A Dialogue with the Seagulls (Urban Aviary)

[poisonpau]

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Having this opportunity participate in the “Porosity Studio” turned out to be a lot of “first-times” for me. It was the first time travelled out of Asia, the first time I had to speak the Queen’s English more than a week and also the first time I’ve ever seen a real seagull. It’s hard to ignore those gulls. They have their own unique way of making their presence felt - cackling in hoards, sweeping their shadows over buildings, defecating on the statue of John Batchelor and making love in public. But what strike me the most is how they are probably the creatures that possess the greatest familiarity with the city, more than any of us would.

Since the end of World War II, the throw-away society was spawned for the world to a lifestyle of over-consumption and excessive production of short-lived or disposable items. Today in Cardiff, the soaring population of these urban gulls is one of the many consequences of this phenomenon leading Cardiff into the future of becoming the top city in UK for the largest population of seagulls by 2020. Originally living in cliffs close to the ocean and surviving on crabs and small fish, the city has provided them with a modern diet of hot chips and tangy cheese Doritos. The hunt for these new foods, has led to these new breed of urban gulls dipping in popularity with Cardiff residents as they demonstrate increasingly aggressive behavior in their attempts. As a result, I can’t help but recognize how they are just like us in their negotiation for a living space and how they too should partake in the mapping of the city.

In my short stay in Cardiff, I started my dialogue with the seagulls by observing the text that they leave behind. Their droppings became markers in the city that I navigate myself through. To me they were a feathered version of Jackson Pollock making public art and I instinctively toyed with the possibility of how the droppings can be something beautiful.

When I started this studio, I couldn’t help but bringing in memories from where I’m from. Coming from Singapore made a huge impact to my perception towards the city. I have to admit, living in here has cultivated in an anxiety towards urbanization. Back home, the city changes at an unprecedented pace - (even as you read this) we are tearing down old buildings, replacing them with new ones in our relentless pursuit for efficiency and economic growth. This degree of erasure we experience brims almost onto a kind violence. This made me question how I as an artist can help Cardiff in its urban vision of 2020 and whether what I do truly can reform the present. Comparing with Cardiff’s urban planning system, urban authorities in Singapore apply the concept hierarchy of concentric circles in the mapping of the city: commerce being the core and residences being the peripheries. This has come from the long tradition of the political “mandala” system in historic Southeast Asia with it’s the economy, to replace religious/political, be its driving force in contemporary society. Childhood memories of reading the works of Thomas Moore and how the first the circle became a reference from the construction of a utopian society came to affect me dramatically.

With all these memories supplemented with fresh new experiences in Cardiff, I conceptualized a performance-installation strategy working with my idea of “utopian Cardiff” and the seagulls. With the same gusto and concepts urban planners in my country would apply to the job of “urban makeovers”, I remapped Cardiff digitally on a 2D map keeping the form of a circle strictly in mind. With this new utopian blueprint of Cardiff, I painstakingly carved out all the buildings within the map to make a stencil to be placed on a roof. That roof was to be used as an urban aviary whereby I’ll bring foods from the new urban diet of these gulls and let them defecate onto the stencil, leaving behind buildings constructed from their waste. I was particularly interested in the roof of the Westminster’s bank because it was one of the highest buildings by Cardiff Bay and it overlooked the two city centers. When I got there, there was already had a family of seagulls residing there as rooftops are regular breeding places for these urban gulls. To me, the rooftop as part of an architecture is kind of an in between space: between public and private, between the ending of a building and the beginning of it. I was very excited about the by the possibility of technology in the art making process and thought about how Google Earth gave people a degree of a hyper-visual sense that can be used in the documentation of ephemeral installation works like these. I worked on a roof towards a scale of the map that can be visually captured as a circle from afar, but up close it becomes a map within a map to give a “Matryoshkan-doll-effect”.

To end on a note of honesty, at the beginning of the studio, I have anxieties with fulfilling the tasks of coming out with solutions for Cardiff’s 202 future. As an outsider, I constantly question the position I am in to reform Cardiff’s future. I am new to Cardiff and there was so little time and so many things to learn about this amazing city, coupled with the fact that I had only possessed the skills of an artist and not an urban planner or an architect. I tried to reconcile these questions through keeping true to my experience by absorbing ideas that are currently present and focus on what fascinates the most with a fresh perspective. This process made me realized the importance for us to take ownership of our own city and acknowledge the present to create dialogue for the future.