US Edition If you should happen to find yourself travelling down the Thames by boat this summer – look up! Perched on the roof of the Queen Elizabeth Hall, you will see a strange and entrancing structure. It looks like a boat. And it is a boat – in every respect but seaworthiness.
Poised between the river and the sky, in this summer of relentless rainfall, it recalls both Noah’s Ark and the haunting pictures of boats come catastrophically to rest among the ruins of trees and houses after the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 and last year’s Japanese earthquake and tidal wave.
Modelled on, and named after, Le Roi des Belges, the riverboat in which Joseph Conrad sailed up the Congo river – a journey on which he later based his novel Heart of Darkness – the temporary structure is part sculpture, part holiday home, part writers’ retreat, part sound studio.
Created by architects David Kohn and the Turner prize-shortlisted artist Fiona Banner, the design was the winner of 500 entries in a competition run by Living Architects and Artangel to devise a place in which visitors to London in the Olympic year could stay, reflect, imagine, and think.
Since January, when it was winched into place, Le Roi des Belges has provided a temporary refuge for writers, musicians and the public (online bookings for an overnight stay sold out within minutes of opening).
Each month different artists are invited to spend a few days on the boat. The results of their stay are posted online, recorded as a podcast, streamed live online and recorded in a logbook and an online record of the boat’s virtual journey through the year.
A little more than halfway through its stay on the South Bank, the Roi des Belges has entertained writers such as Jeanette Winterson, Michael Ondaatje and Caryl Phillips, and musicians including the Malian husband-and-wife duo Amadou and Mariam, the German composer Heiner Goebbels and, in August, classical cellist Natalie Clein.
Although it is detached from the world, the boat isn’t an artistic version of the Big Brother House. Residents can take their phones and laptops, and there is an octagonal library (another Conradian reference) with London-related books, including Michael Bond’s A Bear Called Paddington, Martin Amis’s London Fields, and Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson.
Apart from adding to the gaiety of the London skyline, the test of an installation such as the Roi des Belges is the quality of the work that emerges from it. Halfway through its stay on the Southbank, the signs are encouraging.
Although there are no rules, you’d think that the pressure to produce a worthwhile artwork in the space of a few days might be the royal road to writers’ (or composers’) block. In fact, the opposite seems to be the case. A terrific Conrad-inspired essay by the initial resident, Juan Gabriel Vasquez (his first composition in English), set a high standard, which has remained consistent in the following months. (Judge for yourselves at aroomforlondon.co.uk).
The question now is, what is to become of the Roi des Belges when the Olympic year ends? It is solidly built, and could last for many more years. There are rumours that the Southbank has become attached to it.
The instinct of its creators is that it should move on. Banner would like it to follow the route of Conrad’s original craft by visiting the Congo. But if the logistics are too complicated, perhaps it might find a berth on the lower reaches of the Thames, “one of the dark places of the earth”, where Conrad’s Charles Marlow unfolds his story while waiting for the rising tide.