SME Partner

Mohamed Hammoudan, Bemerton TMO/Team Cally

Academic Partner

Anna Hart, University of the Arts London

Project Title

Cally Calls

Project Description

Responding to the ongoing regeneration of the King’s Cross area the Cally Calls project attempted to generate a distinct voice for residents of ‘The Cally’, or the Caledonian Road area. Artists Anna Hart and Tilly Fowler, AIR, collaborated with Mohamed Hammoudan of community organisation Team Cally to establish seven pairings between artists and residents.

Members of the local community consisted of: a postman, a retired solicitor, a unemployed young women, a playworker, a group of female pensioners, a caretaker and a cafe owner. The artists involved were: Giles Bailey, Margot Bannerman, John Costi, Ruth Ewan, Magda Fabianczyk, Mathilda Fowler and Lee Milne. Walking and talking ‘The Cally’ the pairs discussed life in the area, subsequently the artists created original works responding to these conversations. The artworks were a first draft of a novel, a seven day mail-art work, a collection of bespoke hand printed Cally paper bags, an audio work of birdsong and sweeping, a temporary stile for a blocked desiring path, a film work about adolescent conflict and a pairing of street identities through the re-presentation of the artist’s Ralph Lauren collection.

The artworks were exhibited in a disused shop as part of The Cally Festival in September 2013. In October 2014 the exhibition was re-stagged at the Cities Methodologies exhibition hosted by the UCL Urban Laboratory at the Slade Research Centre.

As part of the October 2013 Inside Out Festival Anna Hart and Mohamed Hammoudan hosted a public walking tour of ‘The Cally’.

Commenting upon the project Hammoudan remarked that “Cally Calls has challenged my cynicism about working with arts institutions and been a springboard to do a lot more of those type of things. It has helped me to understand the breadth of the community and how important it is to go beyond the usual suspects.”