It’s been quite a start to 2024. In the second week of the month I was involved in an amazing week of R&D with Common Wealth in Cardiff (more to follow), then immediately got side-swiped by illness that mutated into bronchitis and laid me low for the rest of the month.
That said, it’s been a strangely productive month as my typing fingers were still working, even if my lungs weren’t, so I’ve managed to move a lot of things along, on paper, that have needed a bit of a shove for a while.
The month started with the announcement from the 309 Punk Project in Pensacola that I’ve been invited to be their July ‘24 artist in residence - the first international resident in their programme that’s been running for the past three years. I’m really excited by this, as they’re an inspiring bunch of people, who I had the pleasure to meet back in 2018 when we were presenting together at a conference in Los Angeles. The 309 is a thing of beauty - an old punk house in the city now transformed into a living archive and project space celebrating the city’s punk scene. To say it’s up my street is something of an understatement. Do check them out. (Needless to say, I’ll be even more excited if the funding application I’ve put in to go and do the residency is successful…)
As mentioned in the first paragraph, I was part of a week-long R&D in early January with an amazing group of people, brought together by Common Wealth, for a National Theatre Wales-funded R&D week, to test the potential for a performance based on under-cover policing, specifically from the point of view of activists and groups who were infiltrated.
It’s a fascinating subject. The two main advisors we had with us for the week were the two hosts of the Spycops.Info podcast (I’ll not name them - not because they’re in-hiding or anything, but out of respect for the fact that their lives were turned upside down by undercover surveillance and the abuse of power that came with that). Their stories are equal-parts fascinating, inspiring, scary, and enraging. And if you’re wondering whether the Police were just doing what needs to be done to keep society safe, the activists successfully sued them and the investigation is ongoing.
The week was spent in the Royal Oak pub in Cardiff (which is an amazing, proper, old, pub on Newport Rd), with them, and a group of musicians, performers, and writers, to begin imagining what this performance might look like. Photographer Jon Poutney dropped in a few times to document things and these are selection of the wonderful pictures he took (all copyright, his).
My role is as the designer of the whole thing, so I was primarily observing, taking pictures, playing with lights and smoke, and things like that. I’ve put a zine together to capture something of the essence of the week and to begin that process of visual translation. You can see it here:
As well as that, I’ve started work on a new project over in Weston-super-Mare with RCKa architects, which is a redevelopment of the old Tropicana Lido - the site for Banksy’s ‘Dismaland’ and, more recently, ‘SEE MONSTER’.
Over the next two years the site is being redeveloped to become a multi-use space, most significantly with the capacity to hold large, open air, gigs. My role on the project is to develop and deliver the artistic outreach programme and to design a major new sculptural element to be incorporated into the redevelopment. With a history of the site including sculptural elements like those in the pics below, there’s plenty to play with. So watch this space…
Last, but by no means least, I’ve been working on a project for a few years now, trying to bring a photographic archive - taken by Pop Artist, Derek Boshier, when he lived in Wales in the 70s - back to Wales. For any of you that saw the show of Derek’s work I curated at Mostyn back in 2019, you’ll have had a taste of the archive - an extraordinary glimpse of Welsh rural life in the 1970s through the lens of one the UKs original Pop Artists. Part of the issue is the geographical distance between us (me in Cardiff, Derek in L.A.) and the fact that these photographs were taken half a century ago, so locating them and any negatives amongst a studio-archive as big as Derek’s is a bit of needle-in-a-haystack situation.
Anyway, this morning I woke up to these photos from my friend, Jonathan Griffin, who has kindly taken up the task of helping to find this stuff…
(Bronchitis aside…) it looks like 2024 is shaping up pretty well.