Mundane Appreciation Week is a 7-day project combining installation, performance, audio and audience participation. Mundane Appreciation sets up a display stand and activity centre in different locations, to explore and celebrate everyday life. Visitors are invited to discuss their everyday methodology with our on-site representatives and take part in a number of activities such as writing to-do lists, transcribing telephone messages, peeling vegetables, changing electrical plugs, folding clothes, organising clutter, and filling in questionnaires.
Mundane Appreciation offers a range of promotional gifts to visitors such as pencils, balloons, badges and always offers a selection of classic biscuits.
If you visit a Mundane Appreciation Week stand, you'll find a comical audio installation in the nearby toilet facility where members of the public are heard speaking about day-to-day life including how they change their bedsheets, go round supermarket, and dry their laundry.
Mundane Appreciation Week 2 was held at The Affordable Art Fair : Autumn Collection, Battersea Park, London, October 2007 as part of The Recent Graduates Exhibtion. As well as offering the same activities as the first Mundane Appreciation Week event, we introduced some new ones. On site, we developed 'The Mundane Appreciation Museum' where items around the gallery space were tagged and submitted to the museum. Our first submissions included a queue rail, bin and wall mounted pencil holder. Another new task proved successful when participants were asked to make a badge from something out of their handbags or pockets including receipts, bus tickets, old wrappers and notes.
As part of our table display provided statistic books containing charts, graphs and transcriptions of the results from our original Mundane Apprecation Week surveys.
During our time at the AAF we developed a spontaneous mini-project called 'The Stationery Box Project'. The admin staff at exhibition felt that we might appreciate an organisational challenge and invited us to sort out a messy box of stationery from their office. Needless to say, they were right and we rose to the challenge with much joy.
