Monthly Archive for August, 2010

From The Independent…

The British representatives at the Venice Architecture Biennale work with rubbish, fragments and cyanide. Jay Merrick meets the two women behind the groundbreaking Muf.

There is a grainy, two-metre square image of a white horse on one wall, several bikes are stacked against another, and in a corner there is a collage composed of faintly toxic rubbish from Beckton Alp in east London – dog bones and balled-up tights formed into rat-like figures. They are like freaked out votive offerings, or African ju-ju icons. What’s going on, exactly?

The inexact is what’s going on – the scattering and picking up of the runes of people’s lives in places that have not been branded by the outstations of Starbucks or Wagamama. I’m in a small, nicely battered studio in Central Street in Clerkenwell which houses Muf, perhaps Britain’s most remarkable and unusually obsessive studio of architecture and art.

Muf are the curators of the British Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale, which begins at the end of this month. They are going to change the way visitors perceive British architecture, by focusing on Venice instead – and drawing on the furies that besieged the mind of the great 19th-century art and architecture historian John Ruskin. More…