Walking Tour to Salford with the Institute of Urban Dreaming

For CG Associates members only

In the long gentle (we hope) May evening the Institute of Urban Dreaming will take CG Associates members on a walking tour from Castlefield Gallery into the rapidly changing landscape of Salford; gone is the open land to the east of Regent Road, now being rapidly transformed into a landscape of high new buildings. Walk and talk with the Institute of Urban Dreaming for a discussion about regeneration, the changing city and how artists can avoid being complicit in gentrification.

John van Aitken and Jane Brake formed their collaborative practice as the Institute of Urban Dreaming (IUD) in 2004. They use walking, a range of media and artistic strategies in order to witness the ruination, dispossession and what they call the architectures of displacement which accompany housing development projects everywhere. Their work focuses on 20th and 21st century planned environments such as UK council estates and workers housing in China. IUD investigate privatization, gentrification and social cleansing, forging long term partnerships with others who seek to resist capital accumulation processes that target people’s homes.

IUD make exhibitions, films, textiles, performance, discussions and tours. In 2006 they produced Tower Block Tour for Architecture Week.  Walking methodologies – influenced by the Situationist International, urban poetics and everyday life studies – are central to IUD’s practice. A slowed pace produces an acute quality of observation and a corporeal knowledge of space. IUD recently published All Materials of Value, based on a series of walks in Salford.

Jane Brake is a writer, artist and film maker, has an MA in Research Architecture from Goldsmiths and lectures at MMU. John van Aitken is a photographer, artist, Academic Leader for Media at UCLAN and a PhD student with CREAM Westminster.