Forward Back Together

From Information for workshop leader:

The overarching aim of this project was to explore the notion of ‘the gift’ in relation to public art and its commissioning. In the case of Forward, the gift to the citizenry or general public of Birmingham was symbolically and actually rejected. This project prompts a questioning of the value of a ‘gift’ of this kind, not as a measure of generosity, but in its imagining of a ‘public’. Perhaps the destruction of the sculpture produced a more engaged public or set of publics that the one imagined for it? Perhaps the commissioning and decommissioning process also defined a genuinely engaged public, also members of the imagined citizenry, yet who are normally excluded from consideration, or overlooked as a ‘participants.’

A script-development workshop was held at VIVID in which a group of people, who constitute the various publics produced by the sculpture Forward, will participate. The aim of the workshop was for this group to produce a fictionalized dialogue between pieces of public art in the city. The main protagonist, Forward, the Raymond Mason’s sculpture which was razed in 2004, described its life, from the artist’s studio in Paris through to its eventual disposal. It recounted the stages at which human agency contributed to its material transformation, from ideation through to its radical decommission . Along the way, it entered into dialogue with with other sculptures in the city in which they explored a range of issues: their publics, their care, their fate, for instance.

The workshop leader worked with participants, improvising an exchange of “direct speech”, written in the ‘first person’, from the point of view of these sculptures. The workshop provided participants with the opportunity to imagine a point-of-view, other than their own, from which to describe their own interactions with Forward (and other public artworks) and to imagine those of others. For example, the a member of the original commissioning panel was coached to speak about the commissioning process, as if they were the sculpture, describing, for example, the rooms, the other people, the documents, the outcomes of that process and the consequences for the life of the sculpture; participants will lent their own ‘I’ to the sculpture, allowing it to talk on their behalf and allowing them the freedom, even, to provide an imaginative, fictionalized account of their own actions; (especially where confidentiality issues might arise); they also contributed to describing other peoples’ engagement with the sculpture, for example its fabricators, or the children who climbed on the work.