Wabi Shabby

Give me a map and an art event spread over a collection of shabby, dilapidated buildings and I'm a happy man. Not for me the pristine white cube or the sombre museum; I like my art venues dirty. I like them damp and dank, with peeling wallpaper and crumbling cornices. I like them abandoned and re-occupied, like the office building in the Kerameikos district of Athens, taken over by Peres Projects and Ibid Gallery during the recent event called ReMap 2.



Even if the art isn't great -- and at ReMap it was pretty impressive -- the kind of art event that gives you a map and a cluster of unfamiliar buildings to explore is already a winner. You feel like an urban adventurer breaking the padlock on some forbidden marvel as you step across the threshold of an apartment or workshop converted, temporarily, into a vitrine for art.



The 2006 Berlin Biennial was a great urban adventure; Maurizio Cattelan and his co-curators repurposed buildings up and down Auguststrasse, using abandoned stables, residential flats, a mobile utility hut and an old Jewish girls' school in which the art had to compete with evocative basins and ripped wallpaper. I remembered those interiors last weekend as I explored shabby squats in my own Berlin neighbourhood, opened for two days as part of an event called 48 Hours Neukolln.



Although the wabi sabi aesthetic may be Japanese, it's harder to find such comfortably shabby environments in Japan. The closest Tokyo ever got was the Shokuryo-building in Saga-cho. This "emotional site" -- a former rice co-operative -- made an evocative home, earlier this decade, for Ishii and Koyama Galleries. It was demolished in 2002. But events like the Biwako Biennial at Omi Hachiman keep the tradition alive, using old cinemas, sake factories and teahouses as temporary art galleries.



There are risks, though. Last year I saw a show called Camp Berlin, housed in an old tram repair shop in the immigrant-filled north Berlin district of Wedding. It was supposed to be a dialogue between artists from Berlin and Hiroshima, but for me it became more like a charisma competition between the art and the atmospheric tram shed that housed it. The building won.