APEX London — diplomatic mission

Last week I went to Lon­don for two neat rea­sons; one was sched­uled for the near future but was hap­pi­ly pre­cip­i­tat­ed by the oth­er. My best friend’s first vis­it to Europe, who came on work relat­ed mat­ters, pushed for­ward my ini­tial scout­ing for art spaces in Lon­don. It could­n’t have been bet­ter tim­ing; I found Lon­don in full blossom!

The two areas I want­ed to check were SOHO and, to the east, the Brick Lane sur­round­ings- Shored­itch; nei­ther dis­ap­point­ed me. In fact I saw great works in SOHO by Brett Amory (Twen­ty-Four in Lon­don, in Lazarides, great leg of the project), Emma Richard­son (Feast, in The Out­siders, colour­ful slices from some­one’s hypo­thal­a­mus, tak­en with a very sharp katana and skil­ful­ly stuck to can­vas ) and, per­haps on a dif­fer­ent point of the spec­trum, Lionel Smit (Cumu­lus, in Rook & Raven). As for Shored­itch, I know…easy to say it’s full of char­ac­ter. But I think there’s some­thing else here that adds to my project, APEX: the per­cep­tion of a top from a bot­tom. Tran­script: the City’s cor­po­rate land­scape is just there…silently cut on the back­ground when you walk some rusty alleys. The Stolen­Space had a great show by Cyr­cle. called “Over­throne! Poor­ing Reign”. In both areas I met inter­est­ing peo­ple, some of whom are quite inter­est­ed in the project.

Meet­ing this old friend was a real treat, I’m hap­py. It’s like a part of your life com­ing back to you in the form of mem­o­ries, anec­dotes, and more impor­tant­ly, that ease of mind reflect­ed in a to-the-point talk mixed with affec­tion and the cheer­ful mood from child­hood, even dis­cussing seri­ous mat­ters (he is in a sep­a­ra­tion process). At the moment he’s work­ing in a book for the Argenti­na Embassy in UK, and he was stay­ing at the Ambas­sador’s Res­i­dence in Bel­gravia. On Sat­ur­day we went with Ali­cia Cas­tro, the Argenti­na Ambas­sador her­self, for an infor­mal won­der­ing around to var­i­ous places, like the mar­ket in Por­to­bel­lo rd — Not­ting Hill, etc and the tour end­ed hav­ing tapas and a great red in Bor­ough Mar­ket. To final­ize a spec­tac­u­lar sun­ny day, and in order to check the last loca­tion for my project, we went up the View of the Shard, Lon­don’s phys­i­cal APEX.

A spe­cial men­tion to my good friend and for­mer Dublin mate Anahi Fer­nán­dez, who very kind­ly left me her home in Padding­ton, thanks Anita!