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Went to Southbank Centre yesterday night to attend a talk with the German artist Klaus Weber. Apart from the talk being a really interesting walk-through his works the aftermath in front of the Southbank Centre made a spectacle on its own.

Klaus Weber’s latest work The Big Giving, which is a fountain of 7 people in different positions with water streaming from different body parts, has been commissioned by the Hayward Gallery and is placed in front the centre. The fountain is made of leftovers from the making of cement and has in that sense a direct link to the public space it’s placed within. The water splashes from throm the figures in a quite fascinating way leaving curious spectators and walkers-by wet.

(Above: Another of Klaus Webers public fountains: Fountain Loma Dr / W 6th St, 2002. It was exhibited for one day in L.A. and had two hired police men to guard it. Down under: LSD Fountain. It’s an antique crystal fountain. It makes an incredible sound when the liqiud (professionally prepared potentized LSD) hits the crystal, hear here. )

Parts of the Southbank Centre has recently been refurbished. Yesterday night the small plazas in front of the River Thames and between the two Waterloo bridges were full of people. The centre has now got modern glass facades and lots of café’s and resteaurants. Happy people enjoyed beers, met for dates and cultural adventures, whereas others were on a promenade along the river. The atmosphere signaled the life in a metropolis, the life one expects to happen, when one looks at an architecture model. In fact, the whole setting made me feel like I was a tiny little figure from a white and fancy carboard model. I behaved as they expected people to do – the dream had come true.

Or maybe the dream was about to crack. Klaus Weber has done another work consisting of cultivating the ’sidewalk’ mushroom (Agaricus bitorquis), which can push its way through asphalt. Undermining every city planners dream of straight lines, asphalt here and nice green plants there, the mushrooms pops up at unpredictable places mastered by the rhizome-like net of roots in the soil. And soon the joy was over, the happy people were all eaten by big mushrooms and the Southbank Centre infiltrated by a hasty growing net of roots.