Saturday begins with two unique festival workshops: the Day of Sound workshop at Greenwich University & Enderby Wharf (starting at Greenwich University at 10:30am, meeting at Cutty Sark Pub at 1pm, and ending at 5pm) and a Walkie-Talkie with Walking Artists Network along with artistic interventions along the Thames Pathway (12-5pm)
InspiralLondon: Day of Sound (with Grant Smith & Ian Thompson): 10.30am-5pm
Looking at sound walking, field recording and live audio streaming, we’ll consider how actively listening to the soundscapes around us can enhance our awareness and understanding of the spaces in which we find ourselves, and how we can share them remotely in real time or as archived recordings.
Then take a soundwalk along the Thames Path to Enderby’s Wharf, currently undergoing major transformation into a cruise ship terminal and the site of Over Time, a multidisciplinary art project curated by artist Anne Robinson in Autumn 2014. Artists from the Over Time project will be revisiting their work along the foreshore at low tide, reflecting on changes that have taken place over two years. We’ll share a picnic lunch have a chance to record in the soundscape while there, and there’ll be a live audio stream from Enderby’s Wharf via Locuscast during our visit. To round off the day, we’ll upload our recordings to permanent archive at Radio Aporee. Booking essential here.
InspiralLondon Meets Over Time: 12 noon-5pm, at low tide
With artistic interventions, invitations, walking art and workshops along the path of segment 12 of InspiralLondon. Come and share the spectacular views along the Thames at North Greenwich and disrupt the dystopian vision of contemporary waterfront living by imagining other cities future/past. In conjunction, the Walking Artists Network will lead a Walkie-Talkie, a workshop for those who use walking in their practice. More information below.
The meeting point for Saturday’s explorations is outside Cutty Sark Pub at Ballast Quay, SE10 9PD.
Walkie-Talkie (with Clare Qualmann & Blake Morris) from 12 noon:
Please join us for a ‘walkie-talkie’, an opportunity to come together and think and talk and walk. However you walk – as an artist, commuter, ecologist, geographer, hiker, historian, urban planner, on wheels, with a walking stick, or just for the pleasure of it – please come along and add your feet and thoughts.
There is no pre-defined content or agenda beyond the goals of connecting with fellow walkers and sharing ideas. The workshop will cover what participants want to discuss, debate or try out on the day. We hope artists and festival participants will bring ideas from the previous days’ talks and events, and from their individual creative practices and disciplines to investigate collaboratively. We will meet at Ballast Quay, on the Thames River Path in Greenwich and will end at the O2 in North Greenwich. There is construction work currently taking place on the route, and we can’t be certain of its accessibility, but navigating/manoeuvring to find ways through and around for everyone will be considered creatively and collectively.
We’ll begin with a short ‘open-space’ workshop to identify a range of themes, points for discussion and areas of common interest, and then take those ideas out for a walk. These might be theoretical, philosophical, practical, experimental and argumentative (or any combination of these). Throughout the afternoon we will regroup to share and document the results.
‘Walkie-Talkies’ are organised by the Walking Artists Network. The first two (held in London in July 2011 and Zutendaal, Belgium in 2012) generated walks and discussions around micro-navigation, slowness, getting lost, dead-ends and unpromising pathways and much more. The meeting point is Ballast Quay, SE10 9PD, opposite the Cutty Sark Pub, starting at noon and ending by 5pm. The nearest station is Cutty Sark on the DLR or Maze Hill on the national rail network: https://goo.gl/maps/HjAyvTyECKD2
Please let us know that you’re coming by booking a free place here.
Alongside the Walkie-Talkie, from noon to just after 4pm, there will be a number of artistic interventions, participatory artworks and artistic responses to search out along the Thames foreshore. All artists and projects times/locations to be updated on this programme or pick up a schedule on the day from an Inspiral Volunteer.
12-3pm – Enderby’s Whaling by Calum F Kerr. Ballast Quay will be haunted by Samuel Enderby’s and Hermann Melville’s, White Sperm Whale, beckoned by spirits of the whalers and the destroyed industrial heritage of the Wharf, challenging where cruise liners are due to depart in the streams of the whaling ships.
12.30pm – Join Charlie Fox outside Cutty Sark Pub to walk along the Thames beach to Enderby Wharf. Inspiral volunteers will direct those not able to walk along the beach to the Thames pathway at Tunnel Avenue.
12.30pm onward – Rachel Gomme will create a durational performance using found materials to map the contingent presence of the foreshore, both present-day tidal shifts and past and potential future shorelines.
1-2pm – Join artist Anne Robinson for Quick Draw/Long Draw. An experiment with perceived time in the landscape: How long is a minute? An hour? A day? Drawing out the moment, Anne Robinson will lead a graphic adventure on the foreshore: inviting participants to explore hand-eye time, mobile drawing and the altered state of the artist/recorder. This play-shop will last for an incalculable number of magical drawn out moments, an infinitesimal amount of clock-time, but if you really want to be bound down, probably about an hour and all essential materials are provided.
1-2.30pm, every 15 minutes (while the tide is low) – Richard Couzins presents a portable single screen video work, exploring how the tangential drift of the Inspiral route changes expectations of walking, talking, presence and place.
2-4pm – counterproductions will unveil and place a number of new AntiSigns to join those that remain on the Thames foreshore from Over Time (autumn 2014).
2-4pm – Sarah Sparkes invites visitors to join her for Eels and Wormholes – Psychic Wanderings, an inter-dimensional journey along the liminal shoreline of the Thames. This participatory performance will use a series of actions, dialogues and immaterial mapping systems to activate mental timelines, dream lines and desire lines, creating a network of paths that invisibly intersects with the fabric of reality.
2.30-4pm – Screening at Enderby Wharf of Over Time (approx. 45 minutes).