Lottie Child
Lottie Child explores survival skills for the 21st century. She devises participatory, Live Art explorations of public space, inviting individuals to collaborate with her in researching and making interventions into specific sites. Her work facilitates playful and critical subversions of, and provokes discourse around, the physical and social construction of public space. We're hosting a picture gallery showing images of Lottie's work - click here to visit the gallery.
Lottie calls the overarching framework for her practice Street Training: the art of training ourselves to develop responsive behaviour on the streets, by regularly, safely and joyfully exploring ourselves and the spaces we inhabit. To develop as a Street Trainer, it's crucial to work in relation to other local collaborators, and to undertake peer-to-peer learning. Street Training teaches us that, by focusing our thoughts and behavior, we can affect our surroundings as much as they affect us. Street Training focuses on the conditions of specific urban locations through the senses of specific individuals and frames them in a way that can be tested in any global city. Here are some short videos of Street Training in action.
"I want to be a 'whole' person and to be around other 'whole' people - that means developing myself in tandem with others. I identify aspects of my own behaviour that I want to develop, formulate questions relating to these aspects, ask everyone I meet about their strategies, and find people who are skilled in these behaviours. My work helps me define the skill and to disseminate it – for which I use galleries, the radio and the internet. Each skill is formulated as a stand-alone art work which also acts as a tutorial or instructional resource. I encourage others to try the skills I define, and to practice them with me; we stay in touch via mailing lists and blogs."
The outcomes of these participatory live art acts are transformed into training manuals and maps, in order to activate another layer of engagement with the chosen location(s). Here's a PDF of the Street Training Manual developed from Lottie's work with local participants in Camberwell Arts Week, London 2007; and here's an interactive urban climbing map, created as a result of an invitation to exhibit in Monument, Copenhagen, in 2004.
“I understand Street Training as a potentially emergent 21st century Martial Art, and I treat its ideas and my engagement with a comparable level of discipline and respect. Like a martial art, the many strategies of Street Training range from rigorous physical exertion to quiet, still meditation.”
"I use the development of certain behaviours as the site for my art work, because I see it as the most intimate and effective of tools for positive transformation of self and society. I'm investigating if this can be a site for art, by working to try to shape other people's behaviour too - to enlist others in my project of conditioning behaviour."
More background
In 1998, Lottie was one of the founders of Twenteenth Century, an artist group which set itself up as a publicity machine and support structure for the individual practices of its 12 member collaborators. In 1999 Twenteenth Century created Open Day, a one day interactive exhibition/community event at Shoreditch Town Hall, Eponymous at Nylon gallery Vyner Street, Art of the Twenteenth Century at Central St Martins. In 2001 took part in the Exhibitions Berlin - London 01 at the ICA and New Contemporaries at Camden Arts Centre. Around 2006, the group acknowledged that it had become history and their website became this archive site.
In 2001, Lottie co-founded Boxing Club in Limehouse Town Hall. Boxing Club provides space and time for artist and cultural producers to work together in deep collaborative process, clean the floor, engage in radical educational experimentation, ignore each other, host events [some epic, some tentative ] including Scope Art Fair, Omsk Live Art and DMZ, a media art exhibition and event. Boxing Club continues to support and develop cultural and educational events.
Lottie was among the instigators of The University of Openness, set up in 2003 as a self-institution of researchers and intellectual interlopers, who decided decided to socialise certain aspects of their research using a wiki, and who created faculties to frame their often experimental activities. As part of the Faculty of Physical Education, Lottie created the UO Climbing Club as a way to locate peer learning primarily in sensory, embodied experience. Climbing Club chose the architecture of the City of London as the context for creating collaborative meaning and testing of knowledge production methodologies. Details of the Club's climbs can be found here, and a documentary made by Fulcrum TV, and screened on Channel 4 in 2005, can be seen here.
Links to other coverage
"In Lottie's work I liked the word 'bravery', I think this is brave work because I would be very nervous to attempt any of the.....'eloquent moves', just amazing stuff. But it is also possible to think in her work of the body as a drawing tool, as a way of recording space but also intervening and critiquing space, as a critical tool. I thought this was really refreshing and really exciting in the way that she is working. Very gentle in a way but also potentially really, really challenging." Jane Rendell summing up at Not yet.... Art and Archeology in the Context of Urban Renewal, Arnolfini April 2007, organised by Situations