I’m at the end of an intense fortnight, where I have moved out of my house and prepared for half of it to be knocked down and rebuilt, at the same time as hitting crunch time of preparing our art project for its first public outing.
‘Murmuration’ is something that my friend Frank and I started working on in late 2019 having got some funding to take it to Nest festival. That obviously got cancelled (although they did cover the money we had already spent by that point), so the project has gone throughout the pandemic without any real motivation or funding to continue.
But Nowhere festival, despite not even running in 2020, offered some art grants for things that would be public in the local community. All we had to do was apply, make the art and then find someone who would let us run it publicly.
Luckily my friend Becky has recently started a performance art open mic night in her flat in Hackney Wick. Some emails and application forms later, we had the money to buy lots of steel and a deadline to meet.
Not everything went exactly to plan, but it got surprisingly close! There were no complete disasters throughout the making process, and the evening itself was dry and wind free. We got it up in time, everything went safely and people loved it!
The only negative was that on the night I was too exhausted and stressed to properly engage with the audience. They kept wanting to talk to me and ask questions, but also I just wanted them to smile, enjoy the art and leave me alone, which I hope they didn’t take personally.
Its next outing I should be more rested and relaxed about the whole thing, and I’ll be better at being front of house.
I collated some of my favourite photos and videos of the night on my instagram.
The building work on my house is another thing that has been waiting since 2019 to properly get started. You wait 3 years for a big project to get started, and then 2 come along at once.
I love my weird Leyton cottage and plan on living in it for the rest of my life, but there’s 160 years of incredibly bodgy British building to try and fix if that’s going to happen.
I have to move out for about 4 months(🤞), and my life needed condensing and packing up into boxes. I had accrued a lot of stuff.
But it’s all done now, and the builders have arrived and its amazing to see something that has been 3 years in organising actually start happening in real life. It has not been fun living in a house where it wasn’t really worth fixing anything, as I knew it would be torn down ‘soon’. Soon just took longer than anticipated.
On Youtube I’ve been enjoying Laura Kampf, Engineering with Rosie and brian david gilbert.
For headphone music I’ve loved Hamzaa - Hard To Love and alt-J - Get Better. For dancing music Northern Bassline finally and completely clicked with me at Balter festival this year. Check out Off Me Nut.
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