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IN 2009 I returned to live in my home town of Dublin. While I had been away, the landscape had changed.
All I could see was empty properties. Everywhere. Not just hidden down side streets and in darkened alleys, but across the city and in every suburb and street; thousands of empty offices, retail units, houses and apartments.
We all know the story: recession, foreclosures and bankruptcy leading to vacated premises, empty shops and vacant properties.
But I knew these properties still had great potential. And so whilst some saw them as a blight on the landscape and a visual reminder of Ireland’s financial woes, I saw an opportunity. As Hillary Clinton said, “Never waste a good crisis”.
So, using my background in visual arts, I set up PrettyvacanT Dublin, an arts initiative repurposing vacant properties as temporary exhibition spaces for artists.
The challenge is to make people think about the way vacant space is being under-used in Ireland
The aim of PrettyvacanT Dublin is to enliven Dublin’s empty buildings through painting, photography and installation, to bring art on to the high street, and to the public, in a more disarming and unexpected way. The challenge is to make people think about the way vacant space is being under-used in Ireland.
Raise the shutters on a vacant unit, and life returns to an area. Use art to make buildings more aesthetically appealing, and you demonstrate a property is fit for purpose. Create positive attention for a building otherwise ignored, and you advertise its availability to potential suitors.
Furthermore, provide artists with an alternative platform to display their work, and you give them a place to meet, exchange ideas, and hone their craft.
To date, despite not being in receipt of any funding, PrettyvacanT Dublin has grown over the last three years, and has organised 12 highly successful events across 10 locations, worked with over sixty individual artists and received thousands of visitors. We’ve transformed former supermarkets, repurposed disused travel agents’ shops, and reworked abandoned office.
Like a cross between The Wombles and The A-Team locked in a garage, we’ve recycled, reused and re-employed the materials we’ve found on the floor to help deliver our exhibitions. We’ve used leftover furniture, utilised shop fittings to hang artwork and even refitted existing wall panels to create gallery walls.
In keeping with the DIY ethos, we find our artists via social media. The digital space is the perfect place to cultivate relationships and research potential shows because it’s free. Twitter and Facebook allow us issue open calls, before launching a show into the real world.
Whilst there does not seem to be a national strategy to tackle the national issue of vacant properties in Ireland, arts collectives and arts organisations taking it upon themselves to lead the conversation and fuel the fire. And it’s working. Recently, PrettyvacanT Dublin was asked take the mic at a conference held by Dublin City Council on the use of vacant spaces in the city, evidencing an authority beginning to wake up to the potential of such schemes – incidentally ones which have are already successful in other cities around the world.
Of course, NAMA is the motherlode. If these properties were opened up to alternative cultural use it would be recognition of the potential in vacant spaces.
All of this isn’t meant to sound self-aggrandising, rather it’s to highlight that solutions never need be expensive, and that open and collaborative dialogue encourages people to think of new, and cheap, ways of addressing a problem. PrettyvacanT Dublin provides one such solution, but no doubt there are many more.
The take-out is this: think about every empty shop. Every office. Every house. Think about its potential.
What could happen there?
Louise Marlborough is Founder and Director of PrettyvacanT Dublin. More information on prettyvacantdublin.com Their current show ‘Shoot the Tiger’ is taking place at Unit 3, James Joyce Street, Dublin 1 until 31 March, open Tues – Sat, 12 -5pm.
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Who makes this kinda stuff up? I really don’t understand the mentality of the type of people who would go out of their way to play on people’s fears with a view to stealing from them (information, bank details, whatever).
@lambda sensor: I agree, but if it is a text message it should have a source number so the telephone operators should be able to pass on the information to the gardai. I assume it is an offence to impersonate a government or state (or any) organisation.
Jail without access to the internet for the duration to these scam individuals. If coming from abroad then block the foriegn operators numbers from all texts and calls to Ireland
The telecom operators can be very quick to protect themselves but are lacking in protecting it’s customs. Bet they could stop all texts with the link in it and other scams but for some reason they seem slow to act. Yet social media platforms can stop the spread and remove stuff if needed.
@Niall Ó Cofaigh: There are many SIM card providers out there now so it would be very difficult to track things back to the source. With GSM cards being so cheap and easy to use plus the availability of GSM application SIM cards it is a very simple thing to setup a PC controlled system which will spit out messages all day. Those messages are not even sent from a standard off the shelf phone.
@David Corrigan:
If it is a foreign network, block the whole network and tell them to figure it out…
@David Corrigan: I have no doubt that they are almost certainly run from a device and not single composed messages in most cases and might be hard to trace back – ISP logs could help. But even if the guys could not be stopped the mobile operators could stop messages based upon content unless they have now encrypted plain text messages. We can then go to the ISP to block access to that link. Or do what they did in the USA, do a DNS redirected.
When telecom sites were replicated and phishing sites created to mimic them these sites were blocked or unhosted within 30 minutes – so it is possible to block access and prevent too much harm being done.
@Niall Ó Cofaigh: it can be configured in a way that you only see the name of the sender (the name they give themselves) like when you get a text message from your bank with a one time password to login. The sender in turn can be located abroad.
@Niall Ó Cofaigh: the whole world is seeing cyber theft and scams it is not unique to telcos that you allege ( wrongly ) that are sitting back and not taking action – there is an enormous amount of money and effort and resources spent by operators to try shut down scams – unfortunately once the the internet has been opened to all the smartfones then these challenges get more and more difficult – it is not as straight forward as blocking a call ( I work in this field )
Surely the network operators can block this fake information from circulating .
@Eug J Cummins: Would be next to impossible to do this.
@David Corrigan: block mass commercial texts that use the term HSE that are not from an authorised sender
@Eug J Cummins: They can (and used to many years ago) but wont now.
It would actually be straightforward, but would block advertising companies. These are sent by international SMS relays, and it would take 5 seconds to turn on a block if no number or name present.
Ah any close contact of a positive case would know this is fake . 24 days not one call from HSE. Luckily I contacted my contacts myself . Everybody in same circumstances should do it . If you know you’ve been exposed , contact the people you were with and tell them to quarantine and call their GP. Same if you’re a positive case . Otherwise it’s “ waiting for Godot”.
Those f@#£ers should be shot with balls of there own s#%T
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