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‘A Forest of Flowers’ - Project
statement
"Whether I live or die is immaterial. It is enough to know
that there are people who commit time, money and energy to fight
this one evil among so many others predominating worldwide. If they
do not succeed today, they will succeed tomorrow. We
must keep on striving to make the world a better place for all of
mankind - each one contributing his bit, in his or her own way."
Ken Saro-Wiwa
Plants can be potent symbols of regeneration and hope for a better
world. The central aim of this project takes an iconic symbol of
the contemporary industrially developed landscape, the petrol station
forecourt, and ‘covering’ it with indigenous African
plants. This will create a direct and pertinent statement, not only
about the life and death of Ken Saro-Wiwa but also about the on-going
need of humanity to address the necessity for globally sustainable
energy policies in the face of seemingly intransigent multi-national
corporations.
On one level the project will be easy to interpret (and have a high
visual impact) and on another it will create the basis for a complex,
cross cultural, on-going, multi-disciplinary, living memorial to
the life and work of Ken Saro-Wiwa.
The major strengths of the proposal lie not only in its ability
to address the key elements of the brief but also its potential
to organically evolve into a memorial shaped by those with whom
it engages and interacts and those who participate in its broadly
defined development. Indeed we see this proposal not as our own,
but the development of a platform for others to participate alongside
us in the project as it gathers momentum.
Practicalities and potential
The five sites of the ‘mobile’ memorial are to be based
in the many disused or vacant petrol stations around the capital.
The final, and permanent, home for the memorial may well be an actual
petrol station if budget and circumstances permit. Alternatively
a site could be appropriated under the 'Greening London' initiative
funded by the Mayor of London.
Each site will be ‘planted’ with transportable beds
that will camouflage and ‘reclaim’ the stations urban
structure. As if nature were calling to the viewer to pay witness
to the damage that unbridled petroleum consumption is wreaking on
the planet generally and the Niger Delta specifically.
Addressing Ken Saro-Wiwa’s message that,
‘if people knew they would do something about it’, each
site would be flood-lit at night to create a striking night-time
landscape of beauty counterposed to the nightmare scenes created
by the oil companies ‘burns-offs’ in Nigeria.
The lay-out and pre-defined structure of the forecourt affords us
the ability to engage across all
media. The open area allowing potential for graphic designs for
posters, digital matrix ‘messaging’, garden landscaping,
video, audio and web based projects, street theatre. The station
building will allow for readings, displays, exhibitions and meetings.
The structure can crucially facilitate many diverse and engaging
on-site educational projects.
The basic 'greening’ of the forecourt' proposal takes into
account (and has as its starting point) the limited budget of the
initial engagement process and the logistics and costs of moving
from
site to site. However the overall possibilities of the project also
contain the seed of a far more complex and exciting contemporary,
permanently living, memorial to a man who by his actions and words
strove to make the world a better place to live.
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George Knott, Frances Newman and Jeff Jackson
Download their full proposal here
(PDF 303KB)
Click on image below for a larger picture. Photo by Dave Lewis
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