Jindrich Bucan

We are just animals, humans, and machines getting on together in specific lifeworlds

Breath Mark x Lisa Hall & Hannah Kemp-Welch

Breath Mark, a curatorial collective formed as part of the RCA’s MA Curating Contemporary Art programme, has commissioned sound artists Lisa Hall and Hannah Kemp-Welch for Furtherfield’s People’s Park Plinth. Furtherfield strives to produce work that gives people a shared sense of ownership of their lives and localities and in 2021 People’s Park Plinth is imagining the whole of Finsbury Park as a platform for public digital art where people can explore a range of artworks and then choose the one they want to experience more of. Hall and Kemp-Welch’s work will be voted on in August, and has the potential to be expanded into a three part listening experience that takes the themes of connection across species further.

Hall and Kemp-Welch present a listening experience taking you on a journey through the park, suggesting new ways of experiencing this vital green space. Turning up the volume on non-human inhabitants in Finsbury Park, the sonic artwork creates moments of connection between strangers of all species. You can tune into the voices of different park user groups and sounds of many species on your digital devices: scan a QR code located outside of the Furtherfield Gallery to open a sound-based navigation system, developed in collaboration with Studio Hyte. This leads you to a place where you can pause, listen and consider the social and ecological concerns of the area. The destination serves as a meeting point, forming new, shifting listening communities across the park and amplifying the voices of local park user groups.

As part of extended public engagement, Breath Mark has collaborated with design studio An Endless Supply, on a digital microsite acting as a reading room allowing audiences to further engage with the artwork’s themes.

Look for the companions around you.

Draw closer to the unheard, the silenced, the unwanted sounds.

Tune in, feel, communicate.

Extend your senses and rest in them.

Jindrich Bucan is an independent curator from the Czech Republic, currently based in South Korea. His curatorial practice and research focus on collaborative approaches, community-based projects and the intersection of art and technology, specifically the question of knowledge value in transdisciplinary ways of working. He had previously worked as an associate curator at the non-for-profit art space Kunstraum in London and at the moment his thinking is centred around ideas of decentralised forms of society and collaborations across various disciplines.

His graduate dissertation, The Curatorial & Transdisciplinarity: Knowledge Value in Collaborative Approaches, explores the notion of the curatorial at the crossing of different fields beyond exhibition making. In this work, Jindrich is interested in the ideological forces that favour certain forms of knowledge over others and what constitutes the 'event of knowledge', while attempting to discover what the curatorial can bring to this discussion.

While working on the graduate project, together with his group, Jindrich established a curatorial collective Breath Mark, that promotes the idea of pausing the fast-paced tempo of our lives in order to open up a space for critical reflection. As part of Breath Mark, he co-curated We are just animals, humans, and machines getting on together in specific lifeworlds, a site-specific listening experience on the intersection of the physical and the digital realm in partnership with Furtherfield for their 2021 programme the People's Park Plinth.

The People’s Park Plinth, Furtherfield, 2021 — designed by Studio Hyte

Voting will start soon! Stay tuned! — designed by Studio Hyte.

We are just animals, humans, and machines getting on together in specific lifeworlds, Lisa Hall and Hannah Kemp-Welch, 2021 — designed by Studio Hyte.

Breath Mark Collective — Inspired by musical scores, we chose the symbol of a breath mark to represent ourselves as a curatorial collective. We understand a breath mark as an indication of a pause that reminds us to rethink the fast-paced tempo of our daily lives. Besides punctuating musical notation, a breath mark also opens up a space for critical reflection and reveals things that have been lost in the constant repetition of quotidian tasks. https://www.instagram.com/breathmark_collective/

Launch Project

Reading Room — designed by An Endless Supply

Jindrich Bucan

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Royal College of Art