Grant McDONAGH Obituary

I´m very saddened to hear of Grant´s passing.

Grant McDonagh.
Creativity is not a company. It´s human output, Huizinga´s homo ludens unconstrained by famine or persecution. Grant searched for a new architecture to satisfy his political needs and found a succession of practice rooms, underground stages, microcosms of sectors imagined by Nieuwenhuys in Deriville. Drift Cities, New Babylons. Eutopias. In a Wakefield Street warehouse, Six Impossible Things was just one Grant banding together among many others. He scrawled on a building "Take your desires for reality" and it became the graffiti cry of Aro Valley before gentrification. In his free bookshop in the city I took Sartre and left Dostoievski. In his mountainside house with Maggie near Motueka
he spoke of the Ancient Greeks, their mountains metaphorical and real. He reminded me his philosophy was not strictly Situationist, nor urban. Later, he ran a loosely constrained bookspace in Chancery Lane, Christchurch, before retiring post- stroke to his topos within our city, his and mine and that of so many in this booklet, destroyed in the 2010´s by earthquakes and speculators, as Debord´s Paris was reduced to crumbs in the 70´s. He is writing again, updating his book that no publisher will accept, his personal history of ludic music bands. Although many have given up, he is still imagining places, cities, a planet for homo ludens, a future for them who might follow.

-Thank you Grant, it was an honour to know you -- Bill

Sorry to hear that Grant has passed away. My condolences to the family.