Auto Italia, London, 27 September 2008 — 11 October 2008
Rachel Pimm
The Open Home Show, 2008, Rachel Pimm. Courtesy of the artist.

The Open Home Show is the staging of a collection of projects by Rachel Pimm, made in the artist’s simultaneously public and private live-work environment at Auto Italia.

Conversations that have occurred in the day to day of Pimm’s activities at Auto Italia have culminated organically in a proposal to permanently ‘rename East Peckham’. Presented as a text, and an offer to hold a street party: The Glengall Ball. These activities are presented together with a set of external trompe l’oeil billboards to coincide with the start and end of the project. At the opening, Auto Italia becomes a show home in which to meet those collaborating on the projects and take or read a copy of the writing in which people with different takes on naming and different interests in the area have been invited by Pimm to help discuss what it means to name something and how and why it might be done.

This project seeks to explore the ways in which several separate communities sharing a geographic location might work together. The ethics of this methodology and the production of any outcome can at times be hard to pin down due to the individual approach necessary in collaborating with any existing network in their own terms and systems. At any time all three projects threaten to slip away and will only exist if involvement in the project is as worthwhile to the project as to all the individual participants.