Invading Place

I’ve just got back from Lit-Up at the Brewery Arts Centre in Kendal.
The highlight, for me, was the keynote by Helen Marriage of Artichoke. She’s half of the brains and the determination behind the Sultan’s Elephant in London 2006 and has done a whole host of other interesting and brave projects.
She gave a captivating account of the negotiations required to basically shut Central London in order for the Sultan’s Elephant to happen. They weren’t asking the authorities to do anything they hadn’t done before, she said, but whereas roads had been closed for sporting events and royal ceremonies, they had never been closed for a story before. The thought of her sitting in meetings with TFL, the Met Police etc. and telling them this story about an elephant and a little girl, I just find extraordinary.

She talked about her desire to ‘invade spaces’, to use buildings and places in unorthodox ways to create fantastic art that makes people look at the world in a new way. I love this idea of invading space, of using public space as public space – a space to ’surprise, delight and challenge’.
She also had a refreshingly broad idea of place and space: not only in terms of buildings, squares, parks etc. but also shop windows, the sky, and then virtual spaces – the internet, radio programmes, etc. She spoke about a poetry project, I think in Salisbury, where they commissioned 100 poets to create poems about particular places in the city and then put those poems in those places – dragged behind a low flying aircraft, in the butcher’s window, etc. So invading place became not just about shutting streets and walking a spider through Liverpool, but invading the places and spaces of our imagination, our leisure, our minds, in order to create moments of surprise and delight.