SHOP OF POSSIBILITIES
Febrik project: Residency, participatory design London, 2010–12 Commissioned by South London Gallery
A six-month residency in a shop unit in the Sceaux Gardens Estate, London, part of the Making Play project by the South London Gallery. Along with children from the estate, Febrik developed the ‘Shop of Possibilities’: a place that functioned as an invention studio, a play library and archive, an exhibition space and a recycling centre of everyday objects.
In the shop, the children went about a kind of curious play and subsequent invention of new things with objects, and fragments of objects, collated from familiar items from domestic spaces, which were then displayed at the shop’s ‘wall of curiosity’. The new invented object could then be taken out to a location on the estate, tested for its potential as a play object, then returned to the shop where it was documented and archived, displayed on the wall of familiarity and eventually dismantled for another use. This process enabled a compressed playground to extend play outside the shop’s limits and into the expanse of the whole estate. It also enabled a creative process by which children engaged with the personal history of domestic objects, asking questions and engaging in conversations about the narratives of their friends, families and neighbours, as well as their own. The compressed playground aimed to activate the estate’s forgotten public spaces and to introduce a new value-system to everyday objects and local settings through the rituals of public play, appropriation of space and the making of new friends. The ‘Shop of Possibilities’ has since moved to a permanent double unit that serves as a children’s art studio as well as a free after-school and weekend club for children on a number of local housing estates in the area, with a focus on bringing together children’s play and contemporary art practices.