A/Owning: The Final Intervention
For the final intervention of A/Owning, artist José García Oliva invites you on a walk across four independent businesses in Peterborough, where archival photographs of former markets, shops and streets will temporarily occupy the spaces beneath their awnings.
Bringing together images from Peterborough Museum’s archive and a selection of pictures shared by shop owners and local people, the intervention looks at awnings as an infrastructure connecting the city’s past and present.
As we move between locations, we’ll explore how Peterborough has been built, transformed and reorganised over time, and what these changes reveal about the relationship between commerce, ownership and public space.
At each location, the collective text on the awnings will become a starting point to revisit how the A/Owning project began and the conversations that shaped it. Looking at the photographs, we’ll discuss what has disappeared, what continues to exist, and whose contributions have been overlooked in the telling of the city’s history.
A/Owning is a new public art commission by José García Oliva, from Metal’s Words in Public Spaces, as part of Peterborough Cultural Alliance’s Place Partnership Programme.
Image credit: Alice Mann
