The pop-up exhibition at the South London Gallery asks designers and artists to reinterpret the traditional birdhouse. Designer and exhibit curator Andu Masebo, along with creative director Ollie Olanipekun, share more about the project. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
This is Monocle on Design Extra.
It's a short show to accompany our weekly program where we discuss everything from architecture and craft to furniture and fashion.
I'm Maile Evans.
Now we might focus on creating our very own comfortable living spaces, but what about homes for the avian life around us?
Dwellings is a pop up exhibition at the South London Gallery over this weekend and considers just this Here, invited artists and designers have reinterpreted the traditional birdhouse.
Responses range from modest and recognizable proposals to conceptual approaches and flights of fancy.
To find out more, I caught up with some of the team behind the project on a bird watching expedition in London's Regents Park.
Grey heron stalking its prey.
But usually it'll just sit and wait for up to three hours waiting to see any movement.
Maybe rodents, snakes.
Right now it seems to be staring at the Canada geese and the carrion crow.
My name is Oli Ilanipekan.
I'm a creative director based in London.
I'm co founder of the bird watching collective Flock Together, started by myself in Nadine Pereira in 2020 and also the founder of the new platform Open Area where we use art and creativity to reconnect people with nature.
We wanted a really diverse spread of practices that meant that you could go into this space and be stimulated on lots of different levels.
My name is Andu Musabo.
I'm a product design and furniture maker and I also am part of a collective design studio called Computer Room.
We had all of these friends that we knew we wanted to have in a room on a common theme and we felt that the Bird House was a really nice connector because it both brings a common context to all of the artists, but it also taps into so much of what Flock are talking about.
It gives different entry points of quite simple functional birdhouses to really deep conceptual dissections of what it means to build a house for a bird and why we've got to a point where we need to build houses for birds.
It was really important that this was delivered as a group show because there's so many different access points for people into nature.