A teacher at Lyall Bay Primary School recently emailed me to say her class of 8-10 year olds had been studying Pioneer City over the course of two months. I met with Room 11 this week to tell them more about the project and to hear about and see their work: including their own Pioneer Cities in shoe boxes, poems, and an exercise thinking about who would be eligible to go to Mars. Here’s what I saw:

On the outside, the Shuttle Launch Simulation Facility building was made to resemble the Shuttle Vehicle Assembly Building. CLUI photo

Titled A Complex Complex of Complexes, this article from the Center for Land Use Interpretation on the tourism aspect to Cape Canaveral is an interesting read:

The Cape’s importance to the world’s history of space flight is rivaled only by the Baikonur  Cosmodrome in Kazahkstan.* More than 500 launches into orbit, or beyond, have been launched from the pads at Canaveral and the Kennedy Space Center, including all of the US’s manned space program flights, and 3,000 or more suborbital launches have taken place from its shores. The forty or so launch complexes at the Cape (called SLCs or “slicks” or even more simply LCs) line the shore of central Florida like an eighteen-mile long hemispheric coastal battery aimed at the sky. Of these, most are relics; a few have been converted to other uses; and seven or so are currently actively used in orbital launches.

* It should be noted that the Russians have had more than twice as many successful orbital launches as the US, with over a thousand launches each at Kazakhstan’s Baikonur Cosmodrome, and from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome, 500 miles north of Moscow.

Placemakers is an exhibition of future visions by Australian artist Ash Keating and designers and artists from the Massey University Sustainability Research Network (SuRe). Curated by network members Jenny Gillam, Anne Noble and Amanda Yates, the exhibition includes work by Catherine Bagnall, Wayne Barrar, Jenny Gillam in collaboration with Steve Trewick, Bronwyn Holloway-Smith, Ask Keating, Wendy Neale and Amanda Yates.

PLACEMAKERS
17 March – 9 April 2011

Opening: 6.30pm, Wednesday 16 March
The Engine Room GalleryEast end Block 1, Entrance C
Massey University School of Fine Arts
Wallace Street
Mt Cook, Wellington

PUBLIC FORUM

“how can site-specific art interventions in public and urban space transform viewers’  understandings of local and global environmental issues?”

Preceeding the exhibition opening, Mexican curator Gonzalo Ortega will talk about the public intervention projects executed by Residual (www.residual.com.mx). Gonzalo Ortega is director of the Museo Universitario de Ciencias y Arte (MUCA Roma) of Mexico City and is in New Zealand courtesy of the Massey University International Visiting Researcher fund and the School of Fine Arts Aotearoa Baroque Project. He will discuss his most recently completed project, “Residual / Artistic Interventions in theCity” in which a number of artists addressed the problem of garbage. The project aimed to raise awareness among the residents and municipal agencies of Mexico City about the shared responsibility associated with rubbish generation and management.

VENUE
Massey University Lecture Theatre
10A02, Old Museum Building
(signs from the main entrance)
5.30 – 6.30 pm, Wednesday 16 March 2011

A new page work by Holloway-Smith (a collaboration with Raewyn Martyn) is featured in Hue & Cry 4, launched last Friday. Check it out: http://www.hueandcry.org.nz/