DESCRIPTION
Streets on Weekends is a series of London bricks cast in plaster mixed with different alcoholic drinks — wine, beer — as a reflection on London streets on weekend evenings: the nightlife, its seduction and sensuousness, and the ritualistic nothingness that surrounds it. The bricks are meant to be smelt as much as seen or touched — the olfactory dimension is central to the work, connecting smell to memory and the sensory experience of a city.
What the casting revealed was unexpected: over weeks, the colour of the first brick changed from pale pink to pale beige with grey spots, and the smell shifted from wine to vinegar to dough — as if the material itself is alive, undergoing its own transformation without anyone’s intervention. If a non-living thing can change on its own, then it is not a non-living thing. The brick, cast in a material that cannot construct anything, becomes a living record of a city and a culture — representing London but unable to build it.
The brick piece was used as the central object in the live performance Pub on the Street.
Vandana 