Leverhulme Artist in Residence 2015/16
Tom Wolseley was Artists in Residence at the UCL Urban Laboratory during the 2015/16, working with Urban Lab Co-Director Dr Andrew Harris.
The residency - titled 'Shardology: New Visions of Vertical London' - researched the Shard, London and Western Europe's tallest building, as an object and event between the financial processes that funded it and the imaginaries of the people who experience it in their city. Tom created an essay film as a way to examine the Shard from a range of perspectives; emotional, economic, social, architectural, cultural, international, political and geographical, in a meandering narrative, that also referenced the construction of the film itself. The broader research will be archived on an interactive website.
Tom has worked for over 20 years, creating films and installations that explore our relationship to the environment we live in, with increasing emphasis on film and the city. He has collaborated with a diverse range of practitioners to develop a practice/methodology that reflects on its own condition as it does on the subject. He has created and worked within his own semi fictional institution, Architrope, previously based in an up-cycled shipping container in an urban park in Hackney, for 5 years.
Tom is interested in the relationship between individuals and a city increasingly dominated by spectacular global narratives and aimed to develop conversations across UCL's areas of expertise to engage and think about how we can use the Shard as a tool to understand the changing relationships between capital, the urban and ourselves.
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