Turning Together – Day One @ Bidston Observatory
10:00 – 22:00, 15th July 2023
£20 event
Organised by the folks at FACT Liverpool and taking its name from Ursula K. Le Guin’s understanding of the “mother tongue” as a method for communicating, Turning Together was a two-day series of activities, workshops, and performances put on in July [2023]. This was a summer school programme with the aim of generating new forums of discussion and understanding between early-career arts practitioners.
Now, I never go to workshops, nor do I allow myself the prestige of being an arts practitioner. Historically I’m the type of creative that throws things together in bed on a laptop, so my “practice” isn’t generally a social one. But in spite of this, I felt as though this programme had been designed specifically to motivate someone like me to rise from my duvet. I was to attend Day One.
I’d been enticed by the setting. Bidston Observatory Artist Research Centre (BOARC for short) – the venue for the first of Turning Together’s days and no longer a site of astronomical, nor oceanographical study – is a communal and ethereal place sitting atop a hill in North Birkenhead. It contains a rotatable observatory dome, spooky basements, as well as a recording studio from which local radio station, Domes FM, is transmitted. I wanted to visit and can now confirm: you should too.
What was to happen in the Observatory? The agenda of the day included two meals and a musical finale from local experimental “label” House of Saturn. The bulk of the day, however, was occupied by workshops: a listening exercise put to clay modelling from Exodus Crooks; a presentation of artist Rashaad Newsome’s counter-hegemonic works; a language-based poetry workshop from Day Mattar; and a somatic movement session run by Maxine Brown. This was a full twelve hours of creation, socialisation, and culture – ten in the morning ‘til ten at night. There was even an option to sleepover in the Observatory.
It might sound a lot, that. I was a little worried I’d burn out and hide in a corner after a few hours. But I will say here, reader: this was the most “at home” I’ve felt at an arts event perhaps in my lifetime. Grounded in black and queer culture, this day was compassionate and warming, but challenging. I made friends, I enjoyed art, I made art. This was a beautiful antidote to the more widespread and alienating rubbing-of-shoulders during bubbly-filled opening nights. Turning Together was “networking” in its truest and most human sense. Less a scramble up the ladder and more a level and uncompetitive reconnection with your fellow artists.
I acknowledge the privilege I had in being able to attend this – it cost £20, which to be fair is pretty good for 12 hours, two meals and a gig – but I realise not everyone has the capacity for that. So, Arts Council England, if you’re listening, fund more of this please.