The Extraordinary Ordinary - Blurred London City View...

London City view without glasses...

Small Bizarres No. 73 - Window Installation, London...

The Extraordinary Ordinary - London (Shadow-play) Moodies...

A few, quite 'atmospheric', photos taken in our old flat in London around the mid-noughties, which I came across whilst scouting for something else - good times...  

Small Bizarres No. 45 - Hair Band Shadow Man, London...

The Extraordinary Ordinary - Space Mannequins, Science Museum, London

The Extraordinary Ordinary - Scaffolding...

Manama, Bahrain (Photo by Paul Brady)

A few photos of building scaffolding (one of my favorite photographic subject matters) from around the Gulf region (and one, for comparisons sake, from London)...

Salwa, Kuwait

Salmiya, Kuwait

Aladiya, Kuwait

Aladiya, Kuwait

Doha, Qatar

London, UK

The Extraordinary Ordinary - Stained Statues...

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Even though not formally from the Gulf region, I decided to post the above and below images on this blog nevetheless. The pictures were taken a few years back of the various statues outside Imperial College's Royal School of Mines entrance in London's Kensington (a neighborhood very much frequented by individuals from the Gulf). There's is something subtly abstracting about these stains that suggests camouflage (or even Arab wedding make-up).?! The stains both mask and reveal, that which, whilst hiding various facial or corporeal features, also simultaneously catalyses ones curiosity and encourages one to study and observe those same features even further... Thus these stains become a form of 'anti-camouflage' which, instead of blending the figures into their background (which a stone sculpture in front of a stone facade might do) the asymmetrical blotches across their figures make them stand out from their backdrops to announce and emphasize their humanoid presence...

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Not long after these pictures were taken the statues were cleaned up, returning them to their original stony, and slightly melancholy, vapidity...

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Printed Matters in the Gulf...

A few years back I had a chance to partake in a Royal Designers for Industry (RDI) Summer School, an event that usually lasts just short of a week, and that year took place at a grand mock-Tudor mansion in Wales (with a complicated name I can't recall). Adjacent to the main building a small print-shop held residence, which specialized in very limited edition, high-end, art books. Many of these books apparently fetched prices up to several thousand pounds each which, having had a chance to inspect them close-up, wasn't surprising. The thickness and quality of paper, the resolution and texture of the ink prints, the hand-bound formatting and composition of the books themselves reeked of long hours of painstaking but passionate dedication and craft. The exposure to such a book became about much more than just reading, it's weight, subtle smell, its tactility and the books' kinesthetic and proprioceptive properites (how one had to handle it, its size, the way its pages behaved when turned) became something close to a physical manifestation of a dear memory. This type of a book reminds one of the fact that books on a book-shelf are about more than just information, but also fulfill the role of a mnemonic storage bank - each book spine along the stacked shelves reminds and represents to its reader a sequence of moments, brief, intimate periods of time, or perhaps more accurately, summarized episodes, which inevitably our more comprehensive (life) experiences are made up of. It's this perceptually multi-dimensional, physiological, quality that a computer can't replace.

Here in the Gulf I very seldom see people reading books (at least in public) and, at least in Kuwait, decent book shops are few and far between. This is regrettable, as the act of reading provides a degree of intimacy that no other medium of communication can. It's the reader who determines the pace of reading - a sentence is allowed to be interrupted by a stray thought, a paragraph re-read, or an impulsive note jotted in the book's margin - all things that aren't possible (with the same ease) in mediums such as video or audio recording or even any of the more recent digital tablets (such as the Kindle or the iPad).

I read somewhere recently that the Middle-East, as a total, has translated less books into Arabic in the last decade than Spain has translated into Spanish in a year. This is a true shame, and also says something about the somewhat misdirected curricular emphasis in most of the region's educational institutions, but it also introduces an opportunity to do something about it. The region still retains examples of amazingly crafted and detailed historical, mostly religious and scientific, texts (many of an example which can be viewed at the recently inaugurated Museum of Islamic Art (MIA) in Doha), with this precedent in mind, what's stopping us from creating an updated rendition of this art form for the contemporary Gulf? What would the production of a high-end (art/ craft) publication entail and involve in today's Middle-East? Are there still the required set of skill, passion, perseverance and creativity to do so? Would there be an interest, a market, for such endeavors? If not, shouldn't we just do it and begin building one anyway..?

The workshop location in Wales...

Printing related (analog) machinery...

Stored and discarded templates...

Above and below - Various print making related paraphernalia...




Things on and along walls...


Various publications produced by/ influencing the printers...

Designed Spontaneity...

A busker in Rome...

A successful city is often a contradictory city – where the mix of various cultures, cultural sub-classes and social taxons in close proximity provide it with a catalytic and dynamic vibrancy. How, however, such elements are allowed to coexist and interplay is where the magic formula of a dynamic and resilient city lies.

This benign form of subversiveness is what innovation is all about. New ideas aren't created in a vacuum, but are catalysed by exposure to a smorgasbord of different, frequently conflicting, ideas and forms of expression. It's about being inspired by exposure to unexpected sources of creativity – music inspiring architecture, biology affecting engineering, chemistry inducing a novel take on cooking. It's also about asking questions, as asking, defining, and aiming to solve queries is what research and progression is all about. A city's role and vigour is defined by what questions are asked. The features and activities included here are all reflections of such, more casual and spontaneous, street level interventions. But what the street says, has a tendency to 'trickle up' to eventually permeate the higher echelons of decision makers.

Kuwait is an interesting concoction of concurrent conservatism and tolerance, action and apathy, passion and indifference, progression and regressiveness - qualities that can often exists within the same body - be this 'body' an individual, family, neighbourhood or governmental unit, with many of the more 'exuberant' activities taking place behind the covert enclosures of its private residences. How some of these qualities might manifest themselves more openly as a potential generative resource in Kuwait remains to be seen.

Below are some 'spontaneous' elements found in most world cities. The list is in no way exhaustive, and based on a very subjective take on the matter, but hopefully some of them touch upon issues which at least in part could be adapted here in Kuwait to encourage something closer to a more vibrant city-scape...

Buskers & Street-Performers

As of yet I haven't come across a single busker of (ad hoc) street performer in Kuwait. This is partly due to the lack of street life in Kuwait, where today much of the more casual interactions take place within the hermetic and controlled confines of a mall.

A street performer in London...

Wouldn't it be great to have a 'Busker's Corner' in one of the nooks of Avenues or Marina malls? A spot where aspiring performance artists of any discipline could come to promote their trade and gain experience performing. Create a place where anything from a shadow-puppet performance, sand-shuffle dance, or a drum & base/ beat-box rendition of an Om Kulthoum could be performed. These types of events would not only provide a welcomed distraction and alternative to the common shopping experience, but could also become something of an attraction in their own right.

A (flamenco) busker in Malaga, Spain...

A street (ladder) performer in London's Covent Garden...

A classical trio in Helsinki, Finland...

Protests & Communal Activities

Public activities, be it a protest or any other form of common event, are key to a city's health. They allow various factions to express and vent their feelings regarding issues that, at least to them, are of more heightened general interest and concern. Regardless of the gathering is for ten or ten-thousand individuals, a city needs to allow and provide facilities for them to take place. The alternative, to prohibit or discourage them, only fuels more covert rabble-rousing which seldom results in anything constructive.

The percussion section of a protest march in Malaga...

A communal dance performance (to Michael Jackson's 'Black or White') in Vilnius, Lithuania...

Communal Spaces & Locales for Casual Interaction

Based on the aforementioned heading, a city also needs spaces where such communal activities can take place. This doesn't necessarily mean (even though it can) that a city needs to retain a space only for these types of gatherings, but that there is a place which can be adapted for such public assemblages. Trafalgar Square in London is, along with being a tourist attraction, used mostly as a nodal hub for transport (there's a tube and train-station, as well as a major bus-stop next to it) but it also performs on select occasions as a place of performance and protest. The Spanish Steps in Rome is used as a central meeting point and a place for some people watching adjacent to some of the city's most exclusive shopping streets. Most cities contain this type of adaptable open areas which can be easily accessed and are commonly available. Places for a short breather, a shaded spot for reading, a quick cup of coffee or a bench for a quiet conversation as well as the occasional, more organized, sable-rattling...

The Spanish Steps in Rome...

Town square in Borgå, Finland...

A small neighbourhood square in Benalmadena, Spain...

Casual seating spots at the Alhambra, Granada, Spain...

Graffiti & Public Posters

Even though not appropriate everywhere, graffiti and various event or promotional posters can provide their share of eye-candy in any city. When done with skill and passion, and with an understanding for its context, they can enliven a usually unremarkable stretch of sidewalk or mediocre city wall. They, again, provide an outlet for various kindred, perhaps more subversive, spirits to vent their vexations and provide a skill-set which can hopefully be channelled into something more vocational (it was through graffiti, after all, that artists such as Keith Haring, Jean Michel Basquiat (Samo) and Kenny Scharf got their start)...

Above and all images below - some graffiti and a poster in Vilnius, Lithuania...

Animals

Humans are not the only consious living entities occupying a city. Beyond the roaches and rats, which any self-respecting urban environment can't seem to manage without, there are many animals which actually provide some harmless entertainment in their own right. Kuwait has its slender street-cats embellishing most garbage bins in the evenings. Other places have their own renditions of these semi-domesticated creatures, be these swans, ducks, fish, squirrels, rabbits, even city-foxes, sharing the city with their two-legged compatriots. Of course one should mention the fully domesticated animals that play their own role, and leave their own 'marks' (particularly in Paris), on the sidewalks of most more cosmopolitan cities, but, especially here in Kuwait, these seem to be few and far between.

A swan family in Helsinki, Finland...

Goldfish in Fuengirola, Spain...

Palying Kuwaiti kittens...