Tallinna mnt 33a, Järvakandi, Kehtna municipality, Rapla county, 79101
The proposal is to make a community garden in the town of Järvakandi, augmented by a site-specific architectural structure encompassing a sculpture park in model form: a material rendering of Radical Loyalty at 1:20 scale.
Through working directly with the inhabitants of Järvakandi, a community garden would be created as a place of shared common agency in which democratic and participatory architectural principles in the aspects of place-making are emphasised. Local knowledge will guide the use of materials and the site's contextualisation in the landscape and wider environment of the town. This will extend to liaison and collaboration with local representatives of Järvakandi (town councillors, regional majors office, regional government and town hall meetings for members of the local community) with the prerogative of centring inhabitants views in decision making.
Tallinna mnt 33a, Järvakandi, Kehtna municipality, Rapla county, 79101
The development of the site would be pursued through the use of materials which are non-resource intensive, degradable and carbon-neutral in the works’ execution. For several decades the central, half-derelict building on the site had been used to house a large metal cylindrical tank which stored and distributed oil to the enterprises on the perimeter of the site. The creating of a landscaped community garden would be an opportunity to use phytoremediation to clean up the contaminated environment. Phytoremediation technologies use living plants to break down, remove and neutralise hazardous contaminants including metal particles, pesticides and oil.
Central building housing an oil tank
Integral to the community garden, an architectural structure would enclose a 1:20 scale-version of the sculpture park as imagined on the park itself, made definitive and manifest in recursive form. Whilst produced in physical matter, the work would nevertheless foreground ‘un-realisation ‘as a means of artistic production, intent or negotiation, since its form in fractional scale would continue to model a proposition. Such hypotheticals foreground the circumstances and conditions involved in the works fruition emphasising the genealogy of place, its socially constructed characteristics, topophilic qualities and its speculative, unsoliciated nature.
Radical Loyalty draws us to the notion of the monument and its discontent. Its nexus lies is in the secluded relations behind the fruition of a cultural object for public use and how beliefs, social status and ideological positions are negotiated in a work of art. It proposes to encapsulate and culminate a response to a particular historical geo-political context that resonates to the present day, framed architecturally by a structure whose particularities point to a future dialectically shaped by this.
A network of support, to strategise ways in which this project can come to fruition, currently includes: Paul O’Neill (Artistic director, PUBLICS, Helsinki), Rhea Dhall (Overgaden Institute of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen), Marita Muukonen & Ivor Stodolsky (Co-directors, Perpetuum Mobile, Helsinki), Gerda Paluiyste & Gediminas G. Akstinas (Artists & Directors of Montos Tattoo, Vilnius).
A silkscreened poster, produced for distribution in Järvakandi, will also host information and updates. If you are a resident of Järvakandi or have relatives living in the town or environment and are interested in this project, please contact Chris Evans at chrsvns (@) me.com.
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