Space Search Engine was set up as a company operating in East London for the period of 12 months. During its running time it had several tasks which always involved the vacant spaces and derelict buildings of East London as its physical siting. This empty vacant city is inserted inside the inhabited city that we see in our daily lives.

The Urban Thermometer mapped regularly the territory (an updated inventory every 2 months) with the help of some agents (postmen, roamers and squatters) producing a new cartography of the vacant city. The Urban Thermometer also approached the owners, estate agents or institutions that owned these sites  asking for temporary leases to use them.

 

The Vacant Gaze, in parallel, approached the same sites in a more sensorial way, trying to discover their history, the traces of memory and inhabitation, through a series of highly intiuitive filmings.

As a colophon to the project an event was organised, the 30 minutes museum, which took a group of local citizens for a walk hopping from abandoned site to abandoned site where a dancer would perform a site-specific action.