______m2 (pronounced ‘Blank Meters Squared’) was a guerilla installation work which attempted to reclaim several of the more banal tools of state and corporate control, while also highlighting the ways that public space and time are routinely co-opted by those forces. The core element of the work was setting up safety cones (stark white ones, to make them distinct from the usual kind) in public spaces, and then measuring the square footage blocked off and the total time it remained that way.
The work fell apart, relatively early on, for two main reasons. Firstly, this sort of guerilla installation is a bit too far out of my wheelhouse. This wasn't helped by my general lack of photography skill, resulting in the documentation for several night installations being unusable.
Second and more importantly, I increasingly felt that the work would unavoidably be read as suggesting a kind of futility in resistance and reclamation actions, with the measurements of time and space seeming far too underwhelming compared to the breadth of control of State and Capital. While the staggering degree to which private industry, aided by the State, has been allowed to dominate public space and time through gentrifying construction projects and the privatization of utilities was a central part of the work, it was never my intention to suggest that resistance or reclamation projects targeted against them are futile.
While I am still very interested in the core theme of the work, especially the way that public time is co-opted, rather than merely public space, if I explore it further I’ll do so in an entirely new work which isn’t burdened with the ill-considered central mechanic of this one.
To continue on to the unfinished piece, click here