PRIZE 2017

The first Prize for Excellent RC Exposition was announced for the first time at the  SAR General Assembly in Plymouth on April 13th  2017. The prize for year 2017 went to Trigger Place – A Game of Sound and Architecture www.researchcatalogue.net/view/309117/309118 by Diogo Alves and Matilde Meireles.

The Executive Board of SAR nominated a jury for the prize that included Karst de Jong (The Hague/Barcelona), Leena Rouhiainen, chair (Helsinki) and Michael Schwab (London). All in all, eleven submissions were offered for evaluation, out of which nine were fulfilled the criteria of having been published in 2017.

The members of the jury all familiarized themselves with the nine eligible proposals sent in for the annual prize. They separately shortlisted the three best. The committee members unanimously agreed that exposition Trigger Place – A Game of Sound and Architecture was the best. The criteria on which the committee members based their assessment were those mentioned in the announcement of the launch of the SAR annual prize. They related to the chosen exposition being an example of innovative and experimental formats of publication and making visible qualities of artistic research artefacts in an original manner.

More closely the prize committee commented upon the exposition in the following manner:

Trigger Place is a very convincing, attractive and playful exposition that oversteps dimensions. The exposition presents an artistic undertaking that addresses the context of an existing building, a sports hall, as well as a past musical performance by Alvin Lucier and creates an ambitious and original new cross-artistic performance piece on their basis, enriching both of them. The exposition is based on a complex but clear grid that is informed by themes involved in the performance: the line, architectonics and sound. This it does in a manner that the performance seems to continue and gain further layers in the exposition. All in all, the Research Catalogue is used attractively. The visual elements (the line) are strong, audio is used effectively. The constellations of materials – either along a line, side-by-side or in a two-dimensional “network” – allows for complex relationship to become intelligible. The choice of the line is a strong connector – lines are used in the squash court, they have been applied during the performance and they are extended into the space of RC. Very clever and effective! The exposition is an artistic entity in its own right.