Description
For the Live Art Development Agency’s DIY programme in 2016, Curious ran a summer workshop called Private Keep Out in Hastings:
Whether at home, secreted behind net curtains or privet hedges or further afield, delineating our territory at the campsite, or beach, the British are renowned for their predilection for privacy. Post Brexit referendum and in a crisis of asylum seekers and immigrants, the notion of who is let in and who is kept out, what belongs to whom and what is ‘private’, has taken on a more ominous register. Through site specific performance and art-making, Private Keep Out explored ways we might more successfully break down boundaries, develop more successful relationships with each other and find ways to operate on more communal levels. Artists were invited to explore the double-sided issues of privacy and trespass through a series of generative workshop activities and site responses and then went on to create a diverse range of performances and installations.
Following that DIY project, using a DIY Progression grant supported by Jerwood Charitable Foundation, Curious have created a new performative publication – The Artist’s Borderpanic Compendium, launched on 25 January 2018. Enabling a rich array of theatrical and artistic scores that can be performed at a moment’s notice, the Artist’s Borderpanic Compendium can be used by artists and non-artists in need of creative succour and survival.
Theatre makers and technicians all know that the one thing you can never mask/masque in a theatre is the EXIT sign. This creative compendium will face that virulent green EXIT sign full on, proffering an array of prêt–à–porter performance scores, performances for the page, artistic instructions for surviving border panic, strategic scripts, sketches, maps and images from an array of UK-based artists living in an emerging UK, a UK on the verge of an EXIT.
DIY Progression is a new initiative to allow artists to develop the work undertaken on their DIYs. This could involve the creation of new performance works, ongoing collaborative research with other artists, or something else entirely. Recipients of the first DIY Progression awards are Curious and Seke Chimutengwende & Alexandrina Hemsley. DIY Progression is supported by Jerwood Charitable Foundation.
Live Art Development Agency, 2018. 129 pages, 21.5 x 14cm, colour photographs throughout.
