A Fêteful summer!
Since 2024, Absurd Intelligence has worked with the Hard Art network to put on The Fête of Britain, a joyous, riotous invitation to be part of what comes next.
From the four-day takeover of Aviva Studios in Manchester, to a bus-tour of English towns and cities, the feeling of the Fête of Britain, conjured up collectively in the creative soup of the Hard Art space, has always been an invitation to imagine that what comes next, begins with us.
Now, the Fête of Britain is in the midst of its summer tour of great British music festivals. We’ve put on gigs, presented panels and held workshops, exploring British identity and celebrating the people and culture that makes Britain.
At Wireless Festival, Fête of Britain organiser Daze worked with Climate Live to programme selectas and host an exploration of Britishness and music.
At Latitude Festival we posed the question: “What does Britain mean to me?”, exploring ideas of culture and pride in a supposedly fractured Britain. Fashion designer Maddy Hamilton-Mudge, musicians Genevieve Dawson and Izzy (Generation Feral) and Reality TV star Daze Agahji took part in a panel, hosted on the bright pink Climate Live bus.
Genevieve put the essence of it like this:
“It’s not just about picking apart the bad things about the country, but identifying what we want to run towards. My wish for Britain is that we can build a different story about who we are together, that includes all of the different cultures and people and talents and diversity that we have – it’s what makes our music so good, it’s what makes our food so good, and it’s what makes our cities exciting places to be.”
Maddy reflected on what she loves about British culture:
“The snippets within our culture that bring us a sense of unity. For me, it’s the simple joy of the pub, the football, the fact people bring their hot pants out as soon as it’s over 13 degrees outside – it’s finding joy in the small things that bring us together.”
At Wilderness Festival asked: “What are the stories that make Britain for you?”. People who’d travelled from as close as the Welsh borders to as far as Canada shared stories of castles, dragons and Eastenders.
Craftivist Sarah Corbett led a workshop visioning a better Britain. (By the way, neuroscience shows us that by having a vision rather than just fixating on a problem, our brains start finding ways to turn those visions into reality, says Dr Charlotte Rae, neuroscientist at the University of Sussex: “A visioning exercise is designed to engage the creative, conscious, planning system in your brain – the prefrontal cortex – and help you consider how to join the dots and explore routes to a better future.”)
The Fête of Britain will continue its summer tour at Boomtown Fair this weekend, popping up with the Census of Britain, and then at Reading & Leeds, with a panel on British Reality TV culture.
Fête activity will also be popping up at Art Bomb Festival in Doncaster next weekend, 15th - 17th August, an experimental arts festival designed to provoke debate across current environmental, mental health and ecological thinking, in collaboration with the Unitarian Church
The brand new Hey! Festival, a Hard Art Writers initiative, will also be launching at Doncaster, which we’re also proud to have helped get off the ground.
Elsewhere in Absurdity...
We’re not quite all on holiday, but things have certainly slowed down for August. However...:
- Charlie watched The 1951 Festival of Britain - A Brave New World (BBC (thanks to a top tip from Tracey Sage!) an amazing short documentary on the power of arts and culture to bring communities together in the face of hardship (see below or here);
- Alanna was part of the wider crew who helped get brilliant people into the making of What Happened To Counter Culture? which just launched on BBC Radio 4, with Stewart Lee speaking to our friends Brian Eno and Nelly Ben Hayoun-Stépanian, as well as our own Clare Farrell (and a big up to Jo in Brian’s studio for making this happen);
- And Alanna, Maddy, David, Charlie and Sophie were all glued to their laptops for the release of tickets to the Together for Palestine gig in September at Wembley Arena; we cheered as people typed! We gasped as they actually remembered their passwords! We winced when they put in their credit card details! And finally... we cheered when they got the tickets!
