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INTERNATIONAL ARTWORKS
by Gaby Montejo
Christchurch NZ, July 2010
Under the control of her Christchurch procurer, Boxy Travéla was offered out for
21 days to 21 different artists who had their way with her overnight.
Personal encounters ensued (of a non-objective kind); as can be viewed here:
http://www.facebook.com/photo_search.php?oid=128748880489387&view=all
Montejo eventually conceded to live vicariously through the eyes of Travéla- the windows
into the private worlds that Boxy touched during each invasion.
"This whole thing ended up being more about them" said Montejo
"It was like a wake up call.
I realised I can see faces now where before they were all just Johns to me".
There has been no report as to her allegiance... but oh the stories.
by Jeremy Booth
Wellington, June 2010
Reading and the thinking about the Box project, I was immediately interested, sceptical, as to the level
of possible socio-cultural implication and investigation that the box was seeking to engage.
Irrespective of an artist’s project, and in which country it might take place,
I wondered how this Box — this void — might begin to engage complex intertwining
notions of social and cultural fabric when its fleeting itinerary resembled more the tourist than the insider.
But then — as the transitory, the assimilatory, spring-boards off the fixed
as its defining element — I began to see that the Box itself was only a formality;
that the space within it was where these conversations would begin,
and indeed were already taking place.
My project posed a challenge to the Box: that the space within it might engage a sense of place through
its basic premise of volume; that it might truly experience the New Zealand cultural landscape
by becoming part of it; by doing the hard-yards and getting its hand dirty, as it were. For two months,
the Box supported a small subtropical forest of native Nikau palms, typical of what the local ecology
might support, while also token to the New Zealand identity as one of the more picturesque and
easily digested elements of the proverbial Bush. The extent to which the forest would thrive would
be a measure as to the Box’s ability to become acquainted and integrated with its environment.
But more widely, the project looked to assume and implicate the dynamics of
contemporary New Zealand ecology as a malleable, void space;
a metaphorical framework for considering and putting into motion post-national
ideas of social and cultural makeup.
The forest was shifted between numerous domestic, public, indoor and outdoor locations,
spending time also in transit.
The Travellers Box for efficient living
by Jillian Mayer Miami June 2010
FOR my interpretation of the Travellers Box,
I created a bomb shelter of where I will live,
assuming I am one that will live past the others post apocalypse.
2012, oil slicks in the gulf of Mexico killing all my favorite sea creatures,
or wetlands which are rising around the coast of my Florida;
we are going down. Preparation is key, guys.
“MOnuMENTS”
By focar - Alina Tudor and Razvan Neagoe
London June 2010
The Travellers Box Project, in addition to MOnuMENTS project
Research and Documentation – “MOnuMENTS” Project is in full progress in London.
In between 14 March – 25 April 2010 focAR group will set off together with “The Travelers Box” Project.
focAR group’s action is part of The Travelers Box Project. The event will take place in the very heart of London.
Transferring the project (MOnuMENTS) in London may bring a new direction to the project. It is now possible to suggest a comparison – the observation of the monuments from the two capitals. The interest points of the research are the concept, the urbanism, the artist, the techniques and the general partner, (the state) as well. Being a visual expression of a public attitude, the monuments history has always developed between the two extremes – the pious acceptance, while evoking a glorious past and disproof.
On 10th of April performance in West Ham – “We are the champions” statue (sculptor Philip Jackson ? At the junction of Barking Road and Central Park Road Showing Bobby Moore, holding the Cup, with Geoff Hurst, Martin Peters and Ray Wilson. This shows the four celebrating after England won the World Cup in 1966. The artist has depicted these soccer heroes as being larger than life). The action consisted in the placement of a flower bouquet at the monument and in holding a meditation moment about “heroes” condition.
We keep a “diary” of The Box using photos. As long as we host the Box, we are going to take a photo of The Box daily, trying to notice the evolution of the project. Every day will add something new inside or around The Box.
http://focar.artforclick.com/2010/03/23/the-travellers-box-project-in-addition-to-with-monuments-project/
“ I did NOT take a Shit in the lunch box”
by Monica Winther Oslo June 2010
It is based upon a true story
A friend of mine took a shit in her toy-suitcase.
It smelled like hell in her room. Her father came into
her room and asked what that awful smell was.
“Well I did NOT take a shit in the suitcase that`s for sure”......
The word shit is usually considered a vulgarity and profanity in Modern
English. As a noun it refers to fecal matter (excrement) and as a verb it
means to defecate or defecate in; in the plural (“the shits”) it means diarrhea.
Shite is also a common variant in British English. As a slang term, it
has many meanings, including: nonsense, foolishness, something of little
value or quality, trivial and usually boastful or inaccurate talk, or a contemptible
person. It may also be used as an expression of annoyance, surprise
or anger.
Wikipedia
(excrement is waste matter discharged from the body, esp faeces; excreta)
Excrement is waste, but it is also fertilizer and nourishment for new
growth. It has a wide range of associations, partly due to its deployment in
many linguistic expressions, any one of which may be the meaning of excrement
in a dream. As with all dream symbols, the tone and setting of the
dream indicate which meaning is appropriate.
Beliefs about actual excrement are few. To step accidentally on dog dirt or
a cowpat is said to bring good luck, as attested by two 17th-century proverbs:
‘muck is luck’, and ‘shitten luck is the best’. Some say the reason
some burglars befoul the scene of their crime is as a charm to ensure they
will not be caught.
by Daniel Shaw
Wellington, April 2010
My practice is heavily sample and software-based, and the internet is a primary source of material for my work.
I was interested in utilising the inherently mobile nature of the Travelling Box as a tactical position against current shifts toward a heavily regulated internet (in NZ specifically, Section 92a: http://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/2008/0027/latest/DLM1122643.html, and ACTA: http://acta.net.nz/).
My project for the Travellers Box invoked it as a mobile web server during the second week of March, 2010. This became a paranoia-tinged space for me to develop a project, titled dubdubdub, using illegally downloaded content as source material (a file-shared copy of Gus van Sant's 1998 Psycho re-make of Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 film of the same name). At the end of each development session the web-server was relocated to a safe zone within walking distance of my home.
Materials (in addition to the Travellers Box): Computer, wireless broadband, custom electronics, open-source software, rope, vinyl, fabric.
Liminopia
TangentProjects´collaboration with The Travellers Box
by artists Karen Ay, Helene Kazan and Steve Smith
London, March 2010
Liminopia was a fantasy, a model urban landscape free from constraints of scale constructed of random materials found by chance. It was a series of spatial contradictions, emanating from the Travellers Box which in this incarnation, turned upside down, issued forth from a hilltop an expanding city from the imaginations of the three artist/architects. The dialogues between the architects of this city came more through the internal preconceptions of urban planning, architecture, landscape and the material structure of the urban environment. We embarked on the project with notions of collaboration through conversation, dialogue, dissent and negotiation to construct a city of our choosing only to find that the preconceptions controlled and led us to construct from almost subconscious dialogue with the found materials.
Ultimately despite the measured placings of each of the sites that made up the city in its entirety Liminopia in many ways made itself, perhaps less so for the other two architects but for me represents the life of a city which pervades our consciousness, suggests behaviours and subtly subverts and alters our own wishes for the immediate world around us. We are directed not only by our own motivations and the agendas of those who have more power over our cities, and therefore us, but also by our urban world which absorbs all the differing agendas, assumptions, hopes and wishes of its inhabitants and emits these back again in silent and unseen combinations.
Liminopia never had a history, it's (assumed) inhabitants never spoke, it never created an infrastructure that we recognise in our real cities that would enable it to live. Now that it is demolished and its heart, the Travellers Box, has moved on to its next incarnation, we can begin to discuss and decipher the ideas it suggests to us back in the real world. The documentation of its existence can now be created, interpreted and used to create a dialogue and conversation between the three architects to determine what this process of collaboration but also perhaps a wider understanding of the urban environment we share means to us and our fellow city dwellers.
 facing the front of liminopia, shanty town in foreground
aeriel shot - march 2010
aeriel shot - wasteland/factory/council estate/river - march 2010
aeriel shot - shantytown - march 2010
liminopia apartments - march 2010
liminopia at dusk - march 2010
aerial shot - monolith (centre) toxic waste dump (left), green belt (back left) urban dwellings (back right) financial district (right) - march 2010
fun fair - march 2010
monoleith detail - march 2010
night scape - march 2010
invented waterways - march 2010
Visit http://liminopia.blogspot.com/ to see and read the whole proces with Liminopia
Studio 1 artwork in process to The Travellers Box
by Justin Jade Morgan
New Plymouth and Auckland, January 2010
This project is about the tools used within my practice. Often we as viewers or makers of an object tend to address the presented piece and the processes that are driving the overall intent of the work. But how often do we think about the tools that the artist/maker has used to construct?
By unpacking my current practice and diving further into my studio; I intend to address and open up questions around the relationship between my tools, their function and their value. This project currently has several components on show at the Govett Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, the Sanderson Contemporary Art Gallery, Auckland and in the ‘Beats’ video fest in Nova Gorica, Slovenia.
My intention is to introduce the box as a carry box to hold and transport items to and from each gallery space as I go about de-installing the first suite of New Zealand shows (this process will be documented in accordance with the project). This will mean that the box will not only make a trip from Wellington to New Plymouth to Auckland and then back to Wellington just as I the artist does – But it will also have the chance to be connected to the gallery spaces mentioned above, thus inserting the box not only as a tool but also as an art object within an exhibition space and project context.
“Using seemingly simple objects and information to weave ideas into poignant artistic statements.”
(Bruce E Phillips, Independent New Zealand Curator – Text - Weaving Ideas)
Historically artists have specialised in a particular medium or discipline to deliver information about a given subject. In contrast to contemporary art making of today that is characterised by its variety of ideas and diversity of materials due to an increase in the access of information.
It is from here were I draw my interest from the ways in which cultures, society and institutions use categorisation and presentation as a method to label the existence, function and reading of an object and or activity. And how this can be interrupted by the relationship between the maker, the viewer, the situation and the location where the information is delivered.
Thus in turn producing works or installations often researching specific subjects relating to art, architecture and social theory as departure points. My work play’s on the literal reading to create suggestions of natural or invented narratives with the intention of using categories or methods to expose and re-address the object or activiy, as a subject, as a part of the communtiy and where it fits in relation to the context of art.
Toy Box artwork to The Travellers Box
by James R Ford
Wellington New Zealand 2009/2010
For this project the Travellers Box adopted the function of a toy box, an integration of art and daily life. Ford uses the unseen presence of his 8 month old daughter, Mollie, in this work to imply the vulnerability and complete dependence of humans in early life.
For 3 weeks in December 2009 a selection of Mollie’s toys were stored in the Travellers Box. The toys were removed, swapped around and replaced ad hoc whenever Mollie was in the mood for playing. The box was used in the same fashion as a normal toy box, moving from room to room as required, and documented at various intervals over the duration of the intervention.
Immediately a dichotomy is established: Mollie’s colourful, safe and mainly soft toys are being held captive in an ugly, hard, sharp metallic vessel. The edges are dangerous so Mollie cannot be left alone with it. The viewer can envision Mollie banging her head and hurting herself on the box while innocently attempting to grab her toys.
Instead of being anxious about the multitude of possible things Mollie could hurt herself on, and trying to baby proof every eventuality, the artist is placing an actual danger in her reach.
Below you find a link to a video-recording of the box reciting a nursery rhyme via a toy within. A strange combination of clinically cold box and imprisoned, happy singing voice.
Videorecording
(scroll a little down when you come to the site)
s.box artwork to The Travellers Box project
by PISO
Berlin may - november 2009
Sandwich! no Box.
We decided to work with the Sandwich Box, because we found the materials common
and we wanted to do usual things with it. When the performative practice brought the
deconstruction of the format, it was also a proposal about the process itself, grabbing
common materials and listing a bunch of unusual possibilities to deal with it, putting in
poetic evidence a discourse about quotidian life.
In our case, it had nothing to do with this way of re-using poor materials - as a social critique of
post-modern life - that should become more special, but to use them in a casual way, taking it,
nevertheless, emotionally and gently in a nonsense perspective.
From a list of one hundred possible things to do with the Sandwich Box, we picked four:
.To get used to the Sandwich Box;
.To loose the Sandwich Box, and then what?;
.To play any kind of sport on the Sandwich Box;
.To hole up in the Sandwich Box, our common shelter.
 
Get used to it!
It was summer, it was nice. we went to the park to roll in the grass, we tried to do barbecues
like the other people in Berlin do. We wanted to be integrated in the city, to be loved by
someone. In the outside activities we found people like us, with the same tastes for music
and carrying the same kind of materials everywhere. Once again we found our way of living
so common, and even “Sandwich Boxes” were all over, cohabiting and loosing their own sense
of originality in an environment in which they seemed to be native. One could not see which
was “real” or “fake”, but that doesn’t matter, it’s only a question of property.
Anyway - we admit now- we sent back to the travellers box a fake green
sheet.
Swapping materials is also funny.
 
 
 
 
Loosing it!
Loosing the sandwich box was a pretext to work with the notion of disillusion and responsibility
within a group and collective to achieve something further, special and funny.
Frustration is also a way to see the artistic world/activity, even if you are inside.
The illusion of disappointment makes us work with the possibility of failure, misunderstanding,
remorse and that sensation that you feel when you don’t have the ability to forgive - bitterness.
This allowed us to cohabit with the fantasy that we could have done the most incredible things
with the Sandwich Box but we got stuck in the way because we lost it, or because we ceased
to believe in it and we left it behind.
Play on it!
In the multiplicity we found a place for ourselves where we could sleep and do boring and pleasurable
things. Thinking in size as a relative measure led us to wander on ways to dissimulate the content
of the Sandwich Box. The sheet was green, the weather was bad, our living room was big enough
and we had recently purchased badminton racquet’s. We thought to experience with the Sandwich
Box another kind of leisure, we played for a while, for some days, the living room was a courtyard.
The rest of us stood in silence.
Still frames from the video "Summer in Berlin"
View the video here: 
Hole up!
The materials that come with the Sandwich Box are commonly associated with a portable shelter.
We were naturally attracted by this property, not just because it could be used as a potential
protector, but also as a place where we could hide ourselves.
One of us started the game of searching for this temporary space to be hidden. Instinctively a rule
appeared: to be under of it without setting a fixed structure. The solution was to launch the
cover repeatedly, to stop the material from falling, and remain below the accidental and mutable
shapes made by the air blowing the material. Another of us was photographing the moment,
selecting fragments of the fight between the body and the flexible space.
For more info about PISO please go to webpage www.opiso.blogspot.com
Ett tydligare samhälle artwork by Per-Arne Sträng and John Huntington to The Travellers Box
Stockholm august 2009
Ett tydligare samhälle
artwork by Per-Arne Sträng and John Huntington
to The Travellers Box project
Stockholm august 2009
Kanslibyrån is an activist group and an artistic institution consisting of artists Per-Arne Sträng and John Huntington. Kanslibyrån is waging an everyday struggle where rationality, obedience and efficiency is questioned both in public and personal spheres.
The Travellers Box was a good and functioning framework for our activity, as we often work in the public space and the interaction with the general public plays an important role.
We decided on an early stage that we want to do something that was the opposite of our previous projects which was about criticizing norms and conventions in our own and others everyday life, trying to localize points where resistance is possible. This time we wanted to encourage people to follow rules and even contribute with new ones.
The title of our project is A more concrete society; was realized as a information campaign. The project took place near the Sergels torg in central Stockholm during two days in August 2009. Our lobby organization, Kanslibyrån, argued that a changing and often chaotic society requires more directives and guidelines.
We want more rules and recommendations as help and guidance in our everyday life. With simple and understandable prohibitions, we wanted to fix the lack of clarity and create a safe and more controlled society.
In the context of A more concrete society, we launched an archive of rules and prohibitions, with the aim of identifying new rules, prohibitions and recommendations that are important for a sustainable society.
We used the tarpaulin to build a wall, where we hanged three posters and one sign. The posters said “Sit with a straight back”, “always say thank you” and “Don’t stare”, the sign said “Don’t lick on the knife”. We also made a folder with ten different proposals for new rules, which we argued for. The folder was handed out to people passing by.
For more info and some pictures please go to our webpage www.kanslibyran.se
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