A CITY SLEEPOVER by Jessica Rose, Lower Bay Station (below Bay station, Bay entrance). See listing.
Remember childhood sleepovers?
The cozy, silly camaraderie, the forts built out of couch cushions and blankets, followed by flashlight wars on the ceiling.
Social sculptor Jessica Rose is staging a replica, and she wants the city of Toronto to show up. That’s right, bring your comfiest pyjamas, sleeping bag, fort-building materials, toothbrush and favourite stuffed animal to Lower Bay subway station.
“I’m interested first and foremost in bringing people together to think about what it is that unifies them in a civic space at a very intimate and imaginative level,” Rose says, on the phone from London, England. “It’s also a way for us to explore what makes a city great and truly livable.”
Toronto-born Rose, who’s working on a master’s in fine arts at Goldsmiths, describes the project as a social sculpture, a term coined in the 70s by performance art pioneer Joseph Beuys. Social sculpture is less about creating aesthetic artifacts than about inviting people to engage in collective actions that repurpose public space and redraw social boundaries.
“We’re taking this old, creepy, semi-abandoned space and inviting people to transform it into something warm and habitable,” says Rose.
For Nuit Blanche, Rose and her friends will festoon the platform with blue and purple electro-luminescent wires to give the station a soothing glow, turning it into “a sort of post-wave hypnotic sleep tank.” A lights-out, flashlights-only policy will be in place, so Nuit Blanchers can do some snoozing in two subway cars open on either side.
Less sleepy types can stay awake and help build what Rose refers to as “sleepover city”: a collaborative space of live architecture that slowly morphs into a pillow-and-blanket shantytown she hopes will span the entire station platform by dawn.
Commuters who have difficulty sharing the subway every day might balk at the idea of a giant snuggle party in an abandoned subway station. But this won’t be the first time Rose has staged collective action in the face of skepticism. The Movement Movement (in collaboration with choreographer Jenn Goodwin) invited runners to gather in crowds and run through the world’s great art collections.
Photo: David Hawe, Hair and Make-up: Christina Rufino
“At first, the museum organizers and admin were wringing their hands, saying, ‘They’re going to break everything!'” she recalls. “But of course nothing of the sort ever happened.”
That’s the magic of social sculpture. By changing expectations and reconfiguring public space, people often act in unexpectedly creative, fun and cooperative ways.
Photo: David Hawe Hair and Make-up: Christina Rufino
Bring your sleepover gear and demonstrate that great things can happen when abandoned corners of the city are transformed into a collective space for dreaming, building and play.
