Cite as:

McNally, D. (2017) ‘I am Tower of Hamlets’: enchanted encounters and the limit to art’s

connectivity. Social & Cultural Geography, 20(2), 198-221

‘I am Tower of Hamlets’: enchanted encounters and the limit to

art’s connectivity

Danny McNally

Abstract

‘I am Tower of Hamlets, as I am in Tower of Hamlets, just like a lot of other people are'

(2011-2012) was an artwork by Argentinian artist Amalia Pica, and involved a pink-

granite sculpture touring around different homes in the London Borough of Tower

Hamlets for one year. This paper offers a geographical investigation into the type of

encounters and relations created by this artwork. Rather than assume the progressive role

of such art encounters, the paper casts a critical eye on to the actual forms of association

that they foster and the normative social logics they may perpetuate. In doing so, it

suggests that while enchanted, ‘meaningful’ encounters did occur between participants

and the sculpture, these occurred within a pre-existing art community, something which

compounded problematic class boundaries. Thus, this paper utilises this artwork to

identify how encounters can be meaningful whilst maintaining embedded social and

cultural divisions. It concludes with a discussion on the relationship between art and the

geographies of encounter.

Keywords: Encounter, Art, Relational Aesthetics, Enchantment, Materiality, Tower

Hamlets

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Introduction

I am Tower of Hamlets, as I am in Tower of Hamlets, just like a lot of other people are (2011-

2012, I am Tower of Hamlets hereafter), was a year-long off-site artwork by Argentinian

artist Amalia Pica, through Chisenhale Gallery in Bow, East London. This exhibition was the

last part of a broader arts project, also run by Chisenhale Gallery, called A Sense of Place

(2008-2011). A Sense of Place was developed with a particular interest in the gallery’s

position within the borough of Tower Hamlets. The gallery explains:

[Tower Hamlets’] landscape has been over-written again and again: factories and docks,

bomb sites and slums, the rise of Canary Wharf and now the Olympics development. Its

communities are many and diverse, with worldwide cultural and national connections,

and some of the highest and lowest incomes in the UK. So how does someone living in

Tower Hamlets define his or her sense of place? (Wilson & Haynes, 2013, p. 6)

A Sense of Place worked with local secondary school students “exploring the changing

state of the East End” (Chisenhale Gallery 2017a). Dubbed “an ambitious flagship exchange

programme”, it worked with three secondary schools in the borough and with artists who had

“specific interests in collectivism, collaboration and direct engagement with social and

cultural contexts” (Chisenhale Gallery, 2017a). Chisenhale Gallery described this artwork as

an exploration of “the frameworks and cultural resonances of public sculpture and

interventions into public space, while addressing ideas of collective memory through the

precise materiality of the sculpture”. It also aimed to address “conventions of participatory art

practice and the immediacy of individual visual perception grounded within an intimate

encounter with the artwork” (Chisenhale Gallery, 2017b). Starting in June 2011, I am Tower

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of Hamlets involved touring a sculpture made by Pica for a year around homes in Tower

Hamlets. Pica explains:

For this project, I decided to ask the residents of Tower Hamlets (friends, friends of

friends, friends of Chisenhale Gallery and people in the local community and those in the

schools) to host my sculpture in their homes for a week at a time. In this sense, the

project required a high level of commitment from a reduced number of people, relying

on an existing network of friends and people engaged with the gallery, as well as

expanding to incorporate people who may not frequent contemporary art institutions

such as Chisenhale Gallery. (2013, p. 31)

Any resident within the borough could request to host the sculpture for one week.

Requests for participants were sent out through Chisenhale Gallery’s mailing list and

advertised on posters in the gallery. Places were given on a first-come first-serve basis.

Applicants only needed to provide their full address and their availability during the year so

that Chisenhale Gallery could schedule the movement of the sculpture. Following their

hosting period, the resident delivered the sculpture to the next host. The travels of the

sculpture were recorded on ‘lending cards’, detailing the name and address of the host(s) and

the dates they hosted it (Chisenhale Gallery 2017b). The sculpture came in a purpose-made

travel-case with straps inside to secure it, and wheels and a long handle so that it could be

transported easily (see figure 1). The sculpture itself was hand carved out of pink granite in

the form of an Echevaria plant, a plant native to South America and renowned for its

adaptability to different environments (Pica, 2013).

[Figure 1, portrait]

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This paper provides a geographical investigation into the type of encounters and relations

generated by this artwork. Empirically, the paper draws from interviews with the artist (in

2011) and ten participants (in 2013).1 It also includes reflections on my own experience of

hosting the sculpture. Conceptually, the paper has interdisciplinary motivations, developing

geographical and aesthetic theory knowledge in three distinct ways. First, it advances the

body of contemporary aesthetic theory that has been informed by a resurgence of social

commitments (Bishop, 2006; Bourriaud, 2002; Kester, 2004, 2011; Helguera, 2011). It does

so by challenging its anthropocentric nature, arguing that a ‘relational aesthetic’ can emerge

between humans and objects, rather than just between the former. Second, it develops

contemporary geographical enquiry into ‘the encounter’ by identifying how a set of

encounters can on the one hand be understood as meaningful, and the other be understood to

perpetuate problematic socio-cultural logics (see Wilson, 2016). Third, identifying that

Geography’s work on the encounter has predominantly focused on human encounters, it

advances thinking by arguing that ‘meaningful’ encounters can involve objects and should

not be limited to interaction between humans. This is mobilised through the concept of

enchantment (Bennett, 2001).

The paper brings together these developments by speculatively thinking of I am Tower of

Hamlets as a technology of encounter that created meaningful encounters within a “super-

diverse” urban landscape (Vertovec, 2007). By ‘technology’ I mean a social mechanism that

has the potential to create something new. Social and Cultural Geography’s attention to ‘the

encounter’ as a site of disciplinary import has been growing in both empirical and conceptual

intensity over recent years. Research has spanned a broad array of disciplinary topics,

including, but not limited to, urban difference and diversity, poverty, animal geographies,

tourism, and post-colonialism (Wilson, 2016). The empirical grounding of such work is

equally diverse, spanning things such as lobsters and plants (Johnson, 2015; Hitchings &

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Jones, 2004), protest and schools (Merrifield, 2013; Wilson, 2014), bioart and outdoor

sculpture (Lapworth, 2015; Warren, 2013). As yet, however, sustained attention on relational

art and the associated theory of relational aesthetics has not occurred within the geographies

of encounter literature. This is somewhat surprising, as the encounter is central to how such

art practice and theory defines itself. This paper suggests such aestheticization of the

encounter offers a unique insight by connecting cultural, affective approaches of encounter to

theorisations of encounter that engage with socio-cultural processes of differentiation (e.g.

Lawson & Elwood, 2014). However, rather than assume the progressive role of art

encounters, the paper casts a critical eye on to the actual forms of association that they foster

and the normative logics they may perpetuate. Such an approach is one that both

geographical and art theoretical camps have asserted the need for and importance of (Amin,

2002; Bishop, 2004; Wilson, 2016; Wilson & Darling, 2016).

This is done in a series of stages. First, the paper introduces relational aesthetics and

connects this to I am Tower of Hamlets. Second, using Jane Bennett’s (2001) concept of

enchanted materialism, it suggests how the encounters with the sculpture were meaningful.

This section then draws from interviews with participants and identifies how the enchantment

of the sculpture was refracted through its mobility, tactility and domesticity. Third, the paper

offers a critique of the artwork’s encounters by addressing the pre-existing art community

that they took place within, something which, it is suggested, reinforced problematic class

differences. It then concludes around a discussion on the relationship between the

geographies of encounter and art. Thus, on the one hand the paper offers a positive account of

the encounters in I am Tower of Hamlets, but it also uses the artwork to identify how such

‘meaningful’ encounters can also maintain embedded social and cultural divisions.

Relational art and the encounter

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Gill Valentine’s work on ‘living with difference’ and the connected body of research into the

encounter, has emerged as a distinct canon within Social and Cultural Geography (for

example Valentine 2008; Andersson, Sadgrove, & Valentine, 2012; Valentine & Sadgrove

2014; Valentine, Piekut, & Harris, 2014; Mayblin, Valentine, & Andersson, 2015). Situating

this research within living with social, cultural and economic difference, Valentine queries

the type of encounters that generate “meaningful contact” (2008, p. 325). Valentine’s

understanding of meaningful contact is quite specific, and is somewhat a development from

the more general “contact hypothesis” of the 1950s that “recognised the potential of bringing

people from various groups together in ways that might develop mutual concern and respect”

(Valentine & Sadgrove, 2014, p. 1979-80, after Allport, 1954). However, Valentine also

resists a simplistic understanding of the relationship between proximity and meaningful

encounter, arguing proximity can in fact be “socially divisive” (2008, p. 328). What

Valentine has been concerned with is “contact that actually changes values and translates

beyond the specifics of the individual moment into a more general positive respect for –

rather than merely tolerance of – others” (2008, p. 325). Thus, for Valentine, surface level

contact is not enough to create meaningful exchange.

More recently, this investment into the encounter has been applied to geographical work

on class and poverty politics (Lawson & Elwood, 2014; Miewald & McCann, 2014; Elwood,

Lawson, & Sheppard, 2016; Elwood, Lawson, & Nowak, 2015). This body of work develops

research on ‘relational poverty’ – the concept that focuses “on how non-poor actors

(including middle classes) are implicated in the material and cultural production of poverty” –

by exploring whether “middle class actors” can learn counter-hegemonic understandings of

poverty through “boundary-breaking, transformative moments [that] arise through spatial

encounters” (Lawson & Elwood, 2014, p. 210). Here, “zones of encounter” become spaces

where class boundaries are both (commonly) maintained, but also potentially broken to

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“contest hegemonic poverty discourses” and “enact a new class politics” (2014, p. 224; see

Valentine 2008) This paper draws from and develops this work by speculatively thinking of I

am Tower of Hamlets as a technology of encounter that experimented with ways of relating

beyond ‘surface level contact’. However, looking beyond the immediacy of the encounter, it

situates them within a wider collection of relations, in doing so addressing how the artwork

consolidated normative class-based boundaries which participated in the “reproduction of

poverty” (Lawson & Elwood, 2014, p. 210). It does these things first by thinking of I am

Tower of Hamlets through the art theory of relational aesthetics.

Relational aesthetics was a term coined by French curator Nicolas Bourriaud to describe a

theory grounded in finding aesthetic value in the encounter. It is “a set of artistic practices

which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations

and their social context, rather than an independent and private space” (2002, p. 113). These

artistic practices are gauged and judged through the identification of a relational aesthetic, a

“theory consisting in judging artworks on the basis of the inter-human relations which they

represent, produce or prompt” (2002, p. 112). This aesthetic judgement is important, as it

places specific emphasis on encounters created rather than material form. Bourriaud

contextualises the emergence of this art, suggesting it as a reaction to the ethos of

neoliberalism that attempts to suppress collectivity and encourage individualism (2002; see

Popke, 2009, for a similar geographical argument). Relational art, he explains, is a

reactionary attempt to carve out “perceptive, experimental, [and] critical” spaces of human

encounter within this context of reified relations (2002, p. 12). Thus, relational art does not

attempt to change the socio-economic system, but open up alternative spaces of encounter

within it. Bourriaud calls this space of encounter the “social interstice”, a space that facilitates

other ways of relating within the reification of human relationships under late-capitalism

(2002, p. 16). In this light, the thinking behind relational art has a distinctly spatial imaginary.

7

In a number of ways, I am Tower of Hamlets had characteristics that aligned with

relational art. During interview, Amalia Pica expressed a distinct interest in communication

and miscommunication between different people, and ‘being-together’ both generally

regarding her art practice, but also specifically regarding I am Tower of Hamlets. She also

expressed interest in “what it is that brings us together”, citing the importance of images and

objects. This materialised in practice in I am Tower of Hamlets, predominantly during the

participant exchange of the sculpture. It created encounters between people in the Borough of

Tower Hamlets that perhaps would not have met otherwise. However, the encounters that

emerged during the exchange varied in depth and meaning. Asking Simon2 if he chatted with

the next host he replied: “Mmm [agreeing], yeah bits of small conversation, mainly about the

project, the object, the fact that the wheels were wobbly, where I put it, where he was gonna

put it, can’t remember word for word, but small talk, in a nice way though”. Similarly, when

asking partners Alex and Paul about receiving the sculpture they identified an invigorated

sense of urban connectivity:

I think that was part of the interest of the thing. You know, going down another road,

people letting you into their house. She [another host] was keeping it in the garden by the

little pond at the back. She was quite an eccentric lady. Yeah, we had a good exchange.

She was in some kind of arts [organisation]. You know in London and in cities people

don’t let strangers through the door, I thought that was quite good, yeah that was

interesting …

Maria commented on the type of proximity the sculpture created with a stranger: “It was a

really nice, close encounter with people that you would not have met otherwise. It was nice to

exchange the sculpture with them” (Wilson & Haynes, 2013, p. 33)3. Harry, echoing a similar

8

sentiment, seemed to enjoy the responsibility the participation required: “It was a great

experience, a very good point of interest. We also involved our daughter in the collection and

drop off. That was a very interesting experience. Meeting new people, going to strangers’

homes and having to facilitate itby ourselves” (Wilson & Haynes, 2013, p. 33). However,

whilst demonstrating some meaning in the encounters between hosts, they were somewhat

light, and due to the sculpture from one domestic space to another, notably privatised. Thus,

although I am Tower of Hamlet demonstrated a relational aesthetic in that it stimulated

encounters between participants and identified this as part of its aesthetic, their meaning was

understood in a particular context due to the open-endedness of encounters and the domestic

realm in which they occurred. However, I wish to argue that both the relational aesthetic of

the work and meaningful encounter occurs elsewhere – between the participants and the

sculpture. It does so by reflecting on the encounters with the sculpture as enchanting.

Enchanted sculpture encounters

Bourriaud’s theory of relational aesthetics is anthropocentric – material agency is subsidiary

to human agency and relations. Its practical and conceptual focus is with the creation of

encounters between humans, where “inter-human relations” then emerge (Bourriaud, 2002, p.

112, emphasis added). Arguably, this leaning was an intentional, if implicit, move by

Bourriaud, who partly framed relational art’s emergence as a resistance to the

commodification of the art object by the art world.4 By making human encounter the aesthetic

focus in relational art, the materiality of the event became consigned to a passive stage on

which human interaction occurs. I argue that not only was the sculpture central to I am Tower

of Hamlets’ relational aesthetic, but also the source of meaningful encounter. This approach

to relational aesthetics therefore chimes with the emergence of materialist geographies which

has sought to highlight the liveliness and affective resonances of the material (see Tolia-Kelly

9

& Anderson, 2004; Tolia-Kelly, 2013). This paper’s materialist approach, therefore, advances

geographical work on encounter which to date has also predominantly focused on human

interaction, subsequently failing to acknowledge the relationship between materiality and

understandings of meaningful encounter.

There have been a few instances of work within the geographies of encounter which has

engaged with the importance of the material and materiality. Ash Amin, for example, has

asserted the importance of “material intimacies” in the social realm (2012, p. 21). Amin states

that the “material of dwelling” in the world forms habits of differentiation which, through

“affective ties with many persons and non-humans”, specific forms of “care for the world and

social positioning” emerge (2002, p. 24). Adopting a similar position, Dan Swanton has

explicitly expressed the need to expand the geographies of encounter literature beyond

encounters with “human strangers”, towards “particular landscapes and things” also (2016, p.

116). For example, he identifies how encounters with specific materialities – such as taxis,

clothing, food, market stalls, and shop signs – play a crucial aspect in processes of

differentiation in multicultural life. Whilst this work has made important advancements,

understandings of specific meaning in the immediacy of the human-object encounter is still

lacking within the geographies of encounter. By focusing on the specific relationship between

participant hosts and the sculpture, and by conceptualising this through the concept of

enchantment, this paper addresses this gap in knowledge.

Whilst a specific engagement with the relationship between materiality and meaning is a

development within geographies of encounter, there have been some accounts of more-than-

human encounters elsewhere in Geography. Gavin Bridge and Adrian Smith have previously

foregrounded the impact of “intimate encounters with things” in our more-than-human world

(2003, p. 258). In this, Bridge and Smith make the case for acknowledging how encounters

created through the “production, exchange, and consumption” of things “make a difference to

10

the way social processes play out” (2003, p. 258). Geographers have also described how

people become enchanted with objects through encounters, but how this enchantment can be

an elusive and excessive relationality (Ramsay, 2009), and be imbued with distinctive

international power relations (Burrell, 2011). Thus, by identifying how meaningful object

encounters can also maintain problematic socio-cultural constructions of difference, this

paper utilises this materialist way of thinking in order to advance the geographies of

encounter literature.

It does this by thinking of the sculpture as having a materiality that produced enchanted

encounters. Rather than think of this enchantment as either “sparked” by human agency or a

property neatly contained within the sculpture, it is understood as a co-constitutive

relationship between its materiality and human interaction (Anderson & Wylie, 2007;

Simpson, 2013; Darling, 2014). In this light, enchanted encounters can be seen to emerge

through three co-constitutive characteristics – tactility, mobility and domesticity. Arguably, a

number of other characteristics could be used to frame its enchantment. These specific ones

have been chosen because they were the traits of the sculpture that emerged most

predominantly when interviewing the hosts.

These enchanted encounters, I propose, are meaningful as they produce what Jane

Bennett describes as “a feeling of being connected in an affirmative way to existence” (2001,

p. 156). Wilson has also made the connection between encounter, enchantment and meaning,

explaining it creates “new forms of attachment to the world and thus in a renewed attention to

the vitality of life” (2016, p. 10). ‘Meaningful’ encounter in this regard, Wilson contends, is

“about joy, wonder and animation – about encounters that can disrupt, shake or surprise”

(2016, p. 10). This paper develops this position by demonstrating a more nuanced account of

how enchanted encounters emerge and affect through a co-constitutive relationship between

humans and the materiality of an object. This sort of phenomenological encounter is different

11

to the one described by Valentine in which prejudiced views are challenged and altered, as it

is more about the individual being connected in an affirmative way to the world. Valentine’s

is about the self and human other, whereas the enchanted encounter is about an internal

connection to existence.

Bennett has made the case for the ability of materiality to shake, disturb and ‘enchant’ our

everyday life. Experiencing enchantment “is to be struck and shaken by the extraordinary that

lives amid the familiar and the everyday” (Bennett, 2001, p. 4). When being enchanted,

Bennett proclaims, a person participates “in a momentarily immobilizing encounter” (2001,

p. 5). This enchanted encounter “is a feeling of being connected in an affirmative way to

existence” (2001, p. 156), where “you notice new colours, discern details previously ignored,

hear extraordinary sounds, as familiar landscapes of sense sharpen and intensify” (2001, p.

5). These encounters, Bennett describes, stimulate a specific attunement of the senses, a

heightened “state of interactive fascination” (2001, p. 5). An enchanted materiality, then, is

about identifying the forceful yet affirmative role certain objects can play in our life. It is also

both about the “phenomenological encounter” and the spatial, in that it creates a particular

space between subject and object (Ramsay, 2009, p. 199). Consequently, Bennett’s

enchantment holds some similarity to Bourriaud’s social interstice, as both create a new space

of relating in the world.

This paper contemplates the sculpture in I am Tower of Hamlets as being enchanted and

producing enchantment. However, this use of enchantment follows other work which

suggests Bennett’s account “is…too dramatic to explore the complexity of relations between

people and things” (Ramsay, 2009, p. 198, original emphasis). Ramsay follows souvenir

objects in Swaziland and investigates their various animating capacities by attending to “the

ways in which…[they] are produced, sold and bought…and what happens to these objects as

they are incorporated into UK homes” (2009, p. 198). She identifies that “enchantment was

12

integral to encounters with souvenir-objects”, however they “proved elusive” and “were

characterised by uncertainty, awkwardness and ambiguity” (2009, p. 198). Subsequently,

Ramsay suggests a “refracted enchantment”: a toned down and less internal version of

enchantment that accommodates this “often elusive” character which “[unfolds] through

other affective objects, subjects and contexts” (2009, p. 198), but one that still “holds on to

Bennett’s (2001) concerns with the productive and unpredictable ways in which objects

create attachment” (2009, p. 202). As will be demonstrated, the hosting of the sculpture did

not ‘immobilise’ the participants, but there was a particular fascination with the sculpture that

created significant encounters and relationships. This occurred through three particular

characteristics of the sculpture, partly related to its material form, but also related to the

specific context it found itself in during I am Tower of Hamlets. Ramsay mobilises her

example of refracted enchantment in a similar way, excavating “three inter-related ways in

which objects and their animating materiality take-place” - through production, the habitual,

and residual (2009, p. 198, original emphasis; after Anderson & Wylie, 2009). Thus, my

interpretation addresses how the sculpture’s enchanted materiality ‘took-place’ or emerged

through a set of co-constitutive characteristics – tactility, mobility and domesticity. Each of

these generated enchanting experiences and attachments with the hosts, something I suggest

should be understood as meaningful.

The tactile sculpture

Discussing the tension between the material and immaterial in the work, Pica explained: “It

was something about this sculpture being made from stone that I’m interested in, I wanted it

to refer to the traditional public sculpture, because to me it should function as a public

sculpture but one that created intimate moments”. The material tactility of the sculpture was

something that many of the hosts mentioned in their interviews. For Sophie, it was the feel of

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the sculpture that she (and her pets) liked. Asked if she handled it much she replied:

“It was quite coarse, yeah. So yeah, I did. I really liked the feel of it… It was certainly

touched in the garden. I’ve got three cats – they were very curious! I’ve got a very small

cat who’s very curious and would sit on it.”

For another host, Claire, it was the visual properties of the sculpture as well as the tactility

that affected her:

It was just beautiful. So visually, I thought it was fantastic. I really liked it. I kept

touching it when it was out of the box! What I liked about it was thinking about the

schools it has been in, all the different hands that had touched it, so there was a kind of

connectivity, subliminal connectivity that really appealed to me. […] Oh, it was lovely,

just the stone, it was very beautiful, it was like a lovely exotic plant and when it arrived

at my desk all my team came and looked at it and touched it. It had a real tactile quality.

Claire was hosting the sculpture on behalf of the company she worked for, and so it was

displayed in the office. The event of receiving the sculpture created a series of tactile

engagements from her and her team. Writing in my research diary this connection between

the tactility of the sculpture and the hosts was something that also came out of my experience

as host:

I find myself touching the sculpture a lot. And I’ve caught my flat-mate doing the same.

It’s the texture of the surface that’s interesting. It’s odd being able to touch an artwork.

The coarseness draws you in. It’s textured enough to feel interesting underneath my

14

fingertips, but it’s not rough. The other hosts must have touched it loads too…

This notion of my flat-mate being ‘caught’ suggests they felt they were doing something

they should not. With this potentially comes a certain thrill of engaging with something in a

way that is normally not allowed. This combination between its tactility and the fact that it

was an artwork you could touch was something Tom, Alex and Paul also mentioned:

Tom: From my point of view I’ve seen a lot of art that occurs outside of galleries. One

thing that stood out for me was the physical contact of the work, just feeling the

heaviness, getting used to the sculpture and touch. It was strange.

Alex: Yeah, they did [touch the sculpture a lot]. I think people aren’t used to that in the

gallery, you’re not allowed to. It was an added element to it.

Paul: You definitely engage with it more, ’cos most art you can’t touch, in a gallery you

can’t touch it…

Touch, for these hosts, was an important part of the sculpture experience (n.b. Morris and

Cant, 2006). Touch, Hetherington suggests, “is…inherently dialogical in character” (2003, p.

1936). To touch something is to encounter something, however, “we are often touched by

what we touch – a lover’s body, a child’s hand … or a sculpture” (Hetherington, 2003, p.

1936). Objects can act back on to us when we touch them – we can be ‘touched’ by them. In

doing so, the boundaries and distance between self and other can dissolve (Dixon &

Straughan, 2010). By this Dixon and Straughan mean touching ‘things’ can enforce a feeling

of connectivity between others. These ‘others’ can be nonhuman (a sculpture), or human, like

15

the previous hosts of the sculpture. By touching Pica’s sculpture Claire felt a connection with

the hosts previous to her, to ‘all the different hands that had touched it’. My experience was

similar. Touching the sculpture not only made the sculpture proximate, but the people that

had engaged with it beforehand also.

This is what Hetherington would describe as ‘praesentia’, the “presence of something

absent – something that we cannot behold but which touches us and which we can touch”

(2003, p. 1940). Hetherington uses the example of the saintly relic to enunciate praesentia

more clearly: “Praesentia as associated with saintly relics is concerned with how the absent

divine and the holy dead can be made manifest through the presence of a seemingly

insignificant fragment or ordinary material made extraordinary by association: the religious

relic” (2003, p. 1940). The religious relic connects people to absent Gods, and this connection

is accentuated through touch. Hetherington uses this example in order to emphasise “the

involvement of the absent Other within the material presence of social life” (2003, p. 1940).

Indeed, discussing the artwork during interview, Pica made her interest between touch and

objects explicit, as something that created a particular object agency: “The thought that

objects can actually hold a memory of the places and people that had touched them became

an important question, because I was totally convinced that that [memories of people and

place] were contained in the object”. Ramsay, through her souvenir-objects, describes this

type of connection to absent others as “residual enchantment”, where the object’s “presence

carries an affective trace of the past which necessarily haunts the present” (2009, p. 208,

original emphasis). Claire touched the sculpture as it made proximate and connected her to

the absent hosts who participated in I am Tower of Hamlets before her.

Relatedly, Hawkins and Straughan (2014, p. 132) connect touch “with a very powerful

corporeal geography”, one that “challenges the modern fantasy of closure and self-

completion, orientating us away from the separation of self and world enacted by Cartesian

16

coordinates of vision, toward the proximities, openness and intimate engagements that the

modalities of touch afford”. In this regard touch facilitates a practical identification of the

openness and incompleteness of the self and an affirmation of our existence in the world as

being-with others. As they continue, “Touch therefore, tenders a way of thinking through the

mingling of subjects and objects, or bodies and worlds. It proposes a co-belonging with the

flesh of the world that challenges an ‘us’ as a definite, definitive and distinguishable form”

(2014, p. 132, after Irigaray 2005, p. 401). Thus, where Hetherington connects touch to

absent others through praesentia, Dixon and Straughan, and Hawkins and Straughan, connect

touch to an openness to the world and broader affirmation of the being-with of our existence.

This association of touch with a connectedness to others can potentially offer a challenge

to my earlier proclamation around enchanted encounters with objects being centred on the

self. However, rather than contradict this position, it instead identifies the capacity of the

enchanted encounter to resonate out into the world, beyond the immediate affirmative effects

on the self. Indeed, as Steinberg argues, “touching is a sign for our being together” (2013, p.

609).

The mobile sculpture

The mobility of the sculpture during I am Tower of Hamlets was an important source of its

enchantment. Mobility and the encounter have a co-constituted relationship (Valentine, 2008;

Wilson, 2016; Schuermans, 2017). It is the mobility of one or more bodies colliding with

another that creates an encounter (Althusser, 2006). This is particularly pertinent for

contemporary geographical work concerned with the urban condition, where cities are

understood as being “constituted by the multiple flows, interactions and linkages” of

multicultural people and things (Jenson, 2009, p. 139; Massey, 2005). The encounters

emerging from many of these flows form an everyday urban environment of socio-cultural

17

negotiations across difference (Massey, 2005; Valentine, 2008). Within the geographies of

encounter literature, one of the key facets of this interest in mobility is the resultant fleeting,

temporary nature of encounters, and the resonating impact (or lack of it) that emerges from

such interaction (Laurier & Philo, 2006; McNally, 2015a; Wilson, 2016). This part of the

paper speaks to this issue, suggesting that the ‘passing propinquity’ of the sculpture generated

a sense of enchantment among hosts (Wilson, 2011, 2016). By this, I mean that the sculpture

became enchanted through the fleeting nature of its encounters with participants. Thus, rather

than limit the meaning garnered from the sculpture encounters, its mobility enhanced the

participants’ enchantment.

Pica explained during interview: “The [Echevaria] plant and the connotations that

surround it – that it can thrive in lots of different environments – became a good metaphor for

its nomadic/migrant nature”. Pica equipped the sculpture for this mobility. However, due to

the hardness and size of the wheels, when pulled along it made a lot of noise. Hosts were also

encouraged to post photographs of the sculpture in their home on the Facebook page

Chisenhale Gallery staff set up.5 For many, the mobility of the sculpture added to the

experience of participation. Rona explained a tension between becoming attached to it but also

liking knowing it was on a journey: “I got quite fond of it, but also I liked the idea of it going

off on its journey, wondering where it was going next. And there was something at the end,

when it came back to the gallery, which I went to. That was good”. Similarly, Lucy liked

being able to trace the sculpture’s journey through the borough, placing her experience with a

bigger ‘story’:

I think that when you start looking at the Facebook page you see the journey, that’s when

you start to be more drawn to it, so you get more into it, ’cos you start seeing other

people with the sculpture but then associate it with other things that you know of so you

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tend to get a story book in your head, you know you’re part of that story.

Claire felt the mobility of the sculpture generated a connectivity between her and other

participants: “What I liked about the sculpture was that it travelled through the borough and so

there was some sort of connectivity and I’m a great believer in things possessing the

memories of who it passed through”. Of the 52 hosts, 22 posted photographs of the sculpture

in their home on the Facebook page, and so gave a fairly good representation of the journey

for people to follow. For Alex, Paul, and Georgie who hosted it together, the sculpture’s

mobility created a particular appreciation for the object, but also feeling of loss and absence

when it left their house:

Alex: [We] kind of mourned the empty space a bit. Paul was like, well we’ve got to get

something for the space now.

Paul: Yeah, I missed it. I tried to buy it. Georgie was quite upset that we had to give it

back…

Alex: She didn’t want it to go.

Paul: Yeah I was quite sad ’cos it was so nice. But I always understood the way it was

going to work. But in that week, we got quite attached to it. But you also knew you only

had it for a week, so like you really appreciated it.

Alex: Yeah ’cos if you buy art for your house you stop seeing it…it becomes like

wallpaper.

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The mobility of the sculpture here generated a dual effect: an enhanced appreciation and

experience of it as it felt ‘new’ and knew it had to leave, but also a sense of loss and absence

when it left. Conceptually, this blending in of the sculpture also points to the relationship

between encounter and temporality, that with time, encounter gives way to familiarity and the

relationship between two things change. Alex, Paul, and Georgie developed a strong

attachment to the sculpture, but this was, in part, because it was part of a bigger journey. Here

then, it was the absence of the encounter – a result of its mobility – that added to their

enchanted experience (Wilson, 2016).

Where, for Alex, Paul and Georgie, the mobility enhanced the enchantment of the

sculpture, for Sophie, this brought with it a sense of ‘ritual’ to the experience (n.b. Duncan,

1995):

I was quite excited to hand it over to someone else, there was a ritual to it, bringing it

home from the Chisenhale [she hosted it first]. They took a lot of pictures of me going

off with the thing. There were a lot of people waving it goodbye from the art gallery. It

was the taking it somewhere else. I didn’t have to go very far, but it was quite a ritual,

you know, to get rid of it.

The mobility in this instance generated an eventful feeling, something that also came out

in Claire’s account: “It was heavy, but exciting! I have a team of four, and we all unwrapped

it. We stood around and unwrapped it, it was like opening a big Christmas present…it was

quite entrancing…it [the unwrapping] was part of the experience”. Pica actually stated this as

a focus of the work: “I am asking myself how can an object be turned into an event? How can

this object happen somewhere else? How can it gain a life of its own?” (Pica, 2013, p. 31). In

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the experience of Sophie, and Claire and her team, Pica made an object into an event by the

receiving and ‘letting go’ prompted by its mobility. This created the potential for ‘events’ at

either end of each hosting.

The domestic sculpture

Critical work on the geographies of home has identified domestic space “as simultaneously

material and imaginative; the nexus between home, power and identity; and…as multi-scalar”

(Blunt & Downing, 2006, p. 22). This section speaks particularly to this second component,

one which Katherine Brickell describes as “concerning the domestic as a locus of personality,

belonging and meaning to which people are differently positioned, and differentially

experience according to age, gender, sexuality, ethnicity and class” (2012, p. 226).

Specifically, this section suggests that the domestic siting of the sculpture emphasised its

enchantment, and that this enchantment became entwined with a particular expression of

identity by hosts.

Generally speaking, this domestic aspect of the exhibition created a more relaxed

relationship between the hosts and the sculpture. If the experience of an art object in a gallery

creates a reserved relationship and an invisible boundary between viewer and object, the

experience of Pica’s sculpture in the home somewhat weakened this boundary. Although

some hosts were concerned with protecting the sculpture, as was shown earlier, its domestic

siting created a much more relaxed and intimate affair. This was a specific intention of

Pica’s, who said: “I wanted to create engagement with a smaller number of people but on a

more demanding basis, so that it would demand more from 1 or 2 people in their homes,

instead of demand less from 100 people in the gallery space”. However, this element did not

mean the sculpture lost agency, rather its agency morphed, producing a more intimate

experience, and becoming a source of pride for participants, who actively displayed it so that

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others could see.

For Alex, it became “one of the family”, due to the domestic setting generating a more

intimate experience than in a gallery. Lucy felt less daunted about experiencing the sculpture

in her home, which gave her the freedom to have an opinion on it:

[It] makes it accessible… and less frightening. Like when you go to a really posh clothes

shop and the staff decide you’re not their customer. I think some people feel like that

about art; worried people will think they’re not knowledgeable about it, that they’re a

pretender. So, having it in your own home, you’re more confident about having an

opinion, ’cos you’re in your own home.

With the sculpture being in her home Lucy felt she could experience and think about it on

her own terms, rather than feel pressured to view it in the way prescribed by the art world

(n.b. Painter, 2002). For Sophie, hosting it in the home also seemed to break down the barrier

between her and the sculpture:

We didn’t just have it in the house. We had it in the garden – it started off in the garden,

because it’s based on an Echeveria plant. […] Anyway, we grow them [echeverias] in

our garden, so we put it out in the garden amongst them. […] But I moved it around. I

have a plinth thing at home, and you can open it up, it’s got shutters, you know, and I put

it on the plinth on the window so people would see it as they go past. And it spent some

time in the kitchen.

Like Lucy, Sophie was obviously not too daunted with the idea of engaging with the

sculpture. With it being in her home she was happy to move it around depending on where

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she wanted it. This comfort with moving it around also came from a conversation Sophie had

with Pica. Sophie said: “I spoke to Amalia about how robust it was and what would happen if

it fell over [laughs]. She said it should be OK, it’s quite strong”. This, coupled with the

domestic setting, gave Sophie more of an intimate experience of the object. This relationship

between the movement of the sculpture within the home and the experience of the hosts

emerged elsewhere too. Lucy and her family, instilled with a sense of control due to it being

in their home rather than in a gallery space, also moved it around:

We moved it round too. In here [the kitchen], in the living room, in the garden. […]

Yeah, rather than [like] in an art gallery we decided where it went and could go. And

we’ve got a little plant patch out the back. The sculpture looked brilliant there, it just

fitted.

This sense of control over its positioning was taken to the extreme by Tom, who took the

sculpture to his girlfriend’s house in Notting Hill:

To be honest I probably shouldn’t say this, but I took it to Notting Hill, ’cos my

girlfriend was living there at the time, so I took it to her place. I put it in my rucksack and

carried it over and set it up there. [So I] took it outside the borough.

For Tom, in comparison to the others, the domestic siting of the sculpture had a slightly

different affect – it lost a certain aura and became more of a mundane, everyday object. He

went on to say: “Yeah it was a more relaxed experience, but it almost becomes a more

practical, pragmatic thing. You had these jobs, delivering it, and arranging it with your stuff

at home”. When asked if his relationship with the sculpture changed with it being in his

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(girlfriend’s) home he said: “Well I dunno, I think I got a bit used to it…I used it for the first

few days, but then I stopped engaging with it near the end.” Here, Tom implied that the

longer he had the sculpture the more passive he became towards it. In this case, the

enchantment of the sculpture was substantially refracted through its domestic setting. The

typical, imagined barrier and aesthetic aura around the art object subsided due to it being in

his home, but this in fact made the experience gradually more mundane. However, Paul had

the opposite experience of this. For him and his family, it was because they could move it

around in their home that kept the experience of the sculpture lively. Paul said:

When you buy art for your house, after a while you stop seeing it… You buy art, you

stick it on your wall or mantle – but it stays there ’cos you bought it for that spot. But

when it’s something someone’s given you, you’re kind of like, ‘oh we’ll put it there’, ‘ok

its now in the way ’cos we’re doing something else, so we’ll put it there’, or we’re gonna

be in the garden so we’ll put it there – it moves around a bit. You see it in different

settings and it potentially raises different questions. You do interact with it slightly more

than either normal art that you have in your house, or other art [in galleries] that you

don’t have in your house that you can’t actually touch or get up to or see at different

times.

Due to the sculpture being in their home, Paul felt they could keep moving it around to

suit what they were doing, and this kept the experience enchanted. Interestingly, Paul’s

comment indicates that they actively tried to maintain the enchantment with the sculpture, by

moving it around their home. Here, it was the sculpture’s mobility within domestic space that

enforced its lively materiality. Although they moved it around Paul and his family had a

favourite place for it, somewhere where they could show it off. Alex, Paul’s partner, said: “I

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think the first place we put it was on the mantle above the fire place, I think that’s where it

mainly stood. But ’cos it was summer, when we ate outside we put it there. But mainly it had

pride of place up on the mantel piece.”

Although they moved it around they seemed to give the sculpture a regular position in the

house, one that would show it off and identify their participation in the project to others. This

display of participation also came out in Sophie’s interview. Sophie wanted to show the

sculpture off to visitors, so she placed it in the kitchen:

We wanted everyone to see it, we didn’t just want it hidden away. We wanted visitors to

see it, so we put it in the kitchen, we spend a lot of time in there with friends and stuff,

it’s a social kitchen [laughs].

In this instance, like Alex and Paul’s, the sculpture’s existence in the domestic realm was

a source of pride – they wanted to show it off. As many in Geography and beyond have

noted, the home is an important site of self and collective identity construction (e.g. Blunt &

Varley, 2004; Miller, 2008; Reimer & Leslie, 2004; Tolia-Kelly, 2004). Paul’s family, and

Sophie, wanted the sculpture to be noticed and engaged with in their home by others. In this

regard, the sculpture’s domestic display became entwined in an expression of participation

and belonging in Chisenhale Gallery’s network (Blunt, 2005; Massey, 1994), something

which bolstered their middle-class identity as consumers of art. Part of the sculpture’s

enchantment, therefore, emerged not just from its material properties or mobility, but from its

signification of belonging to a specific socio-cultural field (Bourdieu, 1993).

Thus, whether it either dulled the enchantment of the sculpture or enlivened it, its

domestic siting played an important part of how it was experienced by the hosts. The

following section will draw upon this context, along with the sculpture’s mobility and

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tactility, to suggest how it can be thought of as an object that created enchanted encounters.

Relational aesthetics and enchanted meaningful encounters

There’s like a sacredness, like an unknown value added to it

(James, interview)

“To be enchanted”, Bennett suggests, “is to participate in a momentarily immobilising

encounter; it is to be transfixed, spellbound” (2001, p. 5). The encounters between the hosts

and sculpture in I am Tower of Hamlets never quite reached this all-consuming capacity, and

in fact, for some like Tom, this enchantment with the sculpture became increasingly faded as

the week went on. However, there were moments where hosts entered what Bennett describes

as “a state of interactive fascination” (2001, p. 5). Further, as James implies in the epigraph

above, it also generated a feeling of the uncanny, another facet of enchanted materialism

(2001, p. 5). This enchantment, or ‘state of interactive fascination’, occurred through three

co-constitutive dynamics of the sculpture – tactility, mobility, and domesticity. Thus, the

enchanted encounters with the sculpture was not entirely due to “vitalistic and sensual

capacities internal to matter” but rather unfolded through other things, subjects and contexts

(Ramsay, 2009, p. 202). Accordingly, grand claims about the affective power of the sculpture

would be misplaced. However, it is reasonable to claim that hosts were in some ways

enchanted by their encounter with the sculpture. Some became attached to it and mourned its

absence; some wanted it to be public and show it off; some saw it as “part of the family”;

some even wanted to buy it.

I want to take this enchantment and relate it back to the earlier discussion of relational

aesthetics and meaningful encounter. This is done particularly to further develop how an

26

enchanted encounter, like the ones with the sculpture, can be understood as meaningful. As

suggested earlier in the chapter, an enchanted materialism induces encounters centred on the

self which, it was also argued, can be understood as meaningful as it creates an affirmative

connection to being in the world (Bennett, 2001). Although an affect that at first seems

centred on the self, it is possible, through Bennett’s enchanted materialism, to identify how

this can expand out beyond the immediate space of encounter.

Bennett’s ethical vision is a relationship between “code and sensibility”, whereby a

particular “sensibility provides an impetus to enact the code” (2001, p. 156). By code,

Bennett means the actual enacting of ethical practices and the sensibility she refers to is

enchantment. Bennett asks the question: “Just how does an enchanted sensibility make it

more likely that ethical principles will be enacted as ethical practices?” (2001, p. 156). Her

response, which she proclaims as experimental, is thus:

Enchantment is a feeling of being connected in an affirmative way to existence; it is to be

under the momentary impression that the natural and cultural worlds offer gifts and, in

doing so, remind us that it is good to be alive. This sense of fullness…encourages the

finite human animal, in turn, to give away some of its own time and effort on behalf of

other creatures. A sensibility attuned to moments of enchantment is no guarantee that this

will happen, but it does make it more possible. (2001, p. 156, original emphasis)

Thus, when experiencing an enchanted encounter, it is not just an internal affect that

occurs, but one that resonates out into the world. It instils a sense of ‘fullness’ or

“contentment with existence” that subsequently enlivens connections to that which we are in

the world with (2001, p. 156). It is a contentment and openness of being-with the other

(Harrison, 2007, after Levinas, 1969), rather than merely being: “By becoming more

27

responsive to other material forms with which one shares space, one can better enact the

principle of minimising harm and suffering” (Bennett, 2001, p. 157). Importantly for Bennett,

this responsiveness to others is not limited to the human, but, as the previous quote suggests,

also includes the nonhuman. Her ethic of enchanted materialism, she explains, is the

“appreciation of nonhuman, as well as human, sites of vitality – of what might be called its

hyperecological sense of interdependence – [something which] proceeds from and toward the

principle of treading lightly on the earth” (2001, p. 157). Thus, the experience of enchanted

encounters has the potential generate not just a contentment of being-together in the world,

but “an attachment to this world” and a “receptivity and generosity towards other bodies”

(2001, p. 158).

I would argue that for an encounter to be meaningful it has to, in some way, positively

enhance our connection to the world (Woodyer & Geoghegan, 2012). Valentine’s meaningful

encounter is one way this can materialise – it encourages shift away from prejudice towards a

positive understanding of difference. Enchantment, as pitched above, is another way

meaningful encounter can occur (Wilson, 2016). However, what this enchanted meaningful

encounter opens up is the possibility of this happening with the nonhuman, not just the

human other. It is in this light the refracted enchantment experienced by the sculpture hosts

can be understood as meaningful. Further, and in conclusion to this section, this also has

implications for relational artwork. If, like in the case of I am Tower of Hamlets, an art object

is included as central to the work as well as the human encounters, the relational aesthetic is

not necessarily hindered or obscured by its potential for commodification (although as we

saw this was flirted with). Pica explained in our interview:

It was always about the presence of the object, because after so much talk about the de-

materialisation of the art object, we still rely on objects, and I believe they are interesting

tools to make the immaterial happen. […] This is definitely something that is at the core

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of the project, it was almost a defence of the object as a tool that can make the other

relational stuff happen.

Indeed, in Pica’s work, the art object enhanced the relational aesthetic of the work

through its enchantment and helped open up another way to comprehend the encounters it

created as meaningful.

I am Tower of Hamlets and the limits to art’s connectivity

So far, this paper has discussed I am Tower of Hamlets through a rather affirmative lens, as

having produced enchanted encounters between participants and sculpture. However, recent

work on geographies of encounter has drawn attention to the importance of attending to “the

context in which they [encounters] are analysed” in order to avoid “uncritical accounts of

‘meaning’” (Wilson, 2016, p. 11). The remainder of the paper adopts a more critical

standpoint, demonstrating how the enchanted meaningful encounters existed within a cultural

practice that perpetuated a normative social logic that maintained, rather than engaged with or

challenged, implicit class-based divisions. In doing so, it goes some way to answer Wilson’s

recent call for the need to scrutinise “the strategic mobilization of encounters within social…

work”, and to understand how such encounters can be involved in societal logics “that can

have damaging consequences” (2016, p. 12). More specifically, the paper speaks to work on

encounter which has paid critical “attention to the role of space in the making of class

difference” (Lawson & Elwood, 2014, p. 210). It does this by identifying that the encounters

of the artwork were limited due to their emergence within a pre-existing, middle-class art

‘community’.6 This therefore reproduced, rather than challenged, boundaries of class

difference. The majority of participants interviewed stated they knew people on the list of

participants, either as friends, friends of friends, or people they would see at other local

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community events. Some even ended up knowing the people they delivered or received the

sculpture from. In order to build this critique, the paper draws on critiques of relational art

from two art theorists, Claire Bishop and Hal Foster.

For Bourriaud, relational art has a clear political meaning and direction. He claims it “is

definitely developing a political project when it endeavours to move into the relational realm

by turning it into an issue” (2002, p. 17). Art turning its attention towards the constitution of

and experimentation with the social is enough for Bourriaud to find a political focus. It is the

art’s status as an ‘open work’, one that makes space for relations but denounces any particular

direction for them, which is also deemed part of its politics. However, and as Bishop argues,

the specific outcome to this attention to the social remains hazy – what participant-viewers of

relational art are supposed to garner from the experience lacks any real direction or clear

outcome (2004). Dean Kenning corroborates Bishop’s concern (2009, p. 437, original

emphasis):

Most crucially what this eludes is the kind and quality of the relations that have been

initiated: is anyone able to participate in an event, or interact with a piece of work, or

only those invited to a private view, or the person who owns the work? Are the

relationships in any way meaningful, or do they feel contrived, or even coercive?

This “collapse of content into structure”, as Kenning identifies, is what “leads Bishop to

accuse Bourriaud of formalism” (2009, p. 437).7 The politics, for Bourriaud, lies in art’s

attempt to create better ways of living, creating what he calls “microtopias” rather than a

utopian blueprint (2002, p. 13). He explains: “It seems more pressing to invent possible

relations with our neighbours in the present than to bet on happier tomorrows” (2002, p. 45).

This microtopian approach, Bishop identifies, “is what Bourriaud perceives to be the core

30

political significance of relational aesthetics” (Bishop, 2004, p. 54). It is this gap between the

experimentation of social form, but a lack of specificity about the constitution of the relations

within, that Bishop takes issue with, commenting: “If relational art produces human relations,

then the next logical question to ask is what types of relations are being produced, for whom,

and why?” (2004, p. 65, original emphasis; see Wilson, 2016, p. 10). It is this intervention

that forms the basis of the following analysis of the type of encounters produced by I am

Tower of Hamlets.

In many of the interviews with the participants of I am Tower of Hamlets people

mentioned that they knew other people involved. Lucy, discussing the project in general,

said: “It was lovely, really relaxed. There were lots of people that we knew from the

community. It was like a nice little jolly”. James, who was also working at Chisenhale

Gallery at the time, noticed a number of people he knew on the list of participants: “I

recognised quite a few people on the list! Lots of connections!” Rachael, who worked at a

local school that hosted the sculpture, mentioned that not only had the school worked with the

gallery already, but she also knew various people participating:

It was funny ’cos when I went to collect it I didn’t recognise the name of the person, but

when I went in I knew them! A friend of a friend, so that was quite funny. And then later

I looked at the list of all the other places it has been and I knew lots of people on it.

When asked how they heard of the project and got involved, every participant interviewed

explained they were, to varying degrees, part of the Chisenhale Gallery network. This pre-

existence in the gallery network ranged from: their associated school having worked with

them before; being on the Gallery’s mailing list; working at the Gallery; knowing people that

worked at the Gallery; being regular attendees to their coffee mornings; and being a member

31

of the Women’s Institute who run these coffee mornings. For Pica, although technically

anyone who lived in Tower Hamlets could host it, there was a distinct emphasis on the pre-

existing network of Chisenhale Gallery. It is important to state at this point that highlighting

this issue is not an attack on the work per se. It is, instead, drawing attention to the need to

scrutinise the context of encounters, as well as who receives the meaningful experience they

offer.

Art theorist Hal Foster queries this politics on the lines of the assumed connection

between these art works and a democratic society. He states: “Sometimes politics are ascribed

to such art on the basis of a shaky analogy between an open work and an inclusive society, as

if a desultory form might evoke a democratic community, or a non-hierarchical installation

predict an egalitarian world” (Foster, 2003, p. 21). For Foster, such an open end to the

supposed interventional character of relational art detracts from its politics. It follows the

assumption that participation and collaboration automatically equals ‘good’ (2003, p. 21).

Foster also believes that this openness in the art leaves too much work for the viewer to do:

“Bourriaud also sees art as an ensemble of units to be reactivated by the beholder-

manipulator…but when is such ‘reactivation’ too great a burden to place on the viewer, too

ambiguous a test?” (2003, p. 22). He points out that many of the artists included under the

relational aesthetic umbrella “frequently cite the Situationists”, however the Situationists’

approach was a far cry from open-endedness, valuing “precise intervention and rigorous

organisation above all things” (2003, p. 22: after Clark & Nicholson-Smith, 1997). For

Bourriaud, Foster suggests, “simply getting together seems to be enough” (Foster, 2003, p.

22). It is the comfortable, middle-class make-up of the people that ‘got together’ in I am

Tower of Hamlets that limits the political character of its enchanted encounters. Due to its

narrow ‘connected community’, it became an exercise in social capital – hosts were

participating in the Tower Hamlets ‘community’, but through the comfortable confines of the

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normative ‘art world’ filter (Bourdieu, 1993). Relatedly, and channeling Fosters critique, one

has to be skeptical about the capacity of a mobile sculpture to move outside this ‘art world’. It

moved beyond the gallery, beyond the art market, beyond professional critics and curators –

but its movements are still regulated by a wider cultural and social positioning of Art and its

aesthetic field (Bourdieu, 1993). As Pierre Bourdieu has described, Art exists within a

specific field of cultural production, something that is not reducible to just the artwork or

artist, but is embedded in and perpetuated by broader fields of knowledge, networks and

institutions (Bourdieu, 1993; n.b. McNally, 2015b, 2016). He explains (1993, p. 9):

The public meaning of a work in relation to which the author must define himself

originates in the process of circulation and consumption dominated by the objective

relations between the institutions and agents implicated in the process. The social

relations which produce this public meaning are determined by the relative position these

agents occupy in the structure of the field of restricted production.

Thus, how the sculpture in I am Tower of Hamlets was mobilised was restricted to the

cultural field through which it emerged. More specifically, the domestic siting of the

sculpture and the enchanted encounters it produced reached only the ‘agents’ who held a

particular position within this middle-class field, a process that then helped perpetuate this

very structure. In a “super-diverse” place such as Tower Hamlets, the comfortable

composition of encounters and relations in I am Tower of Hamlets based on Chisenhale

Gallery’s network, limited its connective aesthetic (Vertovec, 2007).

It is this comfortable politics Bourriaud’s relational aesthetic paradigm which Claire

Bishop takes issue with. Bishop argues that for art to have a critical politics, one that typical

relational art does not, it must embody something where “relations of conflict are sustained,

33

not erased” (2004, p. 66, after Laclau & Mouffe, 1985, original emphasis). Bishop explains

(2004, p. 67):

[T]he relations set up by relational aesthetics are not intrinsically democratic, as

Bourriaud suggests, since they rest too comfortably within an ideal of subjectivity as

whole and of community as immanent togetherness. There is debate and dialogue in a

Tiravanija cooking piece, to be sure, but there is no inherent friction since the situation is

what Bourriaud calls “microtopian”: it produces a community whose members identify

with each other, because they have something in common.

In this light, the community produced by the artwork had a comfortable togetherness

where, to varying degrees, participants identified with each other. This common

identification, I would argue, is resultant of their middle-class positioning. A more

interventional work would have created “contact zones” that bridged and challenged this

class-based boundary (Lawson & Elwood, 2014, p. 214; after Pratt, 1991). Such contact

zones could stimulate “difficult, often halting or tentative” encounters across difference, but

ones that could provide “new insights about one’s own class position” and challenge

normative assumptions about “poor others” in Tower Hamlets (Lawson & Elwood, 2014, p.

214). By sustaining and engaging with possibly uncomfortable relations across class

boundaries, a “politics of possibility” unfolds, something which has the potential to create

counter-hegemonic openings in middle-class understandings of difference (2014, p. 210, after

Gibson-Graham, 2006, p. xxvii).

It could be said that the exhibition never set out to connect and engage beyond this

comfortable art world, that it was an experimental practice in (middle-class) place making.

However, the fact that Tower Hamlets is so intrinsically embedded in the foundation of the

34

exhibition (the name of the exhibition typifies this), yet its social diversity and tensions are

not effectively brought into conversation, leave the meaning behind in the enchanted

encounters, restricted. Indeed, this exercising of social capital within a pre-existing, middle-

class community can be understood to have strengthened socially constructed boundaries

around the poor, something which arguably makes the artwork culpable in the “reproduction

of poverty” (Lawson & Elwood 2014, p. 210). This was an exhibition about and by Tower

Hamlets, but a very specific – and arguably exclusionary – version of Tower Hamlets, one

that fits comfortably within the network of Chisenhale Gallery. I am Tower of Hamlets

created spaces of enchanted encounter, of quirky mobility, of intimate and unusual aesthetic

experience, but these were all spaces of consensus, of comfortable agreement and familiarity

(n.b. Price, McNally, & Crang forthcoming 2017). Through the enchanted encounters

between the sculpture and participants it also generated a particular ethics (via Bennett),

something that generated an affirmative connection to being in the world and played with the

boundaries of what it is to experience an art object. However, this all occurred with the pre-

existing community of Chisenhale Gallery, and ultimately this limited the work’s encounters

and relations.

Conclusion

I am Tower of Hamlets has demonstrated that the relationship between encounter and

materiality should be a site of geographical investigation. This paper has demonstrated how

the materiality of the sculpture generated meaningful encounters with people, and that the

concept of enchantment is particularly useful to mobilise this meaning. The concept of

enchantment has been shown as particularly useful in mobilising this meaning, as it

articulates how the encounter can both internally affect the individual and resonate ethically

out into the world. However, whilst acknowledging the positive impact of these enchanted

35

encounters, it has been evidenced why it is crucial to identify that they are not autonomous to

society or “free from history” (Wilson, 2016, p. 12). They are embedded within a much

broader network of relations (n.b. McNally 2015b, 2016, forthcoming), ones that help

maintain damaging power structures within society. I am Tower of Hamlets typifies this. The

encounters it created were restricted to the pre-existing art community around Chisenhale

Gallery, consequently maintaining the problematic class-based structures often associated

with the contemporary art world. The problem with I am Tower of Hamlets, therefore, was

not so much the type of encounters generated, more the reach of its network and the cultural

field it confined itself to (Bourdieu, 1993). In this regard, Pica’s artwork has identified why it

is important to locate the “taking-place of encounters” within the wider network it is

embedded within (Wilson, 2016, p. 12). Relatedly, whilst art should be a site of investigation

for the geographies of encounter, it is important not to instrumentalise it as a ‘cure-all’

practice to rectify social issues. Such a position places unrealistic demands on artworks, as

well as ignore its positioning within a broader art world system caught up in problematic

logics.

Finally, the relationship between art and the geographies of encounter should not be

thought of as one-way. Just as art offers a site of interest to the geographies of encounter,

Geography offers something back. Geography is equipped, conceptually and

methodologically, with the tools to trace, unpick and critique the broader networks in which

art encounters occur. What Geography offers art, then, are both the tools to identify specific

meaning in the encounter as well as locate this within this wider socio-cultural context. This

requires stepping back from the art itself and acknowledging it as a cultural practice made

from and set within a distinct set of spatial relations which can often reproduce hegemonic

understandings of difference. What emerges, therefore, is a reciprocal relationship between

participatory/relational art and Geography, with the encounter as a site of interdisciplinary

36

commonality. I am Tower of Hamlets has shown how and why art can be an important site of

enquiry for geographical work into the encounter and its constitutive materialities. Future

geographical work into the encounter should build on this example, and continue to unpick

the relationship between the aesthetic encounter as a site of distinct meaning, one that can

perpetuate social and cultural divisions, but also one with the potential to enact a “politics of

possibility” leading to counter-hegemonic openings (Gibson-Graham, 2006; Lawson &

Elwood, 2014).

Acknowledgements

I am incredibly grateful to Amalia Pica and the participants for agreeing to take part in this

research. I’d like to thank Helen Wilson for her very helpful comments on this paper, and

Phil Crang and Harriet Hawkins for their advice on its earlier incarnation as a chapter in my

PhD. Thanks also to the three anonymous referees for their highly constructive and insightful

reviews. This paper comes from an ESRC 1+3 Scholarship, so my thanks to them for funding

the work.

Funding details

This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council under Grant

ES/I013806/1.

37

1 Each participant signed a consent form agreeing to take part in this research. 2 Host names are changed. 3 ‘Wilson and Haynes 2013’ refers to the A Sense of Place report written by Chisenhale Gallery. See Bibliography for full details.4 However, this reaction overlooked the art world’s expert ability to commodify ephemeral, event based work, something epitomised by the dominant rise of international art fairs and biennales such as those by the company Frieze.5 The Facebook page was mainly used by the gallery to advertise the project and, as mentioned, to collect photographs of the sculpture in its various surroundings. 6 The participants were not specifically asked which class-based group they identified with. My identification of their middle-class status came through a combination of their job, their house and street, education, and cultural activities. 7 Formalism is a concept in art history that suggests the form of an artwork – its literal composition – is the most important thing, rather than things like the subject, discourse, or politics is may be speaking to or represent.

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