Off the Rails presentation at Transforming Spaces

I’ll be writing more about Slackspace’s #Transformingspaces conference but for now here is a video of one of my highlights. Wivenhoe’s own George McKissock and Sue Dawes talking about how in Wivenhoe the station adopters have used art rather than just potted plants to transform the station.

Apparently the station (on the Greater Anglia network) has an annual footfall of around 300,000 and is the third busiest station in the area (‘firstsite’ says George ‘would die for those attendance figures’ ) so the Crab and Winkle gallery and Words down the Line initiative provides plenty of budding eyeballs for up and coming artists and writers. Earlier in the day we’d heard about how the slack network was about bringing people together and #offtherails is certainly doing that. Parents coming to see their childrens work, commuters coming across things that might surprise, engage or just simply bring a smile to your face – huge opportunities for artists seeking an audience.

A useful discussion about the practicalities of the spaces that the station spaces provide results in some enterprising solutions – but its also crying out for artists to respond to the context (decay, damage, fleeting glimpses and all). You get the sense that having got the building blocks in place #offtherails are just at the start of a very exciting journey…

And the success of #offtherails is not going unnoticed. Looks as though other station adopters are going to be taking a lead from Wivenhoe. As George commented the slack movement is not just about shops you know…

(note the film was shot with the Kodak equivalent of the flip cam (for my love affair with flip see here) so the sound quality isn’t always great – especially when the discussion with the audience starts – for which apologies but hopefully this will give you a flavour of the session)