Action Space Pavilion

Action Space was a London-based artists collective, primarily active in the 1960’s and 70’s. Action Space aimed to create experimental, open and collaborative community art through education and play: occupying the public realm and reaching out to people who they felt were side-lined by an established and dominant artistic elite. Part of Action Space’s artistic vehicles were large inflatable environments.

Huw Wahl, filmmaker and son of one of Action Space’s founders, set about to create a retrospective Action Space feature film documentary. For that purpose, an inflatable environment in the style of Action Space was to be created. Former Action Space members (some of whom were in their late 80’s) and young architecture students of the University of Westminster would work together on constructing this inflatable environment.

Following a successful previous collaboration, Studio Memo and Architects of Air were invited to create a design, to cover engineering aspects, and to lead the physical construction-process. The latter was done through hosting a seven-day build workshop at the University of Westminster’s School of Engineering in London. Interviews taken and footage filmed during the workshop were used as contents for the Action Space documentary.

The resulting collaboratively-created installation was the inflatable Action Space Pavilion : A mobile venue for performing arts and for showing Huw Wahl’s Action Space documentary.