How did that happen so fast?  Well, never mind, onwards and upwards…

Last weekend Dirty Bristow launched their new ad-free, censorship-free magazine at the Edge and a great time was had by all. ‘Mayor’ John Bounds led the proceedings of the Summer Fete, including ’splat the rat’ , Punch and Judy and all kinds of summer-fete themed fun, with standup and music in the mix, it was a real fun-packed evening – looking forward to the next one!

This Saturday 4th of September, we are organising Highgate Funday in Highgate Park, on the Moseley Road, from 12pm until 4pm.  Come along and join in the fun, there’ll be the usual bouncy castle, face painting funday fun, with a little extra art thrown in, courtesy of ourselves, ‘Eastside’ Projects and Seven Inch Cinema.  Nicky Getgood will be helping us to create the Highgate ‘Memory Bank’ and there’ll be loads to see and do for all the family.  And the weather forecast is looking good – woohoo!!!

Well, we’re ramping up the activity here at  the Edge, as we put together two great events in rapid succession (and extend another).  First up, we’ve extended the run of Heard And Not Seen at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery for a further week, so if you haven’t made it over to gallery 36 yet, you’ve got until next Sunday 29th August to do so.  The following Saturday, the 4th of September we are running Highgate Funday, which is shaping up to be a nice little event.  As well as the usual bouncy-castle type fun and frolics there will be a health zone, a sport zone and, best of all, an art zone.  The ‘art zone’ will include a 7 Inch Cinema tent, a ‘Highgate memories’ area, with contributions by Friction and Nicky Getgood, and Eastside Projects are providing some arts workshops. The Funday will be open from 12pm on Saturday 4th, in the lovely surroundings of Highgate Park on the old Moseley Road.

Shortly afterwards, from the 24th of September we are hosting the ‘Inside Out Festival’ – a ‘mini-festival’ of performance and installation, in and around the Edge.  We kick off on Friday 24th at 9pm with a ‘launch party’ featuring the harmonious wonderousness of the Wilderness of Manitoba, back to the Edge for a return visit, with another great International act during the evening – watch this space for details. This will be followed by a weekend of activity with ‘art trails’ around Digbeth, including transformed 50 bus stops, mysteriously appearing and disappearing installations, performances and interventions, and contributions by a range of artists and artists groups – full programme tba soon.

And finally, this Saturday the 28th from 6pm the Edge is hosting Dirty Bristow’s Summer Fete.  This looks like loads of fun, with lots of activity, music, standup and a fruit and veg show!  Check out the Dirty Bristow site for more details.

Quite a lot, actually.  Heard And Not Seen is still on at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery – check out Gallery 36, just past the Egyptian stuff on the third floor.  It’s been great having it in the gallery, much better than some contemporary art ghetto, the audience is so diverse – and it’s been a great challenge making the show ’school holiday proof’!  We’ve been getting some fantastic comments in the book, though we do have to keep checking it for ‘ call this number for sex’ type messages.  The show runs until August 22nd.

We’re gearing up for this year’s two ‘mini festivals’ – Highgate Fun Day and the Inside Out Festival.  On September 4th we’re running the funday in Highgate Park, in partnership with local residents and community groups, and there’ll be the usual face-painting, balloon twisting, bouncy castle type fun – with a few surprises – please feel free to pray for good weather!

Swiftly followed from the 24th-26th of September by the Inside Out Festival.  The launch night at the Edge on the 24th of September features a return visit by our favourite Canadian four-part harmony, cello and banjo playing funsters, the Wilderness of Manitoba - not to be missed.  This will be coupled with a whole weekend of art, performance, intervention, film screenings and the like, all centred at the Edge, with a whole range of stuff going on in the surrounding streets.  The theme for the festival is ‘Come and have a day off at the Edge’ and is looking at themes of leisure, the inside-out and back to front – and anything else we feel (in)appropriate – watch this space for more details.

If you’d like to get involved in any of these events, please email us at info@frictionarts.com or phone on 01217726160 and we’ll have a chat.  If you are an artist and would like to show some work or get involved in the Inside Out Festival, drop us a line, too, the more, the merrier we say!

Iration in the nation

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

Hi All

We’ve still got our Heard And Not Seen project in Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, until the 22nd August – if you haven’t seen it before, drop in, it’s open 7 days a week.  We’ve been getting a lot of local and national press, newspapers, TV and radio, and it’s been nicely controversial, in light of all the recent hooha around Europe about various ‘burka bans’ in the offing.  It’s clear that the need for the project is greater than ever – so let’s get talking!

Next week we are holding one of our legendary seminars at the Edge, on Thursday at 6pm.  This time we are proud to be hosting Isaura Mendes of the Bobby Mendes Peace Legacy from Boston USA.  The theme for the evening is ‘A Legacy of Peace?’ – asking the question ‘How can we create a future free of violence for our children?’.  Isaura is a tireless campaigner for peace in her community, after losing two of her own sons to the violence within her neighbourhood.  We first met Isaura in 2006, when she visited with her son, Matthew.  We had an amazing time together and they quickly embedded themselves in our community of Balsall Heath, in two weeks they managed to hook up with all kinds of people and made a great impression.  Matthew, particularly had a great experience and felt that the ‘weight of the ghetto’ lifted off his shoulders and that coming over here had helped him to ‘find his voice’.  Tragically he was murdered in a drive-by shooting just three weeks after his return to the States, 11 years after the murder of his brother, Bobby. Despite this second loss, Isaura somehow found the strength to continue with her campaigning, which has had a huge impact, reducing the murders in her community significantly.  But as she says, just one death is too many, so she continues with her work – she is really an inspiration.  There is now a programme in place called ‘Find Your Voice’ in honour of Matthew, including a community library initiated with the huge pile of books he blagged off us before he left.  We urge you to attend this important event and have the chance to meet this amazing (and lovely) woman (she’s a fantastic cook, so we’re going to try to persuade her to cook us up some her amazing Capo Verdean food – bonus!). See you there.

So, next up for Friction is our exhibition ‘Heard And Not Seen’, which is opening at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery on 10th July and runs until the 22nd August.  We’re really proud of this piece of work, made in collaboration with artist Mitra Memarzia, as it seeks to deal with the ‘mysteries’ between people of Islamic faith and people with other belief systems, to create a space for dialogue and does so using the form of an interactive contemporary artwork.

There will be facilitated discussions on Wednesdays and our invigilators will be around to talk to you about the issues raised through the work.  For further information about the project and to join in, please visit the heard and not seen website.  Interestingly, we received some national press coverage for the project last week, when the Daily Express and Daily Telegraph both ran features about the project.  Typically, the articles were a mix of journalistic sensationalism and the usual story of art wasting taxpayers money, but all publicity is good publicity, apparently, and if we are upsetting the right-wing press, then we must be doing something right.  By the way, nobody is asked to wear a bhurka during the exhibition, which we told the press until we were blue in the face, to no avail.  BMAG is open 7 days a week, so we hope you get a chance to drop in and ‘be heard and seen’.

Call For Heritage Consultant

We are seeking a consultant to assist us in the development of our ‘Echoes’ programme of work.  ‘Echoes’ is a hyperlocal programme of work, based around our HQ in Deritend and seeking to document, archive and reflect the many communities inhabiting the area, past and present. A description of the post can be found here.

So, some great news and some not so great news today.  Firstly, last night we held our ‘critical debate’ at the launch of Raycho Stanev’s exhibition The Great Excursion.  We had an amazing debate – and a fantastically diverse audience who entered into a great discussion about issues around race, nationality and ethnicity.  The audience was great , including a delegation from the city’s Youth Parliament – it was really wonderful to see a group so representative of Birmingham at the launch of a contemporary art exhibition.  It did make me think that perhaps some of our fellow ‘eastside’ arts organisations should be doing more to get more than the ‘usual suspects’ through their doors (Punch excepted, of course).

We started with Raycho explaining the issues around the work – the expulsion of almost half a million Bulgarian Turks from the country in 1989, something few of us here in the UK are aware of, it seems.  He talked about the personal aspects to this, that suddenly in his town, houses and shops lay empty and his class at school was reduced by half, this coming at a time when he was growing up had a deep effect on him emotionally, and that this was the important issue in 1989 for him, not the ‘fall of socialism’, which was what we in the West focused on.  We then had some comments from the panel members, Paradox, Paul Murphy and Sandra Hall, before opening up the discussion with the audience – and that was when the fun really started.  There was some fantastic discussion, and the audience joined into the conversation with gusto.  It was clear that there was a consensus that we have come a long way in our multicultural society, particularly here in Birmingham, that here things are better between communities and there is a lot more dialogue going on than perhaps there is elsewhere.  It was felt that there was still a way to go, but that there was dialogue and conversation, but that this needs to be developed and widened out and that young people need to be brought into this conversation.  there was also discussion about the parallels between the ethnic cleansing perpetrated by Britain in Ireland and Wales, the changing of place names and given names by dominant powers in order to absorb, and ultimately get rid of minority groups.  In summing up, I stated that hopefully in a few years time there would be no need for this conversation, that dialogue and connections between groups would be clearer.  My personal belief being that, whilst nationality, ethnicity, religion and culture is important, perhaps we could treat them like hobbies, reduce their importance and focus firstly on our shared humanity.  Most people stayed afterwards, for banitza? and rakia, but mostly for conversation.  This was the best part for me, I wandered around from group to group, and people were in heated discussion about the issues raised by the work and the debate, the noise was incredible, but gave me a real warm feeling, stimulating dialogue is what we want from our work, and it was great to see the work being so effective in doing just that.  We followed this with a visit to Paul Murphy’s Songwriter’s Cafe in his wonderful garden – 9 members of the Destroyers crammed onto a tiny stage in his treehouse – absolutely heartwarmingly wonderful.  I introduced Paul in the debate as a ‘treasure of the city’ – and I meant every word.  thanks to Paul, for being Paul and to the rest of the panel, Raycho and the audience for creating a wonderful event together.

And now to the dip on that rollercoaster.  Sometime between 11 last night and this morning, the Edge was broken into.  Only a few things were taken, luckily, but they included the laptop on which we were displaying Raycho’s work, and Zara’s own camera.  There was also damage to the space, which we are in the process of clearing up.  This means that the exhibition will be closed on Friday 4th, but we will re-open on Saturday 5th at 1pm.  Apologies for any inconvenience to visitors, but this is one of those ‘beyond our control’ situations, and not a little annoying for all of us.  Thankfully we are insured, so no permanent harm done – like a pheonix, we will rise from the ashes stronger, and more determined to help create a world in which this kind of stuff doesn’t ever happen. Peace and love to the burglar, hope the karmic burden was worth it!

Thursday 3rd of June sees the launch of ‘The Great Excursion’ by Bulgarian artist, Raycho Stanev.  From 6pm we’re hosting a critical debate looking at issues of race, nationality and, ultimately, DNA – we’ve got a great panel of people for the talk, so hopefully it should get nice and ‘heated’.  After the debate we’ll be tucking into some scrummy Bulgarian food, and for the more adventurous, sampling some lovely rakia (Bulgarian ‘whiskey’ – but perhaps the translation should be ‘rocket fuel’?) and maybe getting down to some Bulgarian tunes.

The exhibition continues, Tuesday to Saturday, until the 19th, from 1pm until 7pm (so you can pop in after work).  It is a very moving, interactive installation which looks at a period in 1989 when almost half a million Bulgarian Turks were expelled to Turkey, in what the Bulgarian government termed ‘an excursion’.  Unlike most excursions, however, the people going on the ‘day trip’ were not to return.  In tough times like these we face now, with right wing politics rearing its ugly head, this is a timely and relevant piece of work about a shameful chapter in recent European history.

See you at the Edge…

So last Thursday, while the rest of the country was coming to terms with the potential change in government, here at the Edge we were an experiencing an incredible night of sonic wonderfullnessness.  The Edge was decked out with a number of sonic toys, the phone box contained five new telephones with a range of mood-altering music and sounds, Stan brought his watchamacallit – a mike with headphones and an effects bank so you could make your own voice make the most amazing range of sounds – and we stocked up on cupcakes and cider.

First up during the evening were Bet 4 Motion – a ten-strong performance art group containing sax players, trombones, ‘creative drumming’, three visual artists, a dancer and a guy making an incredible range of sounds with his mouth and voice box, all responding to each other and the audience to make a piece of ’synaesthesic’ art.  Frankly, it was pretty challenging for the audience, at worst, the ‘music’ being made was like some of the maddest ’70s free jazz you’ve ever heard, but sometimes the whole cacophony would take you over and you’d find your mind going to all kinds of interesting places while the performance went off around you.

In complete contrast from the head-exploding Bet4 experience, our second act for the evening brought a very different atmosphere to the Edge.  The Wilderness of Manitoba treated us to a beautiful set of Canadian folk songs, sung with wonderful four-part harmonies and accompanied by banjo, guitar, cello and Tibetan singing bowls.  Check out their Myspace site for a sample of their really beautiful music.  In the middle of their set they stopped to announce that they will be playing the End of the Road Festival in September, and they would like to make a return visit to the Edge at that time, as it was their most favourite venue on their UK tour.  Of course we said, ‘I bet you say that to all the venues’ – the lead singer turned to me, looked me very hard in the eyes and said ‘No, we don’t’.  so we’re starting to get a bit of a pattern here – the atmosphere at the Edge is unique, intimate, fun and you’re never sure what you might find – exactly the kind of place we always wanted.

We’re off to the Goat Milk Festival in Bulgaria for the next couple of weeks, so next up, here at the Edge, we’re hooking up with the BASS Festival and are hosting Bulgarian artist Raycho Stanev’s ‘Great Excursion’ installation.  An interactive artwork documenting the effect  of the enforced expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Bulgarian Turks in 1989.  This is particularly relevant with the BNP’s manifesto ‘offer’ of a £50ooo ’sweetener’ to repatriate ‘non-white’ British people back to their ‘homelands’. This is pretty much what happened in ‘89 (without the 50 grand), and we are holding a ‘critical debate’ on the launch night (June 3rd from 6-9pm) examining issues around DNA, race, ethnicity and mobility – Raycho will be there and we’re lining up a really interesting panel – watch this space for news.

see you at the Edge

So, it’s an important day next Thursday and we urge all our friends to get out and place their X where it will do the most good.  Once you’ve done your civic duty, why not come down to the Edge and seek Sonic Asylum?

Asylum as in Sanctuary.  Headlining will be Canadian band The Wilderness of Manitoba, on their first UK tour.  They make ‘beautiful, stripped-down folk’ and will be playing an acoustic set, ably ’supported’ by Derby performance art group Bet4.  There’ll be a set by Dr Soesmix, designed to heal while getting your toe-tapping, some interactive sonic toys to play with and hot chocolate , home-made cupcakes and nibbles to enjoy while you chillax on the sofa.  this won’t be like a normal gig, it’ll be a Sonic Asylum.  Join us, and take a break from the outside world for a few hours.

See you at the Edge