SOS OK PUBLICATION – msdm: London-based House—Studio—Gallery for photographic art and curatorial research, an expanded practice of the artist's book, photobook publishing and peer-to-peer collaboration operating through mobile strategies of display & mediation

SOS:OK
(SAVE OUR SOULS: ZERO KILLINGS)

Kit: Guide+ Emergency biscuit in a box

Guide:
40 pages duo tone 12cmx18cm 120gsm
matte uncoated paper
litho printing: aldgate press
graphic design by ajdin basic and paula roush
based on real life experience
of being fed w/ emergency food
during the wars in bosnia and portugal.
typeface gyro designed by domen fras
publication date: october 2004
edition:1000
texts: zeigam azizov, alice park and paula roush

1st edition for SOS:OK
(SAVE OUR SOULS: ZERO KILLINGS)
Curated by Frances Coleman
Coleman Project Space London

Read the guide
- [PDF: 18MB]
- page by page flip

2nd edition for PUBLIC SERVICES
Curated by Tadej Pogacar
With: Marjetica Potrc, paula roush, Apolonija Sustersic, Anja Planiscek and Tadej Pogacar, Temporary Services
Pavel Haus, Laafeld, Austria and Sparwasser HQ, Berlin

SOS:OK (SAVE OUR SOULS: ZERO KILLINGS)

Temporary public artwork with Coleman Project Space in the site of the former Biscuit town, Bermondsey which allowed former workers of the Biscuit Factory to imagine and design a new biscuit to represent their neighborhood.

MEMORY FACTORY

First part of the project consisted in setting up a Memory factory in place of the former Peek Frean’s Biscuit Factory, announced as ‘a reopening of the factory for one week only as a memory factory.’ The workshops investigated the factory’s history, gathering archive material. Peek Frean former workers were invited to come to contribute their memories of Biscuit Town. They arrived with memorabilia which filled the project space turning it into a display of selected photos, clothing, gifts, books, films, sound samples and journal entries that mapped the space of memory.

Zeigam Azizov
Memory Factory at Coleman Project Space
Published in SOS:OK guide

SOS:OK KIT [EMERGENCY BISCUIT + GUIDE TO EMERGENCY FOOD RELIEF OPERATION]

A new emergency biscuit, cooked to a specially designated recipe, was created to be distributed to visitors to the gallery and on the streets of Bermondsey. Crates of biscuits were distributed by horse and cart on Tower Bridge Road and on the Blue. The exercise was partly a reference to a relief operation of 1870 during the Franco-Prussian war. When the prussians lifted their siege of Paris, Peek Freans supplied thousands of biscuits to the starving citizens.

The exhibition at the Coleman ProjectSpace was staged as a relief operation, also a response to the hunger crisis which is an international emergency.

Bermondsey, in south-east London, was once affectionately known as Biscuit Town. Home to some of the largest biscuit factories in the country, it provided employment to generations of local families.
Now it’s a very different story. The biscuit factories have closed, and many of their former employees are unemployed. The only businesses that come into Bermondsey now are the large property developers buying up old factories and turning them into gated residences for well-paid workers at nearby Canary Wharf.

SOS:OK DISTRIBUTION CENTRE

SOS:OK STREET DISTRIBUTION

SOS:OK CAMPAIGN

PRESS

Will Pavia, Taking the biscuit
Southwark Weekender
15 oct 2004

Annie Kelly
Bermondsey takes the biscuit Former Peek Frean
employees back community project
The Guardian, Wednesday October 20, 2004

Heather Greig-Smith
Operation SOS:OK, Bermondsey, South London.
Regeneration & Renewal, 5 November 2004, p8

Joanna Callaghan, Go on! Have another one!
True Review, December 2004

Alice Park
Current perspectives on the role of art in urban
development.
Do artistic interventions benefit a community?
Art in Community Settings,
Birkbeck College, University of London 2004,
Published in SOS:OK guide, msdm publications 2004

Tanja Verlak, Excavation Thrill
Nowiswere Contemporary Art Magazine issue 12

PUBLIC SERVICES

SOS:OK was featured in the exhibition Public Services
along with the work of Marjetica Potrč, Apolonija Šušteršič, Temporary Services (USA) and Tadej Pogacar & Anja Planiscek,
representing the way artists today think about alternative
models of public services

Exhibition publication; PUBLIC SERVICES [pdf]

Public Services presents five different starting points for engagement and five explicitly subjective approaches. These projects and creative proposals have been conceived as forms of immediate and physical intervention in the structure of the city, as social interaction, as a virtual utopian scheme. They represent a critical consideration of alternative models of public services, which, ideally, are founded on the principles of openness, access, equality, participation, mobility, adaptability, and transformativity.

When artists today think about structures and forms in the contemporary city, they think above all about the importance of open communication within urban structures. By occupying the space that lies between the many different city users, corporate capital (and its interests), and the urban structure, the[se projects] draw attention to processes of degradation and appropriation, borders between public and private, deindustrialization and precarity, while developing new public-service models based on participation, exchange, and solidarity.

Tadej Pogacar, curator Public Services [+more]

PUBLISH AND BE DAMNED SELF-PUBLISHING FAIR `

SOS:OK was the Special Project for the inaugural edition
of Publish and Be Damned PABD
with the event " Copylaws of the Kitchen"
A free participatory event for 100 women and children
sharing biscuits to celebrate the mutation of the printing
press into biscuit cutting anarchy.

For more information on PABD see here