In collaboration with artists, designers and professionals from many other fields, SPACES gallery of Cleveland embarked on a multifaceted project, Urban Alchemy, to foster discussion about the increasingly social role of art, about environmental issues in the Cleveland area and about strengthening ties to audiences and communities, new and old. The project entails events, discussions, siteworks, exhibitions and educational outreach and has been supported by grants from the Ohio Arts Council and Cuyahoga County.
In the fall of 2005 SPACES invited Chicago artists Frances Whitehead and Lisa Norton to work as lead artists on this project. Their research and preliminary conversations have focused on establishing dialogue between the art community and civic planners in the greater Cleveland area. There is consensus agreement that Cleveland is a progressive city in regard to environmental sustainability and urban revitalization planning. Therefore the Urban Alchemy project can most productively serve the needs of the community through a process of collaboration with ongoing projects in the Cuyahoga River Valley.
Concept and goals
Urban Alchemy creates a context for interdisciplinary collaborations between artists and professionals involved in engineering, planning and urban renewal. Like many artists of their generation interested in issues of sustainability, Whitehead and Norton are committed to collaborating with other professionals to form transdisciplinary teams to foster innovation and to create tangible benefits and to also bring the creativity and knowledge of artists to the collective table.
Given the importance of making ongoing environmental efforts more visible to the local community and the need to understand the inter-connectivity of ecologies, economies and relationships that make up the whole of the Cuyahoga Valley, Whitehead and Norton have conceptualized this project with the working title of superorg.net, a term inspired by the new scientific category of "superorganism," an organism made of interdependent and cooperating entities. superorg.net encapsulates the idea that positive and lasting ecological changes must begin by considering the entire region geologically and holistically from the standpoint of interdependent systems. superorg.net therefore describes the ever-changing bio-technological relations of the entire Cuyahoga River Valley. In this respect, the superorg.net project is actually a process ongoing in time and simultaneous in space.
