Please do touch the art: enter R.I.P. Germain’s underground world in Liverpool

As I step away from Liverpool’s Wood Street, with its assemblage of spinning air vents, fire doors, and passages to the back of unknown premises, and into FACT, I wasn’t prepared for something so uncanny. The ground floor gallery is home to a simulacra, where under a hazy sodium streetlamp glow, artist R.I.P. Germain has constructed a shady backstreet comprising a bright but anonymous shopfront next door to a closed-down and locked-up nightclub. It's a scene littered with urban detritus and malaise, the pavement continuing around a dark corner, somewhat uninvitingly.

Bright lights beckon me into the open shop. Large screens loop glossy rap videos; as I pass an oversized golden chain hangs around the neck of rapper Meekz as he rides a helicopter past glistening London skyscrapers. Deeper inside, a second door reveals a carpeted room with pleated curtains, a display case of glittering jewellery, and an office desk with an open laptop – it’s showing live security footage of the spaces I just passed through. An open congratulations card is ‘from your new neighbours, X’.

Around the shadowy corner of R.I.P Germain’s dirty street is another open door, this one revealing a creepier interior. Business cards litter the floor and someone has been living here – a sleeping bag, sink, fridge, and microwave are reflected in a mirrored wall. A vertical slit reveals a secret door. I slide it and enter yet another room, beyond which – after working out passcodes to unlock doors – there are further, darker, spaces with religious paraphernalia, curious bags of curiouser items, a flourishing weed plantation, and remnants of lives I didn’t expect to find in FACT.

It's a version of the work R.I.P. Germain showed at the ICA, London, last year, but reconfigured and added to with further test ideas of access, layering of meaning, and architectural space. It’s about 'false frontage, your behaviour and prior knowledge, and biases affecting how you navigate through the spaces', the artist tells me, and the installation does encourage people to touch, explore, pick up, and discover the compounded stories.

'You’re left to your own devices to figure out what you should touch,' the artist says, and laughs when I admit to exploring so deeply I found a stash of condoms hidden within a closed box secreted within the shut mini-fridge. The work is about spaces within spaces within spaces within spaces – the outermost space being the art gallery itself, an institution with its own conventions and behaviours R.I.P. Germain is working to disrupt. Please do touch the art.

But this isn’t solely an exercise in sinister exploration. R.I.P. Germain is interested in the codification and presentation of cultural spaces and how they occupy and appropriate architecture, whether that be legal high-end back-office jewellers, or illegal hash farms, bandos, and traphouses. 'Weed caffs became a fascination,' R.I.P. Germain says, 'because when I frequented them I found a cross section of society – I've spoken to doctors, bankers, students, and even police there, there's a whole smorgasbord of people, which means there must be a hole in society that isn't being catered to within conventional law.'

It’s a project designed to break the conventions of the gallery. Through its dramatic aesthetic experience and tactile engagement with the work, but also with a provocation over who the gallery is for, who is excluded, why they might be, and what codifies the gallery itself.

Back out in Wood Street, every boarded-up window, wedged-open fire door, lamppost sticker, and scribbled graffito now seems to carry new meaning. Yet now, such urban cracks don’t suggest a sinister threat, but more remind of the multiple communities that exist in a city such as Liverpool, and how they engage with the fabric of the city.

R.I.P. Germain’s work encourages a civic empathy and depth of consideration of who our urban neighbours, how we share the environment and what we may all surprisingly have in common once we break down conventional ways of looking.

R.I.P. Germain's 'After GOD, Dudus Comes Next!' is at FACT Liverpool until 13 October 2024

fact.co.uk