Owen Brouwer

About

Owen Brouwer’s work engages with psychogeography, ornamentation, the city’s urban fabric and local storytelling. He uses jewellery, film, urban intervention, sculpture and photography to both capture, amplify and reimagine urban instances and visual street cultures.

As a founder of Lab of Theatrics (LOT), a multidisciplinary design studio in London, he aims to challenge conventional representations, perceptions and spatial practices of the city and its architecture. LOT’s current output consists of architecturally inspired jewellery collections and short films.

Instagram: @owenbrouwer @laboftheatrics

Whitechapel Chronicles

Whitechapel’s signature shopfronts and it’s impermanent market stalls have introduced a culturally diverse and eclectic ecology of signage, product display and commercial infrastructure which enters into often confrontational dialogues with the historic ornamentation victorian architecture, with the recent layers of urban tagging and street art or even with the coded visual layer of traffic signage and road infrastructure.

This project proposes a system of ornamentation which is no longer ruled by homogenising or convergent motifs, but rather literally derived from hyper-individual local narratives of a place resulting in fully divergent patterns.

Whitechapel Chronicles conceives 5 urban interventions, dedicated to 5 transient conversations with 5 vendors from Whitechapel Market, testifying about their experiences, perspectives and stories.

In order to expand the agency of this practice in other neighbourhoods, the last phase of the project encompasses the construction of a mobile cart. It operates as an “ornamental totem” or “vendor cart” and offers him a more tangible address within the streets and enables better modalities for dialogue and connection with the respective communities he is engaging with.