“It comes down quicker than it went up”
.log #1 : The NVA is currently in-between.
For the first time in a long time, the NVA is a concept again.
It’s not in Nottingham, it’s not in Sheffield, it’s on paper and software. It’s in conversations, plans and negotiations. A forwarding address.
As I write this, it’ll be the first Saturday in over three years when we haven’t welcomed the public into the building. Muscle memory dictates that I check in on social responses and desk revenue throughout the day, a habit that’ll be hard to rest for a while.
It’s been a weird sensation the last few months of being both running the Nottingham site and being in front of the drawing board with the new site. That’s made the emotions around closing particularly odd. There’s very little time to take any stock as we’re all worrying about the next step, whilst being surrounded by lots of people having really quite pronounced feelings about the closure.
As is their way, the exhibitions team acted fast after closing. Within twenty-four hours of closing the NVA, things were being unscrewed, unplugged and packed down. I was away for a few days following the close on Sunday, and the team has been kind enough to send photos of what’s been going on. The pace is crazy fast.
One of the ‘advantages’ we had with the first opening, was a period of being able to spend some months in the building itself. We staged a GameCity festival in there before the fit out, and that taught us a lot about how the building was going to work. Carlton St was always an incredibly complicated space, two buildings joined together, staircases, hidden corners – we loved it for that. Being able to observe people using the spaces in lots of different ways was really helpful. The new NVA in Sheffield is a very different kind of beast. Gone are the multiple floors and rooms, for the first time this brings us a new dynamic to play with – space and horizon.
The new space is the same size as Nottingham, but all on one floor. It’s not a rectangular shape, there are some interesting features within it, but this single floor affords us an opportunity to think about the space very differently. Being able to *reveal* is something we played around with quite a lot in the initial opening, from Mission Control to the Jump Tunnel. There’s a depth of field we’re going to be able explore that was never bigger than the room you were in, at Carlton st, the biggest of those being the ‘Hall of Inputs’ (Gallery 2).
Of course, all of this also need to be tethered to our curatorial process. To that end, it was really helpful this week to attend the opening of the huge new V&A videogames show. It’s a mammoth project, boldly taking in a broad range of work and I’m sure surprising a lot of visitors in the process. It’s had a long gestation, which was reminded me of a conversation I had with someone back at the time they were holding the initial workshops about it. Even 3–4 years ago, they observed that the function of the NVA should be to inhabit a quite distinct space from the mission of the bigger, metropolitan museums. Where the V&A is (quite rightly) constructing. dissertations, we’re sketching paragraphs, crossing them out, improving them, over and over. The curatorial process of the new space is going to walk toward that much more.
Next week, we’re booking removal vans, we’re doing lots more Sheffield planning AND we’re going to announce some exciting new events!
