Welcome to site: and the first part of a series of urban interventions. This forms part of the Pauls Walk regeneration plan in collaboration with City of London and their 5 year enhancement strategy along the Northbank, Thames. With the announcement of The Southbank Show now officially over this heralds a time of renewal for the Northbank as a new focal point. So far this space, a disused, deserted site provides a brutal but honest perspective - a rich source for circumnavigation of the Metropolis and urban wasteland. Artists are tackling many political and socio-economic challenges and ecological crises that currently threaten our species. It is the hope for a better world that urges this urban action in an effort to build our city anew.

site: and its 1st intervention entitled '999 - Requiem to a Bridge' has so far involved 9 sessions over 9 days with 9 artists from around the globe intervening between May 9th and May 18th, 2009. This event was curated and organised by Lisa K Samoto for site:. Artists to take part include Seecum Cheung, site: and Beatrice Jarvis - associate curator, site:, Maia Sambonet, Javier Rodriguez, Catherine Bagg, Lizzie Cannon, Sarah Rapson and Tetsuya Endo.

The initial intervention event was created by site: with the notion to make subtle, transient happenings to draw passersbys into the space, develop new audiences as well as curiosity about the site. The aim is also to investigate, open up and redefine the boundaries of what contemporary art means. Or what a space means in all its potentialities. These are exercises for artists to investigate their practice, the looming city at large in an attempt as to how one may unobtrusively encounter and experience an open space. How does one negotiate or 'afford' a space such as an underpass? How does one communicate in a site so annihilating, bleak, noisy, polluted not to speak of brutal? The big question for the artist and the public is how to explore, counterbalance and sometimes harmonise the notion of public and private space. 

site: Northbank is a proposal for an empty concrete shell that allows for renewal and creative impulse of the urban metropolitan landscape.

The five senses was a popular subject for 17th century artists this project explores 11 of our senses including the enteroceptive sense such as for example a sense of place or a sense of time normally associated with our primitive intuition. Humans live in a material world confined in many ways to their sensorial and subjective reality. Artists as the antennae of nature, redefine the boundaries inherent between the self and the world as coequal realities which meet.

‘a space to reclaim to world’

Spaces of such temporary, transient activity as to not have the significance to be regarded as 'places'; also called non-space.

The term 'non-place' was coined by French anthropologist Marc Augé, who wrote Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (1995). Examples of non-places include airports, supermarkets, hotel rooms, shopping centres and highways.

“Marc Augé coined the term non-lieux [non-places] to describe specific kinds of spaces, chiefly architectural and technological, designed to be passed through or consumed rather than appropriated, and retaining little or no trace of our engagement with them. These spaces, principally associated with transit and communication, are for Augé the defining characteristics of the contemporary period he calls ‘supermodernity,’ the product and agent of a contemporary crisis in social relations and consequently in the construction of individual identities through such relations.”

'space is the place'