Fish Projects » Nimble Fish

re:bourne, redux

Sep 202010

As we head firmly into autumn, it’s one last wave of the handkerchief to our site-responsive summer festival for Sittingbourne, re:bourne. If you go to this Flickr link, we’ve uploaded a small selection of photos that capture the essence of the two-day event. We’ll continue to add more photos as we’ve time to do so.

A re:bourne documentary film is in the editing suite as we write, and of course you’ll see it here first (unless you’re a re:bourne funder, supporter, artist, participant, community contributor, or any other miscellaneous brand of project co-conspirator, in which case you’ll first see the film at a special screening we’re organising for later in the year…details coming soon!)

A bit sprinkly…

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Aug 142010

…but not torrential like re:bourne Day 1 when we wouldn’t have been shocked to see Noah and his ark floating down the high street.

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Re:bourne T-minus 1.5 hours

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Aug 132010

High street shaping up…

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Carpet-blooming

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Aug 132010

One of our favourite local traders actually made this re:bourne-themed display as their way of celebrating the event…brilliant!

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Friends beginning to arrive

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Aug 132010

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T-minus 6 hours

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Aug 132010

…and here’s the high street. Tranquil.

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Come rain or shine…

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Aug 132010

…something exciting will blossom today in sittingbourne! Join us between 2:30 and 5:30 and see for yourself.

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Re:bourne– it’s going to be a great day

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Aug 122010

We think that re:bourne is the future of the community festival in England. It’s fiercely local but open to new ideas from outsiders (like us). It applies creative thinking across a variety of art forms–theatre, visual art, film, music, more–to otherwise ordinary spaces. It takes as its foundation community pride and history, but looks towards the future. It is calibrated for its audience but doesn’t condescend to them.

We know it won’t all work as we’d planned; that is the nature of experimental art and performance work, and perhaps particularly so when working in ‘live’ spaces like a local high street. But we also hope that for every moment that doesn’t go quite as planned there will be others of unexpected pleasure; the impact you can’t predict materially, even while you’re working towards it from day one. Come along. We think you’ll like what you discover.

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The Space in the Middle

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Aug 122010

As respite from the Re:bourne ‘machine’, I have been doing some research into Landscape and Environment Art; think Christo, Dennis Oppenheim and Andy Goldsmith. I stumbled across this;

(Environmental Art)…is a “spatialisation of cultural politics”, a radical rethinking of the intersection between social relations, space and the community. This rethinking can lead to a kind of IN-BETWEEN or THIRD SPACE, a lived space of radical openness and unlimited scope, where all histories and geographies, all times and places, are immanently presented and represented. Edward Soja

My thoughts exactly!

I hope on some level Re:bourne is able to achieve some of these things. At its best it will be a ‘creative disruption’ or ‘interruption’ that enables the community to inhabit a transgressive space between bricks and mortar and day to day life; it will a critique of what is already there , an invitation to change literally and emotionally. At worst, it will simply enrich shoppers experience as they collect their frozen peas from Iceland.

All hands to the cleaning sponges

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Aug 112010

No, Sam isn’t rehearsing for an upcoming Nimble Fish melodrama; it’s merely her exaggerated exhaustion from bleach-cleaning walls in one of our re:bourne event spaces (the shadows are because there’s no power inside the space so we have to jury-rig power and lighting from elsewhere).

If many of these blog entries seem unduly concerned with the nuts and bolts of process and prep–as opposed to declaiming about the artistic product–it’s probably because re:bourne lives or dies on seemingly small things like whether or not a shop that hasn’t had an occupant in at least 5 years can be made decent enough for art to occur there. The time and energy this can take, and the importance of spending both, is only learned through experience.

When it comes to working like this–that is, the renovation/ preparation of non-traditional art and performance spaces in high- traffic areas (not abandoned warehouses and suchlike)–we must surely be industry leaders by now, if such an industry exists. And disinfecting shops is all into the bargain.