MDZ Estate Tour at The Green
Maja Lorkowska, Exhibitions Editor
A city in a shipping container? It may sound unlikely, but thanks to SICK! Festival’s new commission MDZ Estate Tour you can experience it for yourself in the form of Jimmy Cauty’s touring artwork.
Each block focuses on a different area of social, economic or environmental ruin, made into amusing scenes
You can explore the ‘dystopian model village’ in a 40ft-long shipping container, housing a miniature city full of atmospheric scenes and quirky details. MDZ, the ‘Municipal Disaster Zone’ includes residential Live-Work-Die units, a multi-storey high security children’s prison, a high-rise home for the old, the dying and the dead, and a spiritual centre for neo-pagan misbehaviour. Each block focuses on a different area of social, economic or environmental ruin, made into amusing scenes to encourage critical discussions and inspire the audiences to think about their own homes and communities.
The experience was designed to fit in a container so it can be made available outside of traditional art spaces
MDZ features four abandoned concrete tower blocks at 1:24 scale, approx. 2 metres high. Despite the seemingly negative connotations, irony and humour are the key element of the piece allowing a wide audience to engage with the work, from the purely aesthetic appeal and discovering all of the hidden gems in the miniatures, to considerations of the issues of urban living. The experience was designed to fit in a container so it can be easily moved around and made available outside of traditional art spaces in order made more accessible and closer to the communities it’s visiting.
Jimmy Cauty, born in the Wirral, is an artist and musician, best known as one-half electronic band The KLF. Cauty then went on to set up the K-Foundation, and co-founded The Orb. The artist regularly works with miniatures and dioramas, having previously created the Aftermath Dislocation Principle, an imagined post-riot landscape. His, perhaps most famous artwork, was the radical piece K Foundation Burn a Million Quid, a performance during which the K-Foundation duo consisting of Cauty and Bill Drummond burnt almost one million pounds.
Just so you know, the experience includes smoke, strobe lighting, wind, loud noise and is suitable for children over 5.
