Andrea Gohl. Endell Street

About

For over a year, Swiss artist Andrea Gohl has explored Endell Street in Covent Garden and talked to people about their individual relationship to its buildings, its institutions, and its layered history. Through observation, research, and interviews, a portrait of a place emerges, all around the local context of a church. The fact that the street was named Endell Street in the 1840s, around the same time the church was built, inspired the idea of parallel histories. Taking the Swiss Church, built in 1853, as a geographic departure point, Andrea Gohl went on a journey exploring both a street and a church in transition. The parallel themes and histories serve as material and inspiration for the artist’s present installation and publication. On this less-travelled street in the now touristic Covent Garden is a hostel for the homeless, a community garden, a swimming pool, a 19th century pub, and, of course, the Swiss Church. Place is explored through the surfaces of facades but also through the biographies and observations of those closest to the street. Through different modes of documentation — video and texts — the artist attempts to weave together at times diverging themes of the insular and communal, the local and the transient.