The routes I travel along suffer from pole-lution. Unused poles can be found everywhere and have become my favourite tomason. I have a collection of over forty of them. They stand forlornly by the sides of the city's roads and highways, some bent and rusting away. What happened to their boards, their instructions, their directions? They remind me of the lost and lonely street children who so often use them as an urinal.
I am using these poles as example of a tomason for my next art project. The poles are in a liminal space in the city and my aim is to intervene with these poles in a playful,even absurd way to give them some usefulness or meaning again.
This blog is an opportunity for the viewer of these interventions to comment. It is an attempt to get a conversation going or even an academic discourse.
Amasing! A city is bigger that it’s population - yet, in the mind of those dwellers one will find a world. A world full of Tomasons about dreams unfulfilled. Hopes, deaths, births, sacrifices. Fortunes made and lost. Ventures taken and derailed. Believes defied. Politicians and poor. The rich with beggars on their doorsteps. Murders and creation. If each of those could speak a word one would have a book that could cover the world.
ReplyDeleteI enjoy your idea of tomasons of the mind - like memories. How can one represent those visually?
ReplyDeleteA huge perspex ball with laser-lights entering an inter-active display (magnifying mirrors!) of various news-paper prints informing people of events that took place in the different parts of the city, important events.......... the history of the city. (An to make it a green event........ the lasers and what ever will show the short videos and clippings must be "driven" by solar power!) Such a display can be placed close by the Nelson Mandela bridge. Together with that, one can have a kiosk explaining more about the city...... it's history and hopefully dreams of a future.
ReplyDeleteOk, so now you have go me looking at poles¦ Driving to and from school like any other taxi mom, but in my case through the villages of Geneva, the only strange poles I see are those with empts circular frames on top. To any stranger they may seem to be tomasons, but to the inhabitants of these villages these are the containers for the hanging gardens that beautify every Swiss village and city. They are not filled with geraniums and petunias yet as we have had a very severe and prolonged winter. We have had short spells of spring, but the cold snaps in between have caused the municipalities ( or "communes" as they are known here) to postphone the planting up of the poles. Everyone is careful about mindless spending. Sign of the times/tomasons?
ReplyDeleteTomasons of the mind - very interesting concept! Don't we all have memories that we don't use anymore. Forgotten things - the older we get, the more forgotten things we collect. Like the city has forgotten objects and people. We all have forgotten people and objects in our own lives.
ReplyDeletethe Swiss are far to organised and neat to not have all their street signage in tip-top condition. Maybe there are other types of Tomasons in the built environment.
ReplyDeleteMaybe the poles are seasonal Tomasons - can you install something during the winter months to cheer everyone up?
Are memories still memories if we dont use them?
i am a 16 year old girl who drives on what seems to be a tour of your poles everyday! they are really great and have sparked many a conversation!
ReplyDeletethanks for adding a bit of spice to my maunande drive to school..
please keep doing more!