Black Maria. London
The Black Maria is structure acts as a place of meeting, based around discussion, performance and moving images. The structure hosts a month long series of talks, screenings and events curated by London based artist Richard Wentworth and GRUPPE.
Richard Wentworth invited GRUPPE to design, build and curate the structure as a result of the talk he gave in their structure and lecture series "Putting Things Together Taking Things Apart" for the Swiss Art Award 2012.
Opened on the 16 February 2013 for a month, the Black Maria comprises a collection of spatial elements of varying sizes that recall an early film studio of the same name. The structure will be installed in ‘The Crossing’, the atrium hall that joins the historic Granary Building to the new Central St Martin’s Building. The hall is located between the offices of the Guardian Newspaper, Central St Martins, Kings Cross Station and Eurostar. GRUPPE see the location as the ideal conditions to create a place of exchange. Black Maria sits at one end of The Crossing, facing the larger part of the hall as a kind of inhabitable billboard with a staircase auditorium behind it. The talks happen “within” the billboard, allowing for different kinds of audience on either side of it: a more intimate audience within the structure; and another potentially much larger audience outside the structure. The billboard makes use of a large door to allow events to be either closed and private, or open to the hall and public. Black Maria recalls the vital but forgotten timber scaffolds used to build King’s Cross’ industrial past, and building site hoardings used today. In a related sense the Black Maria is a support structure for the community activities in the hall.
The project was built between the 14th of January and 12th of February 2013.
The capacity of the structure is 120 seated people inside and approximately 200 people outside.
The Black Maria hosted around 50 events over 30 days. Among the great variety of events in the structure were screenings, discussions, lectures, theatre, workshops, fashion shoots and performance.
Size: 8.5m x 9m x 15m
Year: 2013
Location: The Granary Building, King’s Cross, London
Credits
Project by GRUPPE and Richard Wentworth
Built by GRUPPE and Lars Wagner
Engineering by Marcel Aubert
Construction team: Lorenzo Iandelli, Boris Raux, Thomas Oa, Adeeb Ashfaq, Gabriel George, Matt Clark , Niall Gallacher, Tom Emerson, Tom Lobo Brennan, Astrid Smitham, Tarik el Fassi, Nemanja Zimonjic, Esther Vonwil
