30 Bristol artists will spend the night of Friday 30 November exploring Bristol’s new Enterprise Zone for a one-off event called City Running. Staged at Paintworks on Bath Road, City Running gives artists three hours to explore the Enterprise Zone and make a completely new artwork in response to their explorations.
City Running is the first in a series of commissions engaging people with Bristol Temple Quarter Enterprise Zone through new pop-up cultural and creative experiences designed to surprise, question and delight.
BTQ Commissions is a new collaborative initiative co-ordinated by Watershed with funding from Arts Council England. The lead producing partners are Watershed, Knowle West Media Centre and MAYK.
Bristol Mayor, George Ferguson, said: “Bristol Temple Quarter Enterprise Zone is a unique and exciting opportunity for the city region. Our 25-year ambition is to regenerate the area, create a new, superbly connected entry to Bristol and make it a hub for creative, high-technology and low-carbon companies with 17,000 new jobs, and a rich mix of uses including a new Arena for Bristol.
“This exciting arts project, City Running, is one way of opening up the Enterprise Zone to a wider audience and encouraging them into the Zone with a range of creative commissions that will show the history of the area as well as the future possibilities. We want people to see the potential here, enjoy the extraordinary space and help us develop it into a new quarter in the city.”
The 30 artists taking part in City Running have been selected from an open call to the city’s creative community, and include writers, musicians, performers, visual artists, designers and photographers. Working independently or together, the artists will set off from Paintworks at 9pm to ‘run’ the Enterprise Zone, collecting inspiration and ideas. They will return at 10pm to The Invisible Circus’ Jackdaw Hall on the Paintworks site to spend two hours making new work, which will then be shown to an audience at midnight.
Audiences are encouraged to join the event from 9pm to cheer off the intrepid band of artists as they head off into the Enterprise Zone. From 10pm they can join the artists at Jackdaw Hall to watch this rapid creative process unfold.
Tickets for the event are free and can be reserved at http://cityrunning.eventbrite.com.
The concept for City Running was created by the late artist Greg Daville. It was initially inspired by the international phenomenon of Parkour. In the same way that Parkour or ‘free’ runners use a specific urban environment to improvise movements in response to it, City Running encourages artists from all disciplines to respond to the urban environment and new work in direct relation to their surroundings with absolute spontaneity. The project is now led by artist Rowena Easton and City Running Bristol is produced by MAYK, the producing organisation behind Mayfest, in collaboration with ArtsAgenda.
