Video - 2up2down / Home baked. Summary of the project - 2up 2down. 2Up 2Down was a project initiated in 2010 by artist Jeanne van Heeswijk who worked within communities of Anfield and Brickfield in Liverpool to rethink the future of their neighbourhood.
The project was commissioned by the Liverpool Biennial in 2010 and was a response to the controversial Housing Market Renewal (HMR) initiative, which was started in 2002 by the Blair-led Labor Government. The intention of the scheme was to address falling house prices, primarily in northern England, and reconnect them with regional markets by applying the principles of supply and demand. They believed by demolishing high density, victorian terraced housing and rebuilding smaller modern homes this would reduce supply, increase demand and prices would rise and kickstart the local economy. The scheme ripped apart communities by forcefully evicting people from their houses through compulsory purchases orders. Image Credits: Jeanne van Heeswijk and situations.org.uk. Extrait Thèse E. Zhong (2015) Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art. A journey of learning how to take responsibility together.
July 2014 Liverpool Biennial 2014 is opening and the bakery has just gone through its third refurbishment. The CLT is making definite plans for the development of housing in the rest of the block. Homebaked is now independent as an organisation and many of the most difficult hurdles have been overcome. This seems a good time to take stock. Descriptions of the project have been sent around in many forms: funding bids, reviews, poetry, personal letters, performance scripts, evaluation, building and planning reports, in-depth writing by imbedded researchers and, of course, recipes.
As an introduction, here we look back on some of the determining steps that we’ve taken along the journey of what is now called Homebaked. One of the first things we did when setting up camp in the former Mitchell’s bakery in February 2011 was to put up a timeline, as a frieze running along the wall of the front space. End of 2009 Beginning of 2010 July 2014. 2Up 2Down/Homebaked and the Symbolic Media Narrative. This article is an expanded and updated version of a post by the same title on the author’s blog on Social Practice (suebellyank.com) first published 17 February 2013.
At a conference in December of 2012 about socially engaged art, Dutch artist Jeanne van Heeswijk seemed uncomfortable when presenting 2Up 2Down/Homebaked, her ongoing work with residents of the Liverpool suburb Anfield, despite having done so dozens of times before. In a way, she was faced with an impossible task – to explain the complicated breadth of the multi-year project in which she was engaged. After all, her presentation (bolstered, in my case, by subsequent internet searches) was probably the only way that most of us there would experience the work, as an arbitrary and mediated snapshot. Despite her passion and her ability to tell a compelling story with nuance and detail, any description flattens such work, which is an ever-shifting series of tenuous relationships.
The Observer takes a very different approach. Performance, participation and questions of ownership in the Anfield Home Tour. At the 2012 Liverpool Biennial, a significant number of encounters with Homebaked / 2Up 2Down were facilitated through the performance The Anfield Home Tour, which was conceived by Jeanne van Heeswijk, directed by Britt Jurgensen and written by Deborah Morgan.
On this, audiences went on a minibus journey through the streets around the bakery, encountering stories told by locals and the guide Carl (played by actor, Graham Hicks) which then acted as an introduction to the socio-political context of the area, and thus the project. It is not always easy to identify a recipe by taste alone; sometimes we can identify certain ingredients, but even if we manage this correctly, gaining an understanding of the method used to combine them is much harder.
At a fundamental level, performance is the meeting of bodies in space. It is an art form that creates encounters between people, and thus a space that facilitates experimentation with how we relate to each other. Photo: Carl Ainsworth Archive. The Guardian - 'This is not about gentrification’: the pie shop reviving an Anfield street. As Liverpool FC’s Anfield stadium gleams in the April sunshine, the abandoned, steel-shuttered houses cowering in its shadow serve as a poignant reminder of the impact developments can have on their host communities.
But in the unassuming bakery at the end of the terrace lies the heart of a movement working to transform this run-down area back into the vibrant neighbourhood residents remember. The Homebaked cooperative bakery is in prime position to sell pies to some of the 40,000 football fans who come to the Anfield stadium on an average match day. What its customers might not realise is that in the back room of the Victorian premises a group of locals have cooked up a plan to transform the empty properties next door into 26 high-quality, affordable flats. 2017 Interview with the artist JVH.