Reading Community Outreach Mural Workshop
10.6. – 22.7.2018
Matt Copson and Alastair Mackinven
The Stallion
9.6.2018
Concert by Alastair Mackinven and Ben Wallers (from the Country Teasers)
- Reading is a commuter city, approximately 60 miles outside of London.
- Reading International was set up in 2017 as a government-funded arts initiative in Reading to bring art to the otherwise culturally-impoverished city.
- Curator Andreas Jagd asked the artists to produce the inaugural exhibition of Reading International.
- We completed five projects under the banner "Eggy and Seedy", yet Mr. Jagd publicised a sixth exhibition without our knowledge on the tenth floor of a new-build office block called Thames Tower. We were given two weeks notice to fill the 200 sqm space.
- Due to the vast scale of the space, we decided upon of making a mural using the north-facing windows of the building. We used day-glo paint and UV light in order for the mural to be visible throughout the night.
- Due to time-restrictions the mural was terrible. Further-to, the owner of the building objected to the content which, in his view, depicted "decapitations, pregnant women and visions of horror".
- It was necessary for us to distance ourselves from the project and so we invented the Reading Community Mural Work Shop - a fictionalised outreach program, working with the disenfranchised youth of Reading to differ responsibility for our hideous monstrosity.
- To add validity to our fiction we decided to employ local punks to pose next to the mural, as if painting it.
- Unfortunately we did know any local punks and our attempts to reach out failed.
- Instead, we used our good-looking friends to act as "punks" as if we mis-read their aesthetic as that of a marginalised subculture.
- We decided that these photographs made most sense as a magazine a la. I-D, Dazed, The Face.
- Curator Andreas Jagd unceremoniously left the entire Reading International project, rendering our magazine dead in the water.
- What you see in the space are the remnants of the Reading Community Outreach Mural Work Shop.
Signed,
Mea Culpa, Matt Copson
Mea Maxima Culpa, Alastair Mackinven
