Places Of Interest Premiere August 2016

Places of Interest/Sehenswürdigkeiten
is a continuing project based around the importance we attach to actual places. It is also a project based around our preconceptions about places we have never been to and what we might expect to find there.

Starting with an initial list of people I know, have worked with or whose work I like, working in the fields of Performance, Art or Music; I wrote to people around the world, asking them to do the following 3 things for me:
– to choose a place that has a special meaning to them. This could be for very personal reasons, or because of political or historical significance.
– search online and find a photograph of that place, taken by somebody else.
– record a description of the photograph. The description should include the name of the country it is in, but not the name of the place or the reason it was chosen. In short, an impartial description of the photograph without opinion.

I then sent the recorded description to a visual artist living in a different country who receivd a fee as a commission to paint a picture entirely based on the recorded description.
The artist did not know the significance of the place and only knew that they are painting for example somewhere in Argentina or northern India. 

At present, the project connects (amongst other places) Shepherds Bush, Beirut, Madrid, Newport Wales, Minneapolis, NYC, Kerala, India, Finland, Chile, Mozambique, Thailand, Warsaw and includes contributions from; 
Nada Gambier, Vic Godard, Marta Górnicka, Charbel Haber, Ant Hampton, Maria Jerez, Eisa Jocson, Pichet Klunchun , Stefan Kaegi,  Amir Reza Koohestani, Aaron Landsman, Jon Langford, Bouchra Ouizguen, Sankar Venkateswaran, Gisèle Vienne, Moulay Youssef Elkahfai, Alf Hofstetter, Kristina Horvat Blažinović, Anne Kaminsky, Bill Kennedy, Dustin Metz, Shadi Noyani, Noyau, George Rush, Naoko Tsurudome, Sabine Wewer, Capricho Casas , Karolina Dryps , Walter Zand and others.

Places Of Interest opened at the
Theaterspektakel Festival, Zurich on August 20th 2016  included a series of short performances linked to the project and the material it generated. It was also shown at the Centre Culturel Suisse in Paris.