silhouettes

Last night the temperatures dropped to just above freezing, and brought a different mood to the project. I arrived at the Chess Park at 12 to find a huddled group making plans for Saturday, but the students were all off dealing with anything that didn’t involve standing around in the wind. We found Guy and Catherine, and a group of tough guys from the Youth League at the Beerhall, which now has gravel laid along the street edge, giving it a detached and even monumental quality.

Mr Cindi is sure that the gravel won’t be stolen. Four succulents were, overnight, but as he points out, shoveling gravel into wheelbarrows makes more noise, and he’ll wake up and stop it.

In this relative calm before the launch on Saturday, all the decisions and gestures that make up this project seem to take on a sort of clarity. There seem to be many, many minds and hands at work, and yet no real centre. Just some obvious ground rules. A budget. Design by consensus, but with allowance for changes and contributions. A timeframe, and of course, marks, for the students. But although there has been very little discussion about the visuality of the scheme, Tom sent through an image today that captured the commonality between the projects so clearly and simply.

There’s the Launch, it says, in big letters. The event looming large. And then there are these two big projects and the cluster of five little ones in the middle, each really unique and clear. A family of projects.

What makes us imagine these moments as something linked? Is it the structure of the teams, or just a process of working on them at the same time? and what is being conveyed in these silhouettes? Something to do with the simplicity of each project, but also the fact of it as a built project, something weighty. The shadow of all the weighty decisions behind it.