Earlier this summer, we filled a room at Metal with cardboard, glue, paint, knives, cutting mats and a deliberately loose instruction…
Make a bit of Liverpool.
People got stuck in almost immediately. By the end of the session, the tables were covered with buildings ranging from familiar landmarks and local institutions to alternate versions of the city that definitely aren’t getting through planning permission.
There was a cardboard Roscoe Head, the Chinese Arch, the Museum of Liverpool and Liverpool’s Catholic cathedral, alongside houses, shops and buildings imagined from scratch.
Some people took the idea of an alternate Liverpool further. One building imagined a more environmentally sustainable future, complete with its own heat pump and other green additions. At the other end of the spectrum was the Amazon Arena, a dystopian replacement for the waterfront arena which felt particularly appropriate given how much of the raw building material had arrived in the form of Amazon delivery boxes.
Lots of Liverpools
Part of the idea behind Cardboard Liverpool was that there wasn’t supposed to be one correct model of the city.
People could recreate somewhere they knew, change something they didn’t like, invent a future version of Liverpool, build something completely imaginary, or just see what happened once they started cutting up cardboard.
As the session went on, we also mentioned about some of the stranger versions of Liverpool we’ve been developing through PVTV.
One of those is the world of The Visionaries, our sci-fi project in which NASA has relocated to Liverpool and three absurdly wealthy Scousers enter into a galactic pissing contest to see who can reach Mars first, with fairly catastrophic consequences for everybody still living underneath their rockets.
That gave us another way to think about the cardboard city: not just as miniature versions of places that already exist, but as different possible Liverpools.
From a making session to Zine Station
We weren’t originally building Cardboard Liverpool as a finished exhibition piece. It started as a one-off collaborative experiment at Metal and, as more people added their own buildings, gradually became a strange shared version of the city.
Now Liverpool Community Print Station and Prints n Tha have invited us to bring Cardboard Liverpool to Zine Station on Saturday 19 September.
We’ll be bringing the buildings together into a more complete display, with a river, sky, clouds and other bits of landscape to give the city somewhere to live. We’re also hoping to include some short pieces of writing from the people who made the buildings, so visitors can find out a little more about the ideas behind them.
This time we’ll be displaying Cardboard Liverpool rather than running another building session. There will already be plenty happening at Zine Station, including zine and print stalls, performances, DJs, collage activity, food and more.
See Cardboard Liverpool at Zine Station →
Saturday 19 September, 12pm–6pm at Metal. Free.
The city isn’t finished
Zine Station isn’t intended to be the end of Cardboard Liverpool.
We’re planning more sessions where people can make their own versions of the city and add to what already exists.
Further down the line, we’re also interested in what happens when the cardboard city crosses into digital space. The plan is to digitise buildings using techniques such as photogrammetry and bring them into a larger 3D Liverpool, combining things people have physically made with Blender, Unreal Engine and other digital tools.
So Cardboard Liverpool can keep changing: part model city, part collective artwork, part experiment, and potentially a city that exists in physical and digital forms at the same time.
For now, though, we’re looking forward to seeing all these different Liverpools together at Zine Station.
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