Conceptual brief
Background and Themes of MG
MG is an art project that intends to investigate how public mobility may influence people’s sense of place and community in the town of Reading.
Reading with almost 240.000 inhabitants is one of the biggest towns surrounding London. Although it is a very old and has a rich history, its closeness to the City seems to have affected its efforts of creating a strong sense of place. Over time, the council has encouraged, through funding and initiatives, many projects with the scope of reinforcing the local cultural identity.
MG locates itself in line with this goal; it aims to explore the possibility of an existence of the local in a globalised society and which part can be played by the public transport.
About that, using an urban bus as the privileged tool to deliver this project is not a casual pick, but it is pregnant with significance since it perfectly embodies the main core of the project.
The bus, by its nature, represents an inclusive community, which reactivates some processes that are getting obsolete. In a society where people are encouraged to adopt an individualistic way of life, the bus implicitly asks people to share a very small place with others, to listen to their talking or to notice their moods.
Moreover, the bus is the symbol of mobility in a place; it is the most democratic and open of the means of transport; it is based on a sense of trust on the others: the trust on the fact that the bus is going to pick 'me' up, on the other people inside the bus who are not going to harm 'me', on the bus driver who has the responsibility of many lives while driving.
All that considered, MG asks the Artists to consider:
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How in the face of all the movement and intermixing that are happening, can we retain any sense of local place and its particularity?
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How mobility influences the sense that we have of space and place?
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What is the relationship between “place” and “community”?
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Is it obsolete to talk about “identity” and “security” in a globalised and much faster society?
A final note: Artists must consider the practical role and function of the bus in their interpretation. The bus is operational and their creative solutions must not pose a hazard on the road or to the public; this will influence the artist’s choice of visuals and graphics and forms part of the creative challenge. More details regarding this are in the section 'Artists, Artworks and Resources - Forms of Art exhibited at MG'.