RESEARCH DIALOGUE

LIVE EDITIONS includes a behind-the-scenes research strand involving four artists which provides paid, albeit limited, time for the artists and programme director/curator to meet, share thoughts, go on site visits and explore project ideas that require more resourcing and co-presenting partnerships than are viable in the first year of public programming.

These aren’t commissions but opportunities for peer dialogue and exploration – spaces to imagine and consider the shape projects could take, and how and where they might meet audiences – the kind of exchanges that are vital and happen all the time before projects are developed and fully realised but which mostly go both under the radar and unpaid on the freelancer’s side.

I’m delighted to be working in this exploratory and open-ended way with artists Anna Maria Nabirye, Margarita Zafrilla Olayo, and Jean Abreu & Michael Johnson as well as Claudia Kappenberg in summer and autumn 2026.

Claudia and I will be meeting up to figure out how – and if – one of her performance works Slow Races (2014) might be remounted in Eastbourne. Slow Races was first conceived for the Dear Serge programme at the De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill and plays on the local history of motor racing and on the modern obsession with speed, mobility and utility. A collection of performance pieces, Slow Races inverts these values and offers games in which participants engage with slowness and stillness and a kind of enjoyable pointlessness. The work we are exploring involves people using mobility scooters in creating patterns inspired by starlings – a murmuration of scooters – following a leader in one direction and then another. And another and another. With these patterns seen by audiences from above.