Kickstarter

Warmbaby invites you to be part of our latest site-specific installation in Benicia, California.  We are installing a project in Arts Benicia’s 2000sqft gallery over 20 days as part of a joint collaboration with Debra Stuckgold from the 7th to 27th June.  The exhibition opens on the 28th June until the 15th August 2012.

This kickstarter is about selling pieces of the exhibition, laser cut maps, paper or fabric prints of the maps, paper or fabric prints of the ‘ghost buildings’ we have redrawn from the archives.  To make the exhibition happen we need to sell these pieces in advance.  We need to raise $600 in the next few weeks to round off our budget to buy the right fasteners, fabric, thread and cord.  We will invest all of our time freely and passionately.

“The Unravelled Ghosts of Benicia Arsenal” deals with the rich history of Benicia Arsenal by reproducing the layout of the area as it was in the 19th Century, in a three dimensional map, strung across the gallery.  The focus is on the buildings that are no longer physically in Benicia.   These will be reproduced from archival drawings, and printed onto hanging fabric.  The softness of the thread and fabric contrasting with the solidity of the original buildings encourages the idea that the ghosts of memory haunt buildings and space.

Once the exhibition opens we are asking visitors to add their own layer of experience, memory or fantasy to the map.  They can add thread depicting their own journeys, houses, studios, dreams.  They can add notes on labels, lightweight objects, shoelaces, ephemera.  The idea is to layer up memories and record the changes occurring over time.  When people add their own ghosts, their memories are made physical. The piece will change and grow in an ephemeral, delicate, but immersive way throughout the exhibition, and be recorded photographically so as to document its evolution. 

The change in scale between the gallery, the objects people add and the scale of the map will allow for numerous connections.  This unusual archive will be a representation of space that extends its meaning to include history, contrast and memory.

We want to provoke questions about place by looking at the architectural history of local context; the history of the 'ghost' buildings; buildings and places that once stood where something else now is.  Architecture, to us, (as architects) is a broad term, it often forgets the fleshy, messy people who inhabit it.  What happened in those ‘ghost’ places, why were they built, why were they taken down/destroyed/improved?  Who lived there, what did they do?  Who lives there now, what do they do there now? What routes do people take everyday, what routes do people know so well, but are so alien on a map?  We want visitors to add their own memories and richness and guts of living onto the architectural bones of the map, to combine their stories with the lives and deaths of these buildings.  To pin up photographs of the pavement that they have trodden on every day for the past 10 years on their way to work.

We want visitors to think about the objects made in the Arsenal in the 19th Century, and the objects made there now.  Some objects have very loaded meanings, were potatoes stored in the storage rooms, or gun powder?  The car park full of hybrid cars imported from China was once a quartermasters storage warehouse for the US military.  This exhibition itself is questioning the use of space; modelling a military arsenal made out of delicate fabric in an art gallery inside what was once an arsenal..

Please help us in any way you can.  And please come and visit the gallery and add something to it.  If you have no money to share, but some time to spare between the 7th and 28th June, please contact us at wearewarmbaby@gmail.com, we will need as many hands as possible to complete the three dimensional map on time.