Asia Triennial Manchester

The projects are coming thick and fast at the moment; immediately after the re-launch of the Irwell Sculpture Trail, we go into the Manchester Asia Triennial. To coincide, Bury Art Museum presents its second 5 Places manifestation, with guest curator Australian Irene Barberis programming UK based photographer Dinu Li (first picture) alongside Tam Wei Ping (picture 2 and 3).

There is an interesting dialogue between the two artists' presentations: Tam Wei Ping's Pilgrim's Journey series questions whether all the places are the same; and where the boundary, identity and praxis to ascertain location and cultural identity rests. Dinu Li has four works from his series documenting the possessions of Chinese illegal immigrants in Liverpool.

Ron Silliman on the Irwell Sculpture Trail

 Ron Silliman's Bury Text was installed yesterday in the Tram station.

Irwell Sculpture Trail

Who would have thought that my idea for a 33 mile long public art project back in 1993 would be re-launched as a major UK attraction in 2011? 

Back then although there was a computer on my desk it only dealt with finance and purchase ordering. I used some project budget to buy a stand-alone PC which could connect to the new fangled internet - the first person in the Authority to be online - and told everyone I met that the internet was going to be a big thing (this wasn't California). Tomorrow the Irwell Sculpture Trail (IST) launches its new website http://www.irwellsculpturetrail.co.uk/ - there's also a facebook page and a twitter feed through which you can follow more immediate developments. It's a big job gathering all the data to put up online but it should all be there in the next 6 or 8 weeks. In this sense, the re-launch is a little bit of a misnomer, as the commissioning of artists has been and is a continuous process. I've lost count of how many artworks I have commissioned over the years, and that's not counting the ones that have been installed in the Rossendale and Salford parts of the Trail - is it 30 or 40? Today, Ron Silliman's neon text art will be installed in the Bury Transport Exchange. On the evening of 14 October, a new lightwork by Daksha Patel will be projected in Bury town centre. Mark Jalland is working on a new work in Openshaw Park, Jack Wright is completing a piece in Brandlesholme. Really, this is a launch of new technology. The website will offer downloadable interpretation, satellite navigation, QR Code trickery and all sorts of other new fangled things. So like the Trail itself, its website will be a continously evolving resource.

No Time at the moment

I've not blogged for weeks due to the volume of projects I am involved in. As well as preparing to relaunch the Irwell Sculpture Trail, I am pursuing projects in China, Korea and Japan. I'll be in China in September and hope that will throw up opportunities to report here.

arthur+martha have launched their first twitter poem - in collaboration with homeless people in Manchester and Bury. During the course of their map of you project they spoke with many homeless people. These interviews were edited by various writers to produce a long collaborative poem, which appears in tweet form four times a day at
http://twitter.com/#!/tweetfromengels
These 'verses' are snapshots in text of homeless lives, in all their moods - joy, terror, humour, resilience, anger. Famously, Engels wrote about the harshness of 19th Century Manchester; people today who live a comparable existence are the homeless. The writing imagines a dialogue between Engels and the homeless people of Manchester. Interspersed through the poem is found material from Engel's correspondence with Marx, and his classic The Condition of the English Working Class.

The idea of the poem was developed with Candian Steve Giasson - who suggested a kind of anti-epic, inspired by Louis Zukovsky. Geof Huth met several Big Issue vendors, prompting several of the lines. The Mancunian poet copland smith helped to give the poem formal design, inspired by the traditional Welsh poetic form the englyn. Longtime arthur+martha colleague Rebecca Guest helped Philip edit the final piece.

This project is in partnership with the Text Festival, The Big Issue in the North, The Red Door (Bury Housing Concern), Brighter Futures, The Booth Centre, The Lowry, LOVE Creative, the BBC. Poets and writers who've been involved include Steve Giasson, Geof Huth, copland smith, Anna MacGowan. Editors Philip Davenport and Rebecca Guest.

The resulting long poem will be tweeted over the coming weeks and streamed as occasional online video through an LED by LOVE Creative.

Berlin

My disrupted internet access and the forthcoming house move delayed me putting this up. The conference of Festivals covered much of the ground one would expect. There was the usual sharing of recent project ideas and much discussion of destructive cuts to literature funding across the globe, with representatives farthest stretched to Chile in the West and the Ukraine in the East. A lot of  Balkan Festivals too. The Text Festival was the only overtly non-literature festival.

Pleased to see Eduard Escoffet (Barcelona) again.

Berlin again

It’s been a while since I thought about blogging; a mixture of Text Festival exhaustion, illness, holidays, buying a new apartment and kicking off a major new international project (which I will be setting up with a visit to China in September) put it to the back of my mind.

Tomorrow I set off for the Berlin Poetry Festival http://literaturwerkstatt.org/index.php?id=1016  – I was invited to be part of the festival’s ambition to establish collaborative programming and joint projects between various international festivals. I was quite looking forward to this dialogue until today when I received the agenda for the sessions. The second presentation of Saturday is fucking Poetry Parnassus. http://tony-trehy.blogspot.com/2010/11/olympics-and-poetry.html So we are in a sharing environment with an organisation with which you have to keep your copyright close to your chest. I find this hugely annoying and now am not optimistic at all. I guess, as with most conferences, the best links will be established over lunch.

More positively, I am very much looking forward to meeting up again with Steve Miller – an artist for whom I have a lot of time.

Anyway, I hope to blog about the trip during or on my return.