2020: Provocations in Green Spaces
Green spaces in Britain are well-represented in traditional art as the subject matter (landscapes) or site (sculpture). Festivals use our green spaces to bring people together to celebrate music, dance, comedy, film, sculpture, light, and food collectively. Until 2020.
Stoke on Trent’s green spaces are more closely related to industry than art: council parks built on slag heaps, overgrown and overlooked brownfield sites, agricultural land working hard between settlements on the outer edges of the city. Urban Wilderness have long used these spaces as sites of collaborate imagination, of modelling alternative futures, and of empowering communities through co-creative placemaking. Until 2020.
2020 amplified the questions that we are asking. What happens to these green spaces if you put additional value on them? If you bring them into focus and use, if you occupy with bodies and interrogate their possibilities? Our movements were regulated in a way that was unfamiliar, and our habitual actions changed overnight. We were encouraged as individuals to use our local green spaces for solitary daily exercise. What happened?
‘Wastelands’ worked with five artists, organisations and collectives from Stoke on Trent who all interrogated their pre-occupations with their changed relationship with local green spaces.
With thanks to emergency funding from Arts Council England.
Find out more about Urban Wilderness at urbanwildernesscic.com