Foreground announce ‘Re-Make/Re-Model’, a newly commissioned text by Chris Fite-Wassilak on Mike Rickett’s The Vessel

We are delighted to announce Re-Make/Re-Model, a newly commissioned text by Chris Fite-Wassilak on Mike Rickett’s The Vessel. Re-Make/Re-Model is the inaugural release in Foreground’s File Notes series, an occasional series of commissioned writing that will critically engage with different areas of Foreground’s programme. The first texts released will present new writing on Document and Location members’ work and be published on the Document and Location website and Foreground websites and available for free download.

Engaging with notions of architectural temporality and spatial politics, Re-Make/Re-Model traces the core ideas behind Rickett’s 2013 work The Vessel and analyses it in comparison to diverse sources such as with The Fun Palace, a proposed centre for London’s Lea Valley by Cedric Price and Joan Littlewood that would have been composed of a hollow building structure and hold moveable building units.

“Ricketts’ artistic role is as a systems observer and modifier; what he exposes to us in The Vessel is the realpolitik of the container. While tracing the continued re-use of this building, we can find it accurately reflects global politics of the past three decades. But what we also find is the implication that flexible systems, while maintaining the idealistic rhetoric of open-ness, work in aid of those who control them.”

Re-Make/Re-Model can be read and downloaded on the Writings page here.