No Bounds Festival 2024 – “Entanglement, commons and cultural mycelium”, a Blog by Amy Carter Gordon
Curator and Innovation Manager, Amy Carter Gordon, Culture and Creativity Research Institute, shares the value of collaborating with No Bounds independent festival in Sheffield in order to engage audiences in practice-based cultural research and innovation in non-traditional venues across the city from neighbourhood social enterprises to an artist studio basement.
Entanglement, commons and cultural mycelium
For my curated strand of No Bounds Festival 2024, Entanglement, commons and cultural mycelium, the provocation of our shared narratives of place (both near and far) is an enduring, underpinning inspiration; the ‘landscape as the protagonist of an adventure.’ [1]
This symbiosis between artists, researchers and communities, forged in the intrinsic creativity of South Yorkshire is ignited at the festival at the coalescence of art, music and technology. My programme creates a meandering trail, much of which could be walked, throughout various locations in the city. It seeks to level our communal experience of art; encouraging encounters in culture in unexpected places and spaces.
Entangled, the No Bounds Festival and artist-researchers form part of the cultural mycelium of the city. New collaborations are nested within the fertile conditions of exploration and cross-pollination; an opportunity to make visible the tentacularity [2] of our deeply rooted networks. These dimensional connections, an origami of knowledge exchange [3] in research, community and creativity, span disciplines and flourish in diversity.
Sheffield Hallam practice-based artist-researchers and their collaborators are drawn together to test new ideas through film, installations and performances. There is an evolving and experimental edge to the works, placing audiences at the heart of active research. This partnership generates an energetic dynamism – No Bounds as a platform for new abstraction brought into form, Sheffield Hallam as a nexus and perpetual stream of applied creativity. The installations form exchanges within a network of care that values the intrinsic knowledge of communities and nourishes and expands the creative commons through shared experience.
Storytelling in its broadest sense is our mission. My aim is to engage audience as collaborator [4] and to demonstrate the social, cultural, economic and environmental value of research and innovation in a time of significant global challenge. My team and I poured over maps and walked liminal boundaries weaving a path between neighbourhoods, industry and the heart of the city to find non-traditional spaces in which to host conversations ranging from contemporary art narratives to economic policy.
Seeking solace, reflection and challenge, the locations reveal different facets of our city; surprising, expansive city vistas from Green Estate on the Manor, the scale and might of the G Mill in Sheffield and District African Caribbean Community Association, a meditative chapel space adorned with stars within Sheffield Cathedral.
Within the post-industrial walls of the G Mill, we present a premiere of Storm-Cloud: Thrown into Form by Dr Tom Payne, an immersive reimagining of John Ruskin’s prophetic public lecture Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century. Comprising live performance, spoken text, digital projection and a unique weather soundscape to showcase an atmosphere of environmental dis-ease evocative of the climate crisis.
At Site Gallery, we investigate form and structure with Base Notes and Place Holders by TC McCormack and Tommy Støckel (Copenhagen/Berlin). Extending our mycelium network into Europe through an exploration of sculpture, structure and sound and includes artist and curator talks.
Shining a light on the impact of current political narratives on economic regeneration, Countering Rhetoric, (Dr Austin Houldsworth) at The Art House critically investigates ‘Trickle-down economics’ and ‘Levelling up’ through the proposition of two new interactive alternative wealth redistribution devices that turn rhetoric into reality.
A hyper-local exploration of the imagining-into-being of modern Sheffield from 1950 to the present day, The Park and the Castle (Tim Machin) is a voiced artwork constructed from archival fragments that asks participants to imagine Sheffield and its rebuilding through the testimony of those who were there. This participative activity will be hosted at Green Estate, and contextualised through the expansive views across the industry and neighbourhoods that make up the city.
By extension, we then take a global perspective of place-based research into femicide (Areas of Search, Helen Blejerman) where the voice of the Mexican artist traces territories where bodies of women have been found and centres the religious responses of families when, despite extensive efforts, bodies remain disappeared. This is a profoundly moving film in the Chapel of the Holy Spirit, Sheffield Cathedral.
The agency of nature is demonstrated via data, found objects and images at the confluence of the River Don and the River Sheaf from the basement of Exchange Place with the infamous Sheffield Megatron beneath our feet (Flow State, Aron Spall, Dr Ramon Rodriguez-Amat and Daniel Bacchus). As artistic curator of the The River Don Project it is a privilege to develop a strand of the storytelling around the river, bringing together researchers with project originators, social enterprise, Opus Independents and regional stakeholders to model the future rights of nature.
Extending the discussion on the rights of nature into more-than-human relations, Dr Kaisu Koski and Penny McCarthy investigate the historical stories of Bruin, the bear of the Botanical Gardens and explore human-bear relationships both real and imagined (School of the Eclipse) within the evocative setting of Green Estate.
My hope is that these installations will hold space for uncommon interaction and incidental encounters with art – that they may form new mycelial pathways and tangential connections. Whilst every exhibit is different, they each respond to the festival’s overarching themes of agency and revelation and present a call to action to imagine new ways of thinking, being and co-existing.
You can also read another article about the latest No Bounds news from Amy here.
[1] Lowenhaupt Tsing, A. (2015) The Mushroom at the End of the World. Princeton University Press
[2] Haraway, D. J. (2016) Staying with the Trouble. Duke University Press
[3] The origami of knowledge exchange is a burgeoning area of investigation for me as a curator in partnership with artist Seiko Kinoshita
[4] My own phrase to explore more active methods of public engagement with research and to move from traditional concepts of passive audience into energised participants within shared experiences
Amy Carter Gordon is a curator, producer, cultural engagement and public art specialist with 25 years’ experience in curating exhibitions, installations, dialogues and collaborations for leading UK research-based festivals including Being Human National Festival of the Humanities, ESRC Festival of Social Science and Festival of the Mind, Sheffield. Amy is Innovation Manager for the Culture and Creativity Research Institute at Sheffield Hallam University.
Presenting a special weekend of music, art, technology and dancing in October each year, No Bounds is Sheffield’s “wildly innovative festival” that perfectly welds past and present. Find out more about the festival here.