INTERFACE

REVIEW

Locws International 2011: Art Across the City

Locws International 2011: Art Across the City
Various locations, Swansea 16 April - 13 May

Reviewed by: Emma Geliot »

Swansea has more festivals and carnivals than you can shake a kazoo at, but on Saturday 16 April, as Locws International 2011 opened across Swansea, it was clear that this was a festival with a difference. The sun was shining - it always seems to for Locws - as people moved from work to site-specific work. Featuring seven interventions by eight artists, which explore different aspects of the city to develop new projects; a tour that takes in the Industrial Revolution, the Rebecca Riots, copper trading, urban design, marine pollution, cage fighters in drag and a little-girl-lost dressed as a bird.

Since 2000, when artists David Hastie and Tim Davies first presented Locws International, the biennial (since 2007) festival has offered over sixty artists the opportunities to respond to Swansea's sites, history and culture in their own way and has brought in a raft of disparate partners and venues to do so.

The aim has always been to make the work accessible - both physically and intellectually - to everyone. This brings its own challenges as evidenced by the damage to Alex Duncan's Helocene, originally sited on the beach in front of the Civic Centre and now safely resited in the National Waterfront Museum. But more positively, when I went to see Laura Ford's Little Bird -a small, lost looking figure in a bird costume, amidst the traffic circulation Hell of Princess Way - two teenage girls had set up camp at its feet in a protective vigil, and seemed disinclined to move.

Further down, discreetly embedded in the pavement of The Kingsway, Bedwyr Williams' Lionheart and Lightsout offers bronze traces of a drag night out for the two eponymous cage fighters that ended in a CCTV-captured punch-up that went viral on YouTube. Their stilettoed footprints cast forever (or for as long as it stays there) in the concrete that, on a Saturday night, is splattered with beer, blood and other human secretions. Williams has always been interested in the murkier depths of our culture, celebrating the things and people that are often overlooked, and in this piece he memorialises a transient celebrity.

Over at Museum Green, in front of Swansea Museum, Maider Lopez' Trees, is a subtle subversion of the notion of desire lines. She has planted a wood of silver birches. At first this planting seems to comply with landscape architecture and urban design conventions, but then the trees march from their formal spinney along the centre of the paths that criss-cross the green, creating surprising barriers to pedestrians walking through this oasis in a sea of traffic.

Back at the National Waterfront Museum, Rhys Himsworth's Industrial Revolution is a monolithic digital display board, or rather a board full of digital displays. Himsworth used the catalyst for Swansea's evolution into a city, the Industrial Revolution, as a starting point. Entering the term into a search engine he created software to follow and display all the links and links-from-links that the term generated, creating a constantly changing and evolving artwork that signposts audiences back to the past and into the present and beyond, the results become increasingly abstract and bizarre as they follow the link-path to their own conclusions.

Simon & Tom Bloor insist that Nothing Should Stand in Your Way, in giant text across the museum's park. This sentiment became a theme in the speeches that marked the official launch and seems true of the spirit of derring-do that has characterised the festival since its inception. The phrase comes from the notorious Rebecca Riots that signalled the Welsh worm turning as taxes became punitive. Here the Bloors have re-appropriated the slogan, allowing it to take on its own contemporary political significance.So those are the works and their locations, but they are just the tip of the iceberg for a festival that ticks so many boxes it could be a census form. Though the box ticking is incidental and the multiple layers of Locws International are like a well constructed compost heap - each feeds and nourishes the next.

For this is a project that is truly driven by the organisers' (David Hastie and Erin Rickard) desire to embed the work of contemporary artists within the life and culture of the city. So working with schools, diverse community groups, businesses and local organisations is a primary concern, for this is where the stories that feed the festival spring from and the future new audiences are developed.

In between the biennial outing for Locws International, there's Locws Projects, offering artists from Wales new commissions and platforms for their work in projects that are often no less complex or ambitious than those of the international festival.

One of these projects, Jackie Chettur's ...It is 89 days this morning since we left the Mumbles Head, has been reprogrammed at Swansea Museum for the main event. These little stereoscopic dioramas hark back to the beginnings of Swansea's long association with copper - it's not dubbed Copperopolis for nothing - and were originally installed outdoors, facing out across the Marina towards the open seas, where the featured ships would have carrying their coppery cargo.

But then there are the public talks, guided walks and associated events. The schools projects are delivered by the eternally imaginative artist David Marchant through Swansea Education, who have been enthusiastic partners since the early days of Locws. Looking at the work of schoolchildren of all ages, it is clear that there has been a level of engagement that goes far beyond replication, or imitation, to an understanding of the themes and ideas presented by the artists.

And there will certainly be themes aplenty for the next education programme to get its teeth into. Duncan and Lopez examine, in their own ways, the impact of humans on the environment in quiet non-didactic voices. Duncan's polyurethane forms - grossly enlarged lumps of everyday pollution washed up on the seashore - proved so alien at this scale on the shoreline that locals felt moved to kick them and, eventually, to inflict more grievous damage until they were resited. Out of context, they still work as a reminder that there's tons of this stuff at large, silently clogging up the oceans. They are also strangely beautiful as forms in their own right.

Lopez looks at planned interventions in the landscape and how urban design affects the ways we move through our landscapes.

Chettur, Himsworth and the Bloors use history as their jumping-off point for journeys to the present. Meanwhile Ford and Williams use figuration to convey forms of bravado or bravery. All of this is curriculum gold.

Of the artists in Locws International 2011 only Alex Duncan is local, but all of them have embraced the brief to respond to Dylan Thomas' "lovely ugly town". In the city of festivals Locws manages to sustain the excitement as the other carnivals roll in and out of Swansea.

Read more Locws International reviews on a-n Interface »

Venue detail:
Locws International »
16 J-Shed, Kings Road, Swansea SA1 8PL

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