An installation comprising analogue slide projectors showing looping moving images of black and white street notices documented by the artists across multiple cities. Functioning as a 3 channel asynchronous projection, the work consisted of 240 different street notice images with an almost endless number of juxtapositions in viewing.

This work builds on an engagement and collection of street notices by the artists since 2015 and across cities including London, Brighton, Athens, Rome. The term 'Street notices' draws from the Russian artist Alexei Plutser Sarno's publication Notes From Russia - 'a portrait of the Russian street told through its public notices. They are pasted on everything - still or moving - notes for missing persons, love letters, political statements, job offers, complaints, and warnings.'

Expanding on this in the context of western Europe and creating connections and juxtapositions across cities, The City Needs Your View is part of an ongoing attempt to produce an archive of street notices that explores the material, political and social structures of communication and exchange within the contemporary, global city.

The production of the work was further shaped by the coronavirus pandemic - where the artists found themselves separated physically during lockdown. The images form a kind of visual conversation, documenting the artists’ respective attention to the city and the ways public spaces become contested sites of communication. Each collection is a snap shot of a place, a society, a history of activity frozen in a moment; a kind of infinite broadcasting of announcements at times urgent, at others redundant.

Through this practice of photographing and collecting found objects and documenting material accumulation in the city, the artists create a network of connections between the items themselves and the activities and circumstances that link them together; of both global capitalism and informal local economies, of larger socio-political campaigns and oblique personal expressions occurring in public space.

This installation was created following a sustained period of research by the artists over 18 months, and which formed the basis of a major new commission at Brighton CCA.

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/39391