Square City (2000)
Year-long residency in Ordnance Survey grid square 84E 97N, Manchester UK
For Year of the Artist and Work and Leisure International



In 2000, I was approached by the Arts Council of England with a view to submitting a proposal to become an artist-in-residence
in a site of my choice as part of a series of projects commissioned for their Year of the Artist celebrations. Working with
commissioning body Work and Leisure International, I proposed to become artist-in-residence in the 1km grid square 84E 97N
on the Ordnance survey 1:50000 map of Manchester. The Ordnance Survey has been the official 'Crown' survey of land in
England since the late 18th Century. 84E 97N was the grid square in which I lived at the time.

I undertook a series of projects utilising the artificial constraints of the square, from curating a survey show "You are Here" at
Manchester Metropolitan University's Holden Gallery (commissioning new work by Cleo Broda, Tim Etchells and Tim Brennan in
the process), to acts of temporal and spatial mapping which privileged the neglected or overlooked, from chewing gum stains to
songs sung by the drunks outside my window each Saturday midnight.

During the lifetime of the project and in the brief period afterwards when I was still living there, the project was documented by a
now-defunct website, www.squarecity.net - most of the physical archive of the project is still located within the grid square.

In 2001, the project became the basis of a solo show at the Project Arts Centre in Dublin - where the artificial frame of the City's
Temple Bar was used as the terrain for a series of experiments and work with artists in that city. In a 2005 project at floating ip,
New York artist Lan Tuazon worked in the adjacent square to that of the original project, namely 84E 98N, which I 'franchised' to
her as part of her stay in the UK.

IImages: Section of grid square; Traffic light outside Copperface Jacks bar, Manchester (image by Jim Medway)