Space standards: CHALKUP21 art & architecture walk

On Saturday 9th June 2018, Gabor Stark led a spatial practice walk from Dover to St. Margaret’s Bay in Kent, UK. The event was part of the CHALKUP21 project, a new 21st-century architectural coastal trail that aspires to raise awareness and appreciation of contemporary art and architecture along the Strait of Dover. Organised by Dover Arts Development and linking together nine selected buildings and public artworks into a 17-mile coastal trail, CHALKUP21 focuses on contemporary art and architecture and aims to inspire a range of creative responses through video, photography, drawing and poetry. A group of 16 wayfarers joined Gabor Stark for the public promenade from Dover to St. Margaret’s Bay. Additional to visiting selected buildings and public artworks along the CHALKUP21 trail, participants were invited to actively engage with Dover’s built environment: to ‘do’ art and architecture, and to ‘perform’ and to intervene in space, albeit only fleetingly. Inspired by Paul Klee’s aphorism that “a drawing is a line going for a walk”, Gabor Stark devised a family of seven portable linear constructions to accompany the walk. The eponymous Space Standards are designed as ‘axiomatic structures’ (Rosalind Krauss: Sculpture in the Expanded Field, 1979). Of identical line weight, the seven objects present all possible permutations of how to configure two timber sections perpendicularly on the top of a T-shaped pole. Self-evident and referring to nothing else than their intrinsic geometric and material properties, the seven artefacts are designed as abstract (en)signs that can be interpreted and used in multiple ways: as viewing frames, sculptural yardsticks, portable semaphores and three-dimensional drawing tools. The international group of standard bearers hailed from Cyprus, England, Germany, Jordan, Taiwan and the United States. Together they took measures across Dover’s urban, infrastructural and coastal landscape and produced transitory spatial drawings of potential architectures along the way.