Afra Rebuscini

Afra is an architect and independent art curator based in Saigon, Vietnam. In 2021, she co-founded Officine Gặp as a way to experiment with alternative approaches to city-making and the use of urban spaces.

Her research and practice interests lie at the intersection of art, architecture, design, urban studies, and curating. Key research interests include the use of neglected urban spaces in contemporary cities, the politics of the city and how culture and art can shape public life.

In her work as a curator, she focuses on how city-makers and art practitioners can collaborate to improve the cultural and social life of cities as well as the exploration of community planning. At the core of her current curatorial practice and research lies the exploration of the curatorial beyond the gallery space and the investigation of new models of artistic interventions in the public realm. 

Every Second In Between 

A Public Art Commission by artist Kyung Hwa Shon

Every Second In Between is the first large scale public art commission for White City Place. Artist Kyung Hwa Shon used drawing, collage and digital manipulation to create a site-specific installation that combines fragments of recognisable local landmarks, urban landscape and street signage.

Sourcing patterns, shapes and colours from the local built environment, Kyung Hwa Shon has created colourful abstract designs, that have been installed as huge vinyl stickers across the façade of a five-storey building and the outdoor seating in White City Place. The artwork continues with a large scale digital animation of the design inside The WestWorks’s lobby.  

As research for Every Second In Between Kyung Hwa Shon spent two months walking around the area documenting her experience using drawing, photography and writing. Kyung Hwa Shon has a nomadic practice, routed in what it means to navigate urban space. She is inspired by the writer Charles Baudelaire’s 19thcentury concept of flânerie (the practice of walking in the city), and Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy book to create the fictional, faceless and genderless character of ‘Stillman’. Much like the concept of flânerie and through ‘Stillman’, Kyung Hwa Shon captures the human experience of walking through cityscapes, occupying urban space and what lies in between personal and communal experience when moving through the city. 

Every Second In Between explores how the rise of privately owned public space increasingly blurs the boundaries between public and private experience by capturing the changing flows of people, traffic and information within the shifting landscape of massive regeneration. The artist demonstrates how people in White City are forming connections within this rapidly evolving urban environment – it is fast becoming a new commuter hub for creative individuals, whereas historically it has been home to people from a variety of backgrounds and cultures. Every Second In Between also questions the balance between individual encounter and mass participation within the daily flow and collective movements of crowds. 

Public Programme

Artist Kyung Hwa Shon in conversation with Dr. Filipa Matos Wunderlich (Lecturer: Urban Design, Bartlett School of Planning, University College of London)

Cities are dynamic and complex systems layered through multiple temporalities, coexisting, overlapping and, disrupting each other.

Rhythms can assume diverse forms and affect bodies, materialities, social interactions, urban and natural cycles, mobilities and, more broadly, the experience of and in the everyday.

Reflecting on cities as space-time complexes and drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s research into everyday life and rhythm analysis, the talk explored how temporalities and, their expression through rhythms, can shape cities, as well as our experience and sense of a place.

Lunch Hour Well-Being Walk guided by Ania Bas

A 45 minutes walk around hidden gems of White City.

The walk brought together both workers and residents in White City and inspired participants to reflect on their own working lives as well as themes surrounding the Every Second in Between public art commission.