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" Touch & Go " ~ Cristina Lucas ~

The International Festival of Contemporary Art ~ Liverpool Biennial ~ Cristina Lucas !

 

Many people in Liverpool will be familiar with a building on the edge of Chinatown with distinctive rows of windows and the memorable sign across the façade, recalling the company that occupied it: ‘Europleasure International Ltd’ ! This building exemplifies the thriving economy that continued to be expressed through the urban fabric of many western cities until the last two decades of the twentieth century !

 

In Touch and Go, a film newly produced for ' Touched ' the artist considers the fate of humankind and the built environment as it is caught in the eddies and flows of an unpredictable globalised economy !

 

The video documents a group of unionists and their families throwing stones at the façade of the building ! Their act of transgression initially appears as an unpremeditated and uncontrolled outburst of freedom and anomie, but then reveals a message in broken glass ! As the windows shatter – as if blown outwards or violently compressed – the jagged cavities gradually spell out the words ‘touch and go’ !

 

This expression refers to a momentary act of physical contact, as well as alluding to uncertainty, intermittent and risk !

 

The companies have long since vanished, but their ghostlike monuments remain and today, the ‘Europleasure building’ is an obsolete remnant, a memento of a past economic era ! The signage on the façade, with its connotations of materialist excess, is poignantly incongruous against the dilapidation and decay ! Often using humour as a critical strategy, Cristina Lucas’s artistic practice overturns the established ideological systems embedded in western society !

 

This Is a Screen Shot Taken From The Video !

 

 

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Uploaded on November 11, 2010
Taken on November 3, 2010