The Sandwich Box, Wooloo project gave us the opportunity to develop our work around the idea of regeneration. This project is of specific interest to us as we used to have studios in the Sunniside area in Sunderland, U.K, but have since been evicted as it is due to be redeveloped into luxury apartments and expensive studio spaces. The Sandwich Box gave us a free mobile space to work in. We feel the lack of affordable studio space due to urban regeneration is a significant problem in the U.K. We came to Berlin to participate in the New Life Berlin Festival it seemed a natural progression to create the BaseNorth International Studio as a space to create new work, make new contacts and encourage international exchange. We will send a postcard documenting the project to both our new and existing contacts in Berlin and in the U.K. We hope to raise awareness of the use and cost of studio space and the impact of regeneration on artists.

Continued documenatation of the project.
The Sandwich Box gave us the opportunity to have a base/studio to meet and start making new work in Berlin. If we had attempted to do this in the UK it is likely that we would have been asked to move on. However by creating the BaseNorth International Studio in Berlin it has helped make a statement about the lack of studio spaces in the UK. The work also questions how effective a traditional studio is when making site related work. After much discussion we decided that using photography to document the work was the best option for our project as the work was a live intervention, which only existed for a short time. We feel that photographic documentation can be under valued in comparison to the medium of video. To make a video about it would be a different project all together and would not convey the message as well as text on the back of a postcard.

In July 2007 BaseNorth took up a studio residency with Rednile projects in the Sunniside area of Sunderland, which lasted till mid October. During this time we worked on the idea of regeneration in direct response to the area. In December we were invited to take part in ‘On Screen In Street’ an event happening in the Sunniside Gardens, Norfolk Street. As a response to this we created a video called ‘Sexing up the Whiteboard’. This video is a BaseNorth collective work about regeneration and particular developments in Sunniside.