DIY Progression: Artist Borderpanic Compendium (edited by Curious)

Developed from the Live Art Development Agency’s DIY programme, and supported by Jerwood Charitable Foundation

Expression of interest deadline: Friday 30 June 2017, 12noon

Call for submissions

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 the success of that workshop, and with support from DIY Progression – a new ‘follow-on’ fund for DIY artists, supported by Jerwood Charitable Foundation – Curious will now take their work forward into a new collaborative publication, Artist Borderpanic Compendium, for which submissions are requested.

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.

Artist Borderpanic Compendium will present itself as a performative publication – enabling a rich array of theatrical and artistic scores that can be performed at a moment’s notice by artists and non-artists in need of creative succour and survival.

Each contributing artist or company will have a stage/canvas/site of 6 pages (3 double-page spreads). Work that is visual in nature is encouraged, but for written pieces, the maximum word count is 1,800 words.

Selected artists will receive an £80 honorarium and copy of the book.

If you are interested in contributing to this publication – which specifically aims to showcase how a range of established and early-career artists are responding to issues of border panic – please send us an expression of interest including the following information:

• Name of artist or company
• Title of proposed piece
• A short (200-word maximum) description of your idea
• Some sample text (150-200 words) and/or images (1-2)

Please send to: [email protected] by Friday 30 June 2017, 12noon.

Curious aim to curate a collection with an array of stylistic approaches (poetic, instructional, visual, provocative, performative, etc.) on a range of issues (physical, geographical, political, etc.) from artists coming from a wealth of diverse experiences and backgrounds.

Curious aim to contact shortlisted artists to ask for further details within ten days of the submission deadline. The publication will be completed over the summer of 2017, and contributing artists need to be able to provide final copy and images by 20 August.

For questions about the project or your submission, please contact [email protected].

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.