To join this activity, email me at [email protected].
The activity’s Curatorial Guild (ie. its participants) will endeavour to have an Introductory Meeting on **Monday, March 28th (time and location TBD).
Current members of this Activity’s Curatorial Guild: Bojana Babic + Neven Lochhead**
A second and separate ‘Round’ of this activity is offered from April 22 - May 8.
Instructions for Clipboard Drop-off
Phantom Market: Activity Pitch
Phantom Market is an activity designed to explore the historic Etherington house from an exterior and distal vantage point. We will try to zoom back from the intense forces of the interiors of the house, and place it within a wider art-adjacent field: the housing market. Participants in this two-week activity will carry out a process of conceptualising and developing draft advertisement materials for the Etherington House, imagining how it might circulate as a rentable home within active online marketplaces (Kijiji, Zumper, Facebook Marketplace, Sabbatical Homes, etc.).
As part of this Activity, we will need to think through this gesture, its implications and feasibility. We will discuss considerations of how we could effectively maintain, mediate and ‘care for’ a public advertisement for the house circulating in a live marketplace, and engage with those parties interested in the advertisement. We will consider the role of fiction-making in this project, and explore the ‘parafictional’ as a form of public engagement.
We will also consider and learn the established grammars of listings in the housing market as a format and inflection to use for the purposes of documenting the exhibition A guest + a host = a ghost. For example, if there is a photo or video tour of the Etherington House and its exhibition, what will it document and share with a public? Will this resemble a guided visitor tour (”Here we encounter the word of...” or a description of the possible uses of the room “Bright, sunny, spacious, great for office space...”? How might we think about the Etherington House advertised on Kijiji as a form of ‘promiscuous’ publicity and communications for the artworks in the exhibition? How might we, as a Curatorial Guild, mediate those artworks with publics in real time by responding to inquiries, and entering into conversation with those who have stumbled upon the exhibition in their search for one bedroom apartments?
Lastly, this activity will seek to displace the “specificity” in this site-specific project. While the Etherington House, as a colonial-style home, does produce specific and intense effects and erasures, it is also a deeply generic object, replicated thoroughly throughout Kingston and beyond. The ‘unmooring’ of the Etherington House from its specific function and history as an art gallery, and its placement within these wider markets will give us an opportunity think through, test and make-visible the seamlessness of its integration into the wider colonial vocabularies of Kingston. Unmoored and adrift in the generic space of real estate, where else could the Etherington house travel? As a ghost-house, could it travel beyond Kingston and appear in adjacent markets, in other cities? Could the house be sent home?
Phantom Market workflow
Given the specific complexities of this activity, a greatly customised form of working will need to be determined by those interested in taking part, which would calibrate the scope of the activity to interest level and time availability of its participants. We will need to navigate the complexities of the conceptual trajectories above, building consensus on how we could proceed, and especially start discussing the possible circulation of the Etherington House’s advertisements with Agnes’ communications and curatorial staff. Very likely this activity may not come to fruition within just one two-week period, but will instead spread across the two “Rounds” of the platform, for instance with the first round generating a draft advertisement, thinking through the feasibility of the gesture, and the second round actively implementing and monitoring its live circulation in online marketplaces.