Print Out 2021 // Alternative Spaces: Collaboration, Community, and Public Work

Print Out is an annual, student-led event, coinciding with the summer degree show.
This year’s edition focuses on artworks produced or shared outside traditional studio
and gallery contexts, and particularly those practices that engage with or occur within the broader community.

RCA Print invites artists and collectives Anna Barham, Peter Liversidge, Yara +
Davina, and Donna Travis and Wayne Crichlow of Future Hackney, to each discuss
a particular project in relation to the theme. Relevant to print’s roots in public flows of information, newspapers, banners, signage, these artists intercept communication
formats as a way of representing and engaging communities. This event will
consider the importance of shared public narratives sited within community contexts, as well as public participation in the production of the work, itself.

Further discussion will also explore the experience and necessity of alternative
practices for artists against the background of Covid working conditions. In a
pandemic world, the traditional viewing format of the gallery has become precarious
and the importance of interaction in the local and everyday has become more
apparent.

Yara+Davina will discuss ‘Arrivals + Departures’, an interactive public installation about birth, death and the journey in-between, first opened at Somerset House, London in Autumn 2020.

Peter Liversidge will present ‘Sign Paintings for the NHS’, an ongoing public installation of over 300 signs thanking NHS staff and other front-line workers at a corner of Mile End Park in London.

Anna Barham will discuss the reading-aloud group, ‘They are all of themselves and they repeat it and I hear it’, initiated in January 2020 to read Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans, and continuing with other texts chosen for their sonic qualities and duration.

Donna Travis and Wayne Crichlow will talk about Future Hackney’s ‘Ridley Road Stories’, an ongoing accessible archive of the African and Caribbean communities on Ridley Road.

Presentations and discussion will be followed by audience Q&A.