Getting involved

So, even the ConDem government are talking about people getting stuck into their local community through Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ idea.  Even if you think it is a cynical attempt to get people to deliver services to save money for local and national government, it’s got to be good that there is a debate about how people contribute to their community. Historically, artists, particularly those working in visual arts (with a few notable exceptions) have been pretty terrible at this, seeming to prefer a self-referential and inward looking approach to showing and making work.  I blame the old style art school approach myself, encouraging obfuscation and teaching odd academic language to art students.  It seems that, if you don’t take an intellectualised and esoteric approach to framing or explaining your work, that somehow it doesn’t have value.  Obviously, we take a very different stance, but then we’ve not let the art school system ruin us, we’re self-taught – and as we’ve been making our living as artists for 20 years now, we must be doing something right.  It’s not ‘dumbing down’ to make work accessible – if anything it’s ‘dumbing up’!

We’ve noted before how the arts community in the ‘Eastside’ area tends to be unrepresentative of the diversity which our city is so proud of in other areas – again with a couple of notable exceptions – and we’re committed to creating opportunities for this to change.  Come to any of our events and you will see that it can be done – we have a fantastic mix of people to our gigs – and this has to continue if the arts is to have any credibility in a city which is the first in Europe to have a white minority.

So we’ve come up with some opportunities for others to get involved in their local community.  On September the 4th we are running ‘Highgate Funday’, in Highgate park next to the Paragon hotel (or the Rowton house, as older members of the community call it).  The funday is intended to be an event where ‘Royston Vasey meets the Bouncy Castle’ – if you get the picture, and we’re working with community groups and individuals in the area to showcase some of their skills alongside artists that live or work in the area.  The idea is to create links between Highgate and their neighbours working in Eastside – at present there may as well be a twenty foot wall between them.  So we’ll be having the usual funday stuff like face painting, food stalls, etc, but there’ll also be some art interventions and displays as well.

This will be followed, over the next couple of weekends, by the ‘Inside Out Festival’, where we’ll be making a series of exhibitions, interventions, film screenings and the like, leading from Highgate into deepest Eastside – bringing Highgate residents across to Eastside and Eastside denizens across to Highgate.  So, if you are an artist who lives or works in the area and you’d like an opportunity to put something back into the community you inhabit, please get in touch and we’ll find a way for you to be included – we have a small budget for this, but all the actual work is being done on a voluntary basis, so we can only offer to cover expenses.  We promise it’ll be fun, and you’ll get that nice, warm glow from doing something unselfish – and who knows, you might get to develop friendships with your neighbours.  Now wouldn’t that be great?

Meanwhile, our exhibition ‘Heard And Not Seen’ continues at BMAG until the 22nd of August – the media hoo-ha has calmed down a bit now, but the exhibition is still attracting plenty of attention.  We had our ‘scarf day’ on Saturday, where dozens of people had their portraits taken ‘playing’ with a headscarf.  We had some great conversations with a whole range of people from as far away as Mexico and Pakistan, and we’ll be adding the results to the ‘Be Seen’ exhibit over the next week or so.  There’s some nice pictures of the launch over at the ‘HANS’ website - check them out.

We’ve just said goodbye to Isaura and Pompilio Mendes, after their visit with us.  While they’ve been here we’ve been taking Isaura around to talk to a number of youth and community groups about her work in the anti-violence movement in Boston, US.  This has included the ‘Mothers in Pain’ group, young people at Aspire4U and an appearance on Magpie Brown’s show on Rhubarb Radio – a great interview which you can ‘listen again’ to here (great music, too).  Isaura takes a cloth everywhere with her, which has badges pinned to it with the faces of young people murdered in her community on. When we took her to a young people’s group at St Martin’s community centre and she placed it on the table, the whole place went quiet, you could have heard a pin drop – and she hadn’t even explained what it was – the young people just knew.  Really powerful stuff from a really lovely lady, it’s been a pleasure and an honour to host her and we wish her all the best in her continued work.

Peace and Inity to all