Wednesday April 24 / DAI Public lecture / Mythological Quarter / by Brett Bloom - Temporary Services / DAI auditorium at 19:30

Tonight we welcome Brett Bloom from Copenhagen, where he is based and currently teaching at Jutland Academy in Aarhus. Brett Bloom is an artist, writer, educator and publisher. Over the past twenty years he has been documenting, protesting in, writing and publishing books about the shared spaces of several cities. Bloom will present the work he has done with Temporary Services, an artists collective (with Marc Fischer, Salem Colin-Julin) that started as an experimental exhibition space in a working class neighborhood of Chicago. Their name directly reflects the desire to provide art as a service to others and is a way for them to pay attention to the social context in which art is produced and received. The group documents informal modifications citizens make to alter their city spaces to a variety of ends. Temporary Services also run Half Letter Press, a publishing imprint. http://www.temporaryservices.org

Bloom will also discuss Mythological Quarter, a recent collaboration with Bonnie Fortune that uses art, ecology, writing, and photography to make sense of the hyper-local conditions of the duo's neighborhood in Copenhagen. Bloom's own individual projects range from making giant sign systems that get handed over to others, to writing about the use of art by urban planners to making neoliberal city space design look like a lot of harmless fun. Bloom's most recent essay "Superkilen: Participatory Park Extreme!" (Kriitk, April 2013, Copenhagen) is an investigation of a new park in Copenhagen designed by starchitects Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) and the art group Superflex. It looks at how narratives of democracy and participation are used to gloss over extreme influence peddling and the spatialization of neoliberal values and city planning.

Brett Bloom is guest - lecturing at the DAI upon invitation by Renée Ridgway, in the context of the project Roaming Academy