As a way of engaging with the local neighbourhood and providing platforms and means through which those on the periphery of society can take part in the commons, I am proposing the notion of the surplus material in the context of a participatory performance project entitled Chodzenie-Siberia.
Surplus material has precedence in economics in the context of surplus value and wealth, and in architecture as discarded material that can be re-used in the creation of new buildings. In this proposal I describe surplus material as social surplus that is excluded from established social structures and disciplinary practice, and by extension, from representational politics. Any involvement with this surplus requires an interdisciplinary approach that encourages alternatives modes of dialogue and engagement within the neighbourhood, bringing to life what has been ignored or hidden.
The project Chodzenie-Siberia deals with this surplus as an artistic/architectural intervention that disrupts the normalised and functional content of the High Street, inverting its use from a place for consumption and shopping, into an arena for dialogue and participation. The need to buy and fulfil consumerist demand is replaced by a continuous process of engagements that highlight desires in relation to matters of concern. Through its intervention, it unleashes and reveals the social surplus by becoming a platform for undisciplined encounters between unlikely groups of people and individuals, who normally would never meet, thus altering their everyday reality.
Chodzenie-Siberia (Walking-Siberia) was a participatory event on and around a transformed military truck in the middle of Watford High Street (UK), produced as part of the Imagine Watford Festival in 2011. the project culminated in an extensive collaboration between architects, visual artists, dance choreographers, composers and local resident volunteers from Watford Palace Theatre and Polish survivors then resident in the UK.
