Time Rebel Activity Books
Phil and Ben of Juneau Projects are among Dudley’s crew of Time Rebels. They work across a broad range of media including painting, sculpture, animation, performance, music and installation. Much of their work is made in collaboration with other people and focuses on the relationship between society, culture and the natural world. They are interested in how nature is perceived through the lens of technology, folk art and other cultural mediation.
In response to the invitation to explore ways that we might unlock imagination and nurture long-term thinking in Dudley, Phil and Ben played with a few ideas, and decided to begin with a Time Rebel Activity book which will be offered to people who live in, work in and visit Dudley during Do Fest and beyond. Below they share more about responding to the challenge of becoming Time Rebels and growing this idea.
Why do we want to interact creatively with people and locations on Dudley High Street?
Almost all of our work is collaborative and participatory in some way. We are keen to work with people who want to join in with creative projects, but who often feel they don’t have time or the requisite skills or knowledge. Sometimes our participants are already creative; they have their own creative interests and they make things themselves, usually for themselves at home. More often they haven’t done anything creative since school and, although they are nervous about putting themselves out there, they want to try it out. Sometimes they are just passing by and they give it a go. This has applied to workshops and projects we carried out face to face, before the Covid-19 pandemic, but also, we discovered, to online projects we’ve run during lockdown. We’ve found out that the provision of online workshops allows access to people who might not visit a physical space for a number of reasons, but who are still keen to take part in these kind of projects.
For Time Rebels Dudley, we want to work with elements of both approaches — working face to face with people on the high street as well as making opportunities available for people to contribute remotely. We’re keen to help provide a creative experience on the high street and make it a destination that is not only for shopping, but one that helps local people shape that area they live in, express ideas about the uses and appearance of the high street and help form a productive creative hub for the area.
Taking part in creative activities, whether they are small scale drop in workshops where people passing by try out a quick activity, or large scale projects that create something permanent, allow the participants to engage with wider ideas of cohesion in society as well as the hands-on process of making and doing. Giving people in Dudley the opportunity to think about re-shaping the high street into something that can provide them with resources, things to do and a place to focus their creative energy is at the core of the Time Rebels project. We are aiming to create a strand of that project that, alongside the many other stands, helps people get involved in a hands-on way and signposts them to how they can become further involved in re-shaping the high street in a way that benefits them. The series of activities we want to create aims to help those who are curious about getting to grips with materials, trying something out and building towards creative change in the area.
We have spent time trying to deepen our understanding of the Time Rebel process of thinking, doing and making. Many of the ways of working we have been introduced to are very new to us, or are things we hadn’t consciously thought of. In this sense it has been a slow but very rewarding process in terms of thinking about how we work as Juneau Projects, and why we do what we do. We have had to address the barriers, restrictions and assumptions we place on ourselves as artists, which has felt difficult but worthwhile. To this end we have decided to focus our ideas and thoughts towards Do Fest, as a way of galvanising our research/ thinking so far, to create a concrete base from which we can develop and evolve our design questions.
Our initial response will be to produce an activity book for Do Fest — the Dudley High Street festival at the end of July. The activities will examine possible future of the High Street through the lens of creativity and interaction, and pull together the various strands we have been thinking about. The activities will be suitable for all ages and we will aim to encourage families to work together and for adults to take part as well. We will incorporate reciprocal activities into the book eg: People bring back pages that are displayed and added to other pages together to create a larger piece, and/or exchange what they’ve made for a take-away object of some kind. The activities will encourage participants to think about the future uses of the high street and the kind of things they would like to see and do in the area.
We will use Do Fest as a time to actively research some of the questions we are interested in. Example questions include:
- What will music sound like in 30 years? What will you hear on the High Street?
- What does Dudley High Street look like from an insect’s point of view?
- How does Dudley High Street feel from a plant’s perspective?
- What games can be played on Dudley High Street?
We are glad to be picking up momentum and we’re excited to see where our questions take us.
