Sustainability Made Possible by Documentation: Exploring Assemble’s Granby Four Streets (2013)

Abstract

Since the late 20th century, various projects in the public domain where local communities and art organizations collaborate have been attempted in miscellaneous ways. In terms of anticipating an active attitude of the community, socially engaged project focuses on proactively changing everyday life and environment of people. An art collective, Assemble who won the Turner Prize in 2015 for one of their projects named Granby Four Streets (2013) has been admitted as an exemplary of this phenomenon, and it appears frequently in discussions about community-led projects. We investigate Granby Four Streets, as well as the documentation formed by the perspective of third parties based on the surveillance and criticism aspects. It asserts that the limitation of socially engaged projects that are kept ephemerally and easily forgotten could be overcome with the concept of documentation and its practice.

Keywords

• socially engaged practice
• community-led project
• assemble
• documentation
• sustainability