Exploded Bus Station
Exploded Bus Station by Redhawk Logistica and (h)edge kelektiv was the result of a collaboration that grew out of one of Rednile’s Factory Nights at Stoke-on-Trent Bus Station about six months ago. We discovered a shared sensibility in response to humanised public places, a desire to create subtle interventions outside formal art spaces and an interest in audiences experiencing work first hand that led us to want to make work together. We also enjoyed the visual language to be found in the marks and traces left over the years in the surfaces that make up the old bus station and were fascinated by its proximity to the new bus station, being built directly across the road.
The past is written all over the old bus station’s distressed walls and worn surfaces, traces that give clues to the site’s uses over time. The new bus station will arrive like a vision of the future; a shiny spaceship landing on the hill. The extreme contrast between what is and what will be, led us to think about what kind of relationship these two disparate building’s could have with each other. Our billboard salvages fragments of the old bus station (and environs), memorializing subtly overwritten surfaces as a kind of evolved architectural language, soon to be destroyed by the demolition process. We asked ourselves what would happen if somehow the two buildings merged in a dramatic event, with traces of the old bus station being embedded in the brand new one and pristine shards of the new one inserted randomly into the old station.
PITT Projects and Rednile commissioned us to create a billboard in response to this situation. We asked ourselves what would happen if somehow the two buildings merged in a dramatic event, with traces of the old bus station being embedded in the brand new one and pristine shards of the new one inserted randomly into the old station.The Billboard was of the mobile variety and stated life at PITT Project Space in Worcester, with a second billboard on the other site of the trailer by Chris Reader and Various Artist and was presented alongside an exhibition of new sculpture inspired by the bus station by Charlie Hurcombe on June 16th 2012. The next day (17.06.12) the billboards went on tour, ending up at Stoke-on-Trent bus station where they were displayed alongside commercial billboards, next to the bus station, for passers-by to see.