Mobile Research Station No.1’

Mobile Research Station No.1’ was a sculpture commissioned for Skulpturenpark Berlin_Zentrum in 2009 – a work that deliberately expands the notion of a static sculptural object. The object was a curious hybrid – half high-tech Antarctic Research Station (such as Faithfull visited in 2005 with the British Antarctic Survey) and half rusty-broken-dumpster. Using a standard builder’s skip as its basis, the station nevertheless formed a luxurious, white-leather/brushed-aluminium ‘thinking-space’. Located in a wilderness at the heart of Berlin where the Berlin wall used to be, the strange apparition acted as the base for a set of eccentric of researchers. Over the summer of 2009 Faithfull invited 6 artists to occupy his research station and initiate the station’s research programme with their investigations into this wilderness. The invited artists were Annika Lundgren (artist and lecturer at Valand School of Fine Art, Gothenburg, Sweden), Nick Crowe and Ian Rawlinson (artists and lecturers at Goldsmiths University and Manchester Metropolitan University respectively), Martin John Callanan (artist and teaching fellow at Slade School of Fine Art), Esther Polak (artist based in Amsterdam Netherlands) and Katie Paterson (currently artist in residence at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Cambridgeshire). The two months of short artist’s residencies then culminated in an evening of ‘research presentations’ where the artists gave papers outlining their ‘research’ to an outdoor audience. The research findings were also published live through the research stations’ blog and later, documentation from ‘Mobile Research Station No.1’ was presented as part of Faithfull’s solo exhibitions: 'Recent Findings' at the Harris Museum, Preston (2010) and 'Wanderings' at ICIA, Bath University (2013). The project featured in the Walther Konig publication Skulpturenpark Berlin_Zentrum (2010) and was one of the projects focused upon in the interview with Faithfull by Axel Lapp in A Brief History of Working with New Media Art (The Green Box, 2012)