Echoes From The Edge

During the Summer of 2008, Friction Arts will be collaborating with their US partners, Touchable Stories on a unique, living history arts project, attempting to reveal the true voice of Digbeth, Birmingham. Digbeth is a rapidly-changing community, originally an industrial district, now surrounded by new
housing developments and the low-income communities of Highgate and Nechells, it is also the site of the new cultural quarter for the city.

The exhibition will be hosted initially at ‘The Edge’, Friction’s Digbeth headquarters building, and will take the form of a living, oral history-
inspired ‘museum’, designed and built by a team of artists with an international reputation, whilst retaining the real voices of the inhabitants of the area, old and new. The show will consist of a series of linked‘rooms’, each one an installation inspired by and containing the voices of residents and workers from the surrounding area. The installations will include many interactive elements as well as artworks, films and audio to experience.

A series of community ‘networking’ events will run alongside the programme featuring meetings, talks and most importantly ‘pot luck’ dinners where community members and other stakeholders will share food, stories and information.

The first phase of the project will culminate in a six-week long exhibition which will be created by Touchable Stories founder Shannon Flattery, alongside Friction artists Sandra Hall and Lee Griffiths later this year. We've been collaborating with Shannon and Tim for a few years now, which culminated in us spending 9 days together in a cabin in the California woods last Winter, which resulted in 'Echoes from the Edge'. Please check out Touchable Stories website, where you can see and hear some of the incredible work they've been doing in Richmond, California at http://www.touchablestories.org

If you'd like some more details about the project, here is a pdf