Author Archives: Iain

A trip to Ireland, some recent photos, and mycelial thinking …

Recently we had a sudden and brief eruption of fungal growth resulting a a ragged version of a ‘fairy ring’ in the old graveyard in Clifton – new life from old. I’ve had the no doubt extensive mycelial mesh beneath these strange fruit on my mind since I took this photograph. This image has now become linked in my mind with the fact that I have just returned from three days of animated conversation and warm hospitality in Ireland, during which time I stayed with two artists with whom I’ve been working who are each part of wider mycelial networks of their own. These two were Cathy Fitzgerald (http://www.cathyfitzgerald.ie) who I stayed with at her home in the middle of Hollywood – now officially on the map, as Cathy proudly showed me – and Pauline O’Connell (http://paulineoconnell.com), along with Eamon Colman and their son Ruben in Kilkenny.

I was in Ireland for a number of different but finally linked reasons, the most fundamental of which was my continuing search to find, listen to, and establish links with creative people of all kinds who are open to working for the development of a multi-constituency thinking. A thinking that, following conversations with Antony Lyons, I’ve come to think of as ‘mycelial’ in its approach to building connectivity and the potential for active community. The trip was very productive in that I think there is an understanding of the importance of cultural engagement with rural issues in Ireland that chimes very closely with my own concerns. I sense this as part of a shifting pattern of energies that, like Eamon Colman’s paintings, brings a sense of occasional joy despite the general gloom.

Of course this can be misconstrued – I’m not interested in the rural as something ‘other’ set over against the urban – but because I think our deepening ecological problems are most visible there – sometimes starkly so. These are problems that can only be addressed ecosophically, that’s to say as at once environmental, social and personal, each level of activity shifting in response to the other. Fortunately there seem to be a growing number of people willing and able to sense and respond to the demands of these shifting forces.

Before I went to Ireland I had been working with an international group who are thinking about problems of coastal flooding and all that involves. The project – a series of Between The Tides workshops – was organised by Owain Jones, Antony Lyons and Bettina van Hoven and has enabled me to start to think about possible future work in that area and to open up links with ongoing research that relates to the deep mapping project I was responsible for in Cornwall.

The image below is of Bettina van Hoven and my old friend Simon Read, who has been working tirelessly on environmental issues around coastal erosion and the protection of salt marsh over many years. The photograph was taken down on the levels below Brean Down.

Predictability, security, and creative mutations

It’s often productive to read more than one text at a time because of the unexpected cross-fertilization that result. This has been the case for me with reading the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies’ Think differently, Humanitarian impacts of the economic crisis in Europe – see http://www.ifrc.org/en/news-and-media/features/european-economic-crisis/ – in the middle of working my way through Tom Finkelpearl’s What We Made: Conversations on Art and Social Cooperation (Duke University Press 2013). The particular cross-fertilization I want to pick up on here is between observations made by Daniel Joseph Martinez – a professor of theory, practice, and the mediation of contemporary art at the University of California, Irvine – and the opening statement of the IFRC’s report. This reads:

“Creating a sense of predictability and security has traditionally been attributed to what a society offers to its citizens.

Today, as the economic crisis has planted its roots, millions of Europeans live with insecurity, uncertain about what the future holds.

This is one of the worst psychological states of mind for human beings and we now see a quiet desperation spreading among Europeans, resulting in depression, resignation and loss of hope for their future”.

I know quite enough about living with insecurity – in my case to do with unpredictability around medical responses to my daughter’s longterm illness – not to wish unpredictability and insecurity on anybody at the level of their familial, day-to-day life. However, the assumption that the function of society has traditionally been first and foremost to create a sense of predictability and security for its citizens seems to me a little simplistic to say the least and, at least in my view, needs contextualising. There are, I suggest, some very particular modern and secular assumptions at work that don’t necessarily sit very well with what we know of European history.

It’s in this context that Martinez’s observations seem particularly pertinent.

Asked about changes in his practice in the mid-1990s he refers to the importance of mutation, of being willing to see practice as “unpredictable and uncontrollable”, and of the value of this as a basis for ideas where the emphasis is on creativity in a social context as in “perpetual motion, constant flux” (Finkelpearl 2013: 70). The contrast between this understanding of creative arts practices – and as someone much influenced by Joseph Beuys’ notion of Social Sculpture we can be reasonably certain he would extend this to creativity more generally – and the emphasis, in the IFRC’s report, on predictability and security strikes me as worth exploring. After all, in the context of creative imagination it’s fairly obvious that a degree of uncertainty about what the future holds can be a useful, indeed highly productive, state of mind.

A book that made a very marked impression on me in terms of mapping shifts and clashes in historical mentalités is Emma Wilby’s The Visions of Isobel Gowdie: Magic, Witchcraft and Dark Shamanism in Seventeenth-Century Scotland (Sussex Academic Press, 2010). It illuminates, in extraordinary detail, the point of interaction between two radically different mentalités: on the one hand that of a traditional peasant culture in which vernacular quasi-pagan beliefs co-existed both with residual elements of the Catholic faith and of the new Protestantism and, on the other hand, the new social order predicated on an essentially middle and upper class Calvinism. What is particularly significant about this clash here is that each of these mentalités, which uneasily co-existed for a while, would have understood predictability and security in very distinct ways and have valued them very differently. For example, for the vast majority of the rural poor in Calvinist Seventeenth-Century Scotland one of the very few things they know for certain was that their social status would not improve in this life and that, as born sinners who found themselves within a religious orthodoxy based on predestination, they were almost certainly condemned to the fires of Hell in the next. In terms of predictability, Wilby also makes very clear the almost unbelievable predictability, monotony and restrictions of the ordinary life or a Scottish peasant at that time.

While I have clearly chosen extreme examples, I want to make the point that neither predictability nor security need necessarily be the unalloyed or necessarily obvious ‘good’ that the report assumes them to be. What we take to be predictable – be it eternal damnation or, in the case of the mentalité of possessive individualism, the ‘sustainability of economic growth’ – may be nothing more than a delusory phantom, one on which we become so fixated that we cannot imagine an “otherwise”. Arguably it was precisely because of her creative ability to imagine an “otherwise” through a creative synthesis of vernacular and other traditions and beliefs that Isobel Gowdie was executed. The predictabilities and securities we buy into may, then, also be the means by which we are manipulated by those who hold power in a society.

Which returns us to Martinez’s points about creativity and the unpredictability of mutability.

I don’t want to labour the point here, not least because I really do not in any way wish to imply that predictability and security are not vitally important to human society and wellbeing. My point is simply that unpredictability and insecurity, particularly as these help us see through phantasmagoric worlds such as that created by the current British government (which is actively working against both the spirit and practice of all six of the recommendations of the IFRC’s report), have their place too. Particularly where they act as a spur to a creativity that allows us to imagine the world “otherwise”.

Works in Landscape, Art and Uncertainty exhibition at Southampton City Art Gallery

Installation shot of exhibition on from 7 September 2013 – 5 January 2014
Gallery 8 (photo Christian Shaw)

(Left) Keith Vaughan The Singer (Right) Notes on an anxious landscape: Sidhe, etc. (2013), mixed media on paper

This work takes Keith Vaughan’s The Singer as its point of departure, along with scattered thoughts and visual notes on aspects of vernacular music in general and the post-war folk music revival in particular. The term sidhe (fairy) refers both to the central role of the ‘good neighbours’ in the supernatural Borders ballads central to the British vernacular song tradition and to Vaughan’s otherness as a homosexual.

Notes on an anxious landscape: Women/Place (2013), mixed media on paper (photo Christian Shaw)

This work takes Peter Lanyon’s images of Zennor and other Cornish Towns as its point of departure. It is a musing on the possible interrelationship of two aspects of his work: the extra-marital relationships with various lovers said to be central to his experience of place, and the claim that he largely transformed the English landscape painting tradition by shifting its focus from landscape traditionally understood to place. The image also owes something to my long-standing interest in ‘deep mapping’.

Gregory Maloba at Corsham Court (for Reg Boulton and ‘Rikki’ Richardson) (2013), mixed media on paper (photo Christian Shaw)

Before their marriage my parents-in-law – Reg Boulton and ‘Rikki’ Richardson as they then were – both studied art at Corsham Court (where Lanyon taught part-time). My father-in-law also attended a short painting course with Keith Vaughan, whose work he much admired. This image includes three photographs of Gregory Maloba, a Kenyan student at Corsham and friend of Rikki’s, together with material from a newspaper, as its point of departure. Other elements derive from Maloba’s vast concrete independence monument in Kampala and a map of the Corsham estate. After leaving Corsham, Maloba studied and taught art at Makerere University, where he had an incalculable impact on contemporary East African art.

(Top) Small anxious landscape: all the others? (2013), mixed media on paper (photo Christian Shaw)

(Bottom) Small anxious landscape: Les Girls (2013), mixed media on paper (photo Christian Shaw)

Like the other two ‘Small anxious landscape’ images, Small anxious landscape: all the others? reflects on the social context within which the post-war art world was located at the time my parents-in-law were students. Also to the emphasis on ’social reconstruction’ (of traditional norms as much as of social infrastructure) after a war that, despite everything, many young people clearly found a liberating experience. The sub-title references all those from that period who, unlike Keith Vaughan and Peter Lanyon, were not able to have a career as professional artists, with the various freedoms that licenced.

The photograph used in Small anxious landscape Les Girls was taken by my father-in-law, Reg Boulton, and includes his future wife ‘Rikki” Richardson (on the far right of the image). I was very taken by the different stances and expressions of these four young women that, with aspects of Reg and Rikki’s family history, provided a starting-point for Small anxious landscape: Les Girls. Also in my mind was the very public recent exposure of the sexual abuse over many years of music students by their teachers, a situation that raised questions about Peter Lanyon’s affairs with two of his students, seen by art historians as of the greatest importance to his experience of place.

(Clockwise from top left – photo Christian shaw))

Song / Place / Singer: first and last thoughts (2013) acrylic on paper on board

Night thoughts (after Zennor) (2013), acrylic on board

Song / Place / Singer: Peter Lanyon and Keith Vaughan (2013), acrylic on papers and board

Landscape + Sexual Encounter = Place? (after Peter Lanyon) (2013), acrylic on paper on board

Rural matters – a meditation on sinkholes

These photographs are of two sink holes in County Durham. I’ve been keeping an eye on them and their peers over a number of years. Sink holes appear in the news every so often, usually when a portion of a city in the USA drops into one, often taking houses, vehicles and/or people with it. Their physical presence reminds me very forcibly of the instability of all aspects of the land – and not only of what’s under my feet in places such as these – and so helps me not to take it’s stability granted.

Yesterday I spoke with Margaret Ames, who teaches full time at Aberystwyth University (see http://www.aber.ac.uk/en/tfts/staff/mma/). As usually happens when we meet – sadly all too infrequently – we discussed issues relating to Welsh culture and the rural uplands farming which still just sustains the taskscape in which Margaret lives, and that has been so important to my own work. Most people have internalized an urbanist mentality that either reflects Marx’s observation about ‘the idiocies of rural life’ or tends to think nostalgically of the rural in terms of picturesque landscape and rather static, backward-looking and parochial communities on the margins of contemporary society. Such attitudes are unfortunately dominant and ignore so much – the realities of agribusiness and its negative environmental and social impact, the playing out of tensions around national identity through the politics of the ‘heritage industry’, the increasing distopia of many indigenous working rural communities, the growing crisis of Britain’s smaller farms, and so on. Some of these attitudes are perpetuated by members of rural communities themselves – particular the landowning classes and urban escapees who might be said to be located, rather than working, rurally; but many are simply a reflection of ignorance and media stereotyping.

Margaret’s and my conversation was focused by a number of general issues that it seems worth articulating here. The first relates to what I take to be the most pressing educational issue of our time which, as anyone who reads these notes regularly will know, is the need to facilitate the shift from a disciplinary-based to an ecosophical conception of education; namely one that aims to provide a basis for ecosophical praxis. While the resistance to any such a shift – which requires a radical change in the realpolitik of Higher Education and the professions – is naturally massive, it is none the less a vital part of creating a genuinely sustainable future. Perhaps ironically, and this brings me to my second issue, working rural communities in countries like Wales – which still have a tradition of poetics – are far more likely to offer us initial models of what is necessary for ecosophical praxis to emerge in practice that any number of academic tomes on Guattari.

In Margaret’s home village, as in communities like that on the Isle of Mull, most people must exercise a wide range of different skills and understandings, both in order to earn a living and to sustain any kind of living culture. Community in such places is always fragile, cannot be taken as a given, and requires a good deal of effort by individuals and groups to sustain and constantly recreate it. To survive, let alone to thrive, an uplands farming community requires an engagement in the intermeshing of environmental, social and personal ecologies that, while very far from Guattari’s ecosophy in some respects, in others offers an important lived embodiment of the tensions and connectivities any genuine ecosophical praxis must engage with. While the urban academic theorist can take for granted that her monthly salary enables her to gather her basic physical and cultural sustenance on her way between home and work – whether from a supermarket or a multiplex or arts center – in rural communities these things usually require planning, a thoughtful allocation of resources and, very often, the necessity of social co-operation. In short they require skills that, as the unsustainability of our current consumerist culture starts to bite, will be increasingly necessary to us all.

A third related issue has to do with dwindling fossil fuel resources for long-distant transportation of basic necessities, land use, and the production of food. At present upland farming is increasingly threatened by a combination of factors – many of them related to a blending of economic and social policies that – in the name of a popularist pseudo-democracy – enables Government to believe itself entitled to ignore the needs of ‘marginal’ rural communities. However, as climate change continues to lead to rises in sea level, our whole approach to land use will need to change because there will simply be less and less of it – whether to live on or produce food. (Ironically, it is possible that global warming may allow grain to be grown on a small scale at higher altitudes than at present, as it did in the late Iron Age and Roman period in upland Britain). If, as seems inevitable, the UK will need to become both far more self-sufficient in terms of food production and, with many of its major city at close to sea level, need to relocate very substantive percentages of it population to higher ground, working rural communities in general and upland rural communities in particular, are likely become a contested but vital basis for the creation of a genuinely sustainable society. At present both the dominant social order and our increasingly embattled rural communities – facing such issues as the loss of post-offices, in many places a cornerstone of rural communities – lack the necessary envisioning necessary to catalyze the kind of ecosophical praxis necessary to address these issues. While artists – in the broadest sense – are beginning to undertake just such an envisioning they can only do so much on their own.

And it is at this point that an ecosophical approach to the arts and education as they apply to these issues is urgently needed.

Creating convivial places – towards another politics?

In these increasingly uncertain times I am more and more impressed by the way in which people I meet are managing to continue to make ‘convivial places’ that serve to grow or support forms of community and mutual support – ‘places’ that exist solely through the coming together in good faith of people engaged in creative action. This form of ‘making’ seems to me one basis for what we might call another kind of politics and some of the most valuable creative work we can do. Indeed, if some theorists are to be believed, it perhaps lies at the heart of the creative conversations that we undertake when we engage in the work (verb) of art.

Recently the most obvious example of this kind of work for me has been The Showroom Projects with whom Mel Shearsmith and I (representing PLaCE) worked on the Walking in the City project. (http://www.inthecityseries.co.uk – see my last post and Walking In The City). The three main people involved are Alice Tatton-Brown, Hannah Sullivan and Martha King, who describe themselves as ‘creative practitioners and producers’. Something of the spirit of this enterprise is suggested by the description of Alice Tatton-Brown’s role: “Alice is currently looking after finance and development at TPS, though like Martha and Hannah, she too can also be found cleaning the spaces, emptying bins and filling holes in the walls” (http://www.parlourshowrooms.co.uk/thetea/). Not to mention, at least in Martha’s case, taking on other low-paid work so as to help keep body and soul together). Alice is also soon to perform Ariel – part audio walk, part installation, and part performance – an intimate story told and retold in Exeter Central Library (19-26th October).

It might be argued that what I admire in these three women is simply indicative – a working in the kind of hybrid, ‘in-between’ psychosocial space that is occupied, willingly or unwillingly, undertaken by innumerable artists who have both to subsist and sustain their practice by multi-tasking, creatively and economically. While that may be true, it risks missing the particular outward-looking, enthusiastically engaged and intellectually curious quality of the ‘convivial place’ these three have managed to create at the Parlour Show Rooms. It is this creative conviviality, perhaps more than anything else, that we now need as a society and that Bristol City Council risks disabling when it dispossesses The Showrooms Projects later this year.

Notes towards a deep mapping of Bristol

PLaCE has just engaged with the wonderful Parlour Showrooms on the Walking in the City programme – something very much driven by Mel Shearsmith’s engagement and enthusiasm. As part of the four day event Sue Maude (above) and Sarah Rhys (with myself providing some backup and support) spent some time working on preliminary notes for a deep mapping of Bristol, using the old city and issues of waterways as two key focal points. The public response was wonderful and between us we had a great many interesting conversations with the public. (That Bristol City Council has failed to extend the Showrooms’ tenancy of the building on College Green beyond December shows, in the light of reports like Jocelyn Cunningham’s ‘Knitting Together Arts and Social Change” (RSA), just how unbelievably insular, short-sightened and reductive local government officials can become. I do wonder who made that decision, on what kind of ‘informed’ basis, and how those involved in the council’s arts policy where involved, given the massive level of support for the Showrooms work. That we will never get open answers to those questions tells us a great deal about how cities are run).

For me our mapping process started with a simple reversal – from the usual ‘You are here’ to the question: ‘Are you here”? we have begun to identify some of the historical and contemporary resonances and tensions that help to “make up” Bristol (see my comments re Bristol City Council above).

Are you here?

Perhaps the most enjoyable aspect of this work has been the engagement by members of the public – a mix of young and old, of local people, new arrivals, and tourists. Their responses have ranged from that of a New Zealand archaeologist who lectured me on the inequalities by which the arts “get all the funding”, and then “rip off” archaeology, which is condemned for “just” being about”heritage” through to the woman who wrote the following for our mapping:

More on this as I digest the rich brain and heart food that the last four days have provided, but one of the pleasures has been the way in which working simply and as a team in the context of the Showrooms, which enabled us to appropriate very interesting related material.

More thoughts on ‘transgression’ at 300 meters plus above sea level

This waterfall is just over 300 metres above sea level on the Hopeburn stream that feeds into a large reservoir in Weardale, Co Durham. Walking here you quickly find evidence that the rock in falls over was once seabed.

This hard limestone is close to what is known locally as “Frosterly marble”, columns of which can be found in Durham cathedral.

Obviously I was delighted to find this on one of my “home patches’, with geological transgression on my mind as it is at present.

While we were walking in Co Durham the other morning my wife Natalie asked me how my project work with Antony Lyons was going. We then got into a conversation about language – the term ‘transgression’ in particular and related terms more generally. As our old friend the artist Simon Read often points out, the language around marine transgression is essentially military – we either ‘defend’ coastlines or we ‘retreat’ in the face of coastal erosion or flooding. However, this way of thinking seems increasingly unhelpful in terms of finding more creative approaches to the ecological issues we now face, given that man-made marine transgression is becoming a more and more serious problem in terms of the future.

What we need, I believe, is to start to think transversally, to shift our language use so that it is oriented to an attitude of cooperative adaptation and celebration. This might prepare us to make better use of what, for example, is beginning to emerge in terms of rethinking coastal management in the USA.

A recent article on natural forms of protection against the more extreme forms of storm damage in coastal areas points out that in the USA: “Coastal forests, coral reefs, sand dunes and wetlands are just a few of the natural habitats that protect two-thirds of the US coastline from hazards such as hurricane storm surges”. That is to say, a situation that can be seen as supporting plans to move beyond over-reliance on engineered solutions such as levees or seawalls. The survey to which the article refers to is designed to look at the cost-effectiveness of conservation-based protection such as wetland restoration and dune creation, along with other protective factors such as coral and oyster reefs, wetlands, dunes, seagrass beds and kelp forests (see http://www.nature.com/news/natural-defences-can-sharply-limit-coastal-damage-1.13380). This same shift may already have started in a small way in parts of the UK, where coastlines are managed by organizations such as the National Trust.

Anyway, my conversation with Natalie has got me pondering language and, for example, the link between ‘transgress’ and ‘ingress’ as relevant to our thinking about the geopolitics of climate change and to transgression in a geological sense. One online dictionary gives the following relevant definitions of ‘transgression’, of which the one around which our project is based is the third:

trans·gres·sion (noun) – 1. A violation of a law, command, or duty: “The same transgressions should be visited with equal severity on both man and woman” (Elizabeth Cady Stanton). 2. The exceeding of due bounds or limits. 3. A relative rise in sea level resulting in deposition of marine strata over terrestrial strata.

But it seems to me that the second sense of transgression is also relevant to discussions we’ve been having about climate change, changes in sea level, and the need for adaptation. What Natalie was pointing out to me is that, although the concept of transgression appears to be very much rooted in religious thinking, when seen from a scientific perspective the results of climate change, which are too rapid to allow for adaptation, are also said to ‘transgress’ in so far as they exceed what might be regarded as ‘due bounds or limits’ – but only if we assume a world understood from a gradualist evolutionary perspective. These assumed limits are in reality unrelated to anything ‘natural’ – such as, for example, a tree’s tolerance of the saline content in ground water. They relate only to a particular human perception of what constitutes ‘acceptable’ time-scales and limits, given a particular theory of how nature should behave!

Which brings us to the related term: ‘ingess’.

in·gress (noun) – also in·gres·sion: 1. A going in or entering – 2. Right or permission to enter. 3. A means or place of entering.

At the risk of appearing rather pedantic, it is possible to imagine starting to shift our psychological attitudes to marine transgression by, for example, talking not about either ‘defending’ coastlines or ‘retreating’ in the face of the sea’s threat to coastal erosion or flooding, but instead of accepting that, given what humans have done in terms of creating climate change, the sea will now require ingress – both as a ‘point of entry’ and as something those who have ownership of/authority for coastal management need to ‘permit’ in appropriate areas so as to avoid substantial problems in others. This kind of lateral thinking / speaking may be a small but useful start to thinking otherwise.

Antony tells me that this – about the size of a slightly squashed half football – is possibly the fossil remains of a tabulate coral (or something similar!) This extinct coral almost always formed colonies of individual hexagonal cells defined by a calcite skeleton like a honeycomb. They lived entirely during the Paleozoic period and are characteristic of the shallow waters of the Silurian and Devonian periods. But as transgression occurred during the Devonian tabulate corals became less and less common. They finally became extinct in what is known as the Permian-Triassic extinction event. But even if it’s the fossil of a different coral, the point remains the same.

And here one is now, millions of years and 300 metres plus, sitting embedded in a stone sill in Co. Durham.

Cliff (Clifford) McLucas

I am delighted to discover that there is now a web site devoted to the work of Cliff MacLucas, whose “Ten Things I Know About These Deep Maps” has been a really important source of inspiration for the deep mapping work I’ve been involved in over the last fifteen odd years, along with the work of Mike Pearson.

The new web site, which grows in large part out of work done by Dr Rowan O’Neil, a Lecturer in the Department of Theatre, Film and Television, at Aberystwyth University, can be found at: http://www.cliffordmclucas.info For those who are interested in hearing the man himself there is also the video at: http://metamedia.stanford.edu/~mshanks/threelandscapes/Map-on-a-wall-video.html

Hanging an exhibition at Southampton City Art Gallery

A photograph by Judy Tucker of Deb Gardner and myself working on the hang of our four person show. More on this soon.

Walking in the City

Mel Shearsmith and I have been working with the Parlour Show Rooms in Bristol on a four day event focusing on walking and talking, which will also involve the initial stages of what I hope will become a Bristol deep mapping project. We are very sure it will be more interesting the the annual influx of fibreglass animals that Bristol seems to go in for now (see above).

Here is some information about the event.

A FOUR DAY WALKING EVENT EXPLORING BRISTOL

Walking in the City is a unique four-day event exploring Bristol through artist led walks, talks, discussions and an evolving exhibition, curated by The Showroom Projects and PLaCE research centre. The four day event takes place over 12-15th September and explores how walking and talking can change our experience of the city.

Walking In The City is an international gathering of walking artists, enthusiasts and academics at The Parlour Showrooms, in Bristol. This micro walking festival offers an extraordinary programme of performance, talks and an evolving exhibition. Over the four days audiences are invited to create time/space for imaginative wanderings, meditative practice and serious play.

Artists; Phil Smith, Simone Kenyon and Simon Whitehead invite you to join them on walks around the city to re-imagine the every day, explore ideas of the collective, and question what it means to playfully engage with and see the city anew. All events welcome visitors to Bristol, as well as those who think they know this city like the back of their hand.

The event is centered in and around The Parlour Showrooms, which will act as the cafe hub for the duration of the four days whilst also providing the forum for artists Sarah Rhys and Sue Maude to begin a process of ‘deep-mapping’ Bristol. Through this process they will explore the ancient city boundaries, investigate the hidden city waterways, and invite visitors to contribute to an evolving exhibition on the walls of The Parlour Showrooms.

On the first day (Thur 12th) Phil Smith will open Walking in The City with ‘Crabbing in Bristol’; a derive, or ‘drift’. Described by the artist as an: ‘exploratory, destination-less wander through (usually) city streets, detecting and mapping ambiences, walkers’ subjective associations and those emotions and atmospheres ingrained in the urban structure and texture’. Each dérive is unique, and finds its own duration; ‘Crabbing in Bristol’ could last up to 7 hours. After having lived in Bristol for twenty years and now based in Devon Phil is, ‘looking forward to being a stranger here once more’.

The second day (Friday 13th) is devoted entirely to a day long symposium; a sharing of research and discussion in and around walking artistic practices. Entitled: ‘Mapping Borders’ curated and chaired by UOB researcher Cara Davies, the symposium brings together artists and academics from all over the country to discuss practice and research. During the day there will be five panels of speakers including acclaimed academics and artists such as; Stephen Hodge (Wrights and Sites), Misha Myers and Dee Heddon (Stories from the Walking Library).

The third day (Saturday 14th) welcomes internationally renowned artists Simone Kenyon and Simon Whitehead. In the morning Simone leads a walk together in silence to the cities borderlands, whilst in the afternoon she runs a workshop to practically explore embodiment and walking. Simon Whitehead leads a group in search of a place, where together they can howl into the night.

The fourth and final day (Sunday 15th), offers a welcoming and reflective space for brunch and a talk, led by two walking artists/researchers; Jess Allen and Mads Floor Andersen. Here they return to the central question of ‘how can acts of walking and talking affect our experience of the city?’ Following on from this Tim Higgins, Canon at St Stephens church in Bristol, will lead the final walk of the four days, to find the hidden medieval walls of Bristol; hinting that perhaps the ‘stories of the Old City are not locked in time but can be set free to refresh our times’.

Walking In The City is the third event of the In The City Series, a performance programme held in two empty shops on College Green in the centre of Bristol, curated by The Showroom Projects.

The vision behind In The City Series is to hold an open space in the centre of Bristol to consider the questions: what does our city centre mean to us? What is the future of our high street? How do the borders of our city relate to the centre? The series aims to engage new audiences as well as provide access to artistic excellence.

Mel Shearsmith, PLaCE curator said:

‘WALKING IN THE CITY is part of PLaCE’s larger ongoing project to build links with organisations like The Showroom Projects and between people engaged with the ecologies of place, the arts, and relevant academic work. PLaCE – as part of the recently reconfigured PLaCE International (UK) – is pleased to be co-curating Walking in the City as part of its continuing commitment to facilitating interaction between the performing and visual arts, to engage new audiences and to explore place through diverse walking practices in the South West and beyond’.

Canon Tim Higgins said:

My experience is that telling stories can enchant me and open my imagination. But stepping out and walking inside the space, that is the deep gift of the city; story has the power to change my world view. How I view the world nurtures the seeds of my energy for change. I think what is amazing is we can really get inside that transforming space.

Iain Biggs

educator / artist / researcher