Fabiano Marques

The Student’s Bar Problem is an installation built with parts from the former RCA student’s bar counter salvaged from the skip. The bar used to live on the outdoor terrace of the college but remained dry throughout the course. The assembled objects made of stainless steel, coated in alcohol gel and ultraviolet light are repurposed as three parts, three thought experiments. They are conversation starters, testing the lines between art and life; minimalist design and animal behaviour; quantum physics and political polarisation.

A mike open to the public; a public open to the mike. The singer sings a line. The public translates it simultaneously each to their mother tongue.

There’s a karaoke next to the college. Some sing for their friends. Some sing for the whole bar. We sing for cacophony. Words blend. Meaning expands. To test how appropriate is cultural appropriation, I propose a call and response open mike in which the singer sings a line in one language and the audience translates it simultaneously each to their mother tongue. Then we invert. Someone in the audience sings a line, and the one with the mike translates it. And back to the public. Let’s play until we get good at it. Or bad. This is a proposal. All welcome to join in. Or rebel against it. The mike is open.

Hovercraft is a stop motion making-of video presenting the development of artwork from the initial sketches to its completion with the installation of the object on site. In a hindsight, this has been quite a complex project: imagining such a thing, learning all the techniques in multiple workshops to make it real, and getting the permissions, money and time to make it amongst multiple other projects I had going on. Documenting the process while constructing has also been also hard work. I’ve edited the material with the essential parts for this presentation and more will be added later.

A fly-by through an abstract city-scape made of eclectic geometric shapes juxtaposed. The video is a stop-motion animation made with offcuts from the laser and plastics technical workshop. Set in the near future, a voice-over presents a dialogue between a client and a lawyer, discussing a case of offcuts copyright, which for some creators has become a profitable business; for others, a headache. The text itself is a collage of fragments of copyright cases combined in an incomplete narrative. The ongoing project is to be written in collaboration with a lawyer who specialised in copyright.

The offcuts in the laser and plastics workshop are kept together in large boxes. Sorted by materials (MDF, wood, acrylics, perspex), jumbled by departments (architecture, design, jewellery, sculpture). Offcuts know no such boundaries so I took them for a ride.

Battersea South, the new RCA building has a prominent apex design that reads as my initials, FM.

I developed a typeface based on the apex of the RCA Battersea South. The prominent apex of the building reads like my initials, FM. From there, I derived the other characters.

Stand upright, freeing the hands from walking

Attention to the opposing thumb

Grab a rock, the game of sculpture begins with matter and tool and procedure all combined

Now from the Stone Age to a particle accelerator 

Separate matter and tool and procedure

like particles hammering each other

Fragment them with an onomatopoeic smash: “tool”!

Then develop other tools to compile data

And more tools to bundle them together

Complexity emerges from zero, Homero

Homer, 1001 nights, 2001 and countless other odysseys

The worn-out story of the hammer

Annealing swords, coining money, shaping thoughts, coining money, assigning value, validating information

Day and night

Next, amass the sculptor constellation

As a gravitational pull to go beyond

II: Tool, sculpture is … :II repeat ad libitum

The MA in sculpture and the Kindergarten

I call Gifts the series of works I developed with the offcuts left by fellow students in the technical workshops at college. For the last months, offcuts have become the building blocks of my MA. Offcuts were passed on to me and I’ll pass them on forward. Frederich Froebel, the inventor of the Kindergarten educational system, called gifts his toys for early-age children. His method of learning by playing was so widespread in Europe and America by the second half of the 19 century that it may have influenced the generations of artists and architects, shaping modernism in the 20 century. Effective then, fundamental now. Building blocks can be found scattered everywhere, from conceptual art to coding, from particle physics and biology to social enterprises. Likewise, offcuts are everywhere. A byproduct of a society focused on producing a surplus. Learning how to deal with waste is one of the fundamental challenges for the present. The solutions developed now will be the gifts passed on to the next generations.

A collection of the models and proposals I developed with offcuts I’ve compiled into a little book called Gifts.

Print an object with a 3-D printer. The machine produces a computer-generated supporting structure in order to print the model. Throw away the model. Keep the supporting structure. Scan the structure, and scale it up digitally until it needs more supporting structure to be printed. Print a new model. Repeat the procedure in as many iterations as desired. Technological progress and waste are often interlinked. Scaling-upwards. Scaling downwards.

Request obsolete 3-D printers, which are still functional and keep them running during the show. After the show, find a destination for the machines and feedback on their whereabouts as part of the work.