Tomorrow Is Our Permanent Address
Convention House, Leeds, UK 2019
Devised and curated by Marion Harrison
Commissioned by East Street Arts
Words – Derek Horton
Photo Credits – Jules Lister
Website Design – Erik Winterburn/Studio Volk
Audio – Baile Beyai and Stuart Mellor
This project aimed to critically, practically and technically test the potential scope of this new space through innovative, idiosyncratic, exploratory and inventive uses and implementation of technology, digital material, image, construction, words, systems, encounter and group learning.
--tomorrow is our permanent address and there they'll scarcely find us (if they do, we'll move away still further): into now— E.E. Cummings – all ignorance toboggans into know. (1944)
Words – How will anyone know what is happening?
Convention House
Convention House is situated in Mabgate, Leeds. Formerly a convent and then used as an accountants for the last 37 years, this Victorian large-scale terraced building has recently been redeveloped into a unique creative space by East Street Arts.
Words – What makes a creative space?
︎ Laura Grace Ford
︎ Alex De Little
︎ Sophie & Kerri
︎ Marion Harrison & Stuart Mellor
︎ Jake Krushell & Alfie Kungu
︎ Marnie Simpson
︎ John Orlek
︎ Ben Dalton
︎ Sable Radio
︎ Village Pop up @ Convention House
Marsh Lane Billboard Project
Programmed by Marion Harrison and Alan Dunn.Words – Public art; art in public spaces, art in the public realm…
︎ Dominic from Luton
︎ Laura Grace Ford
︎ Sophie & Kerri
︎ Jessie Brennan
︎ Tara Colette
︎ Andy Edwards
Laura Grace Ford
The Leeds mapped here is imbued with a sense of truancy and escape. Walking, as a fugitive act, is an engagement with spectrality, it conflates temporalities, makes quantum moves through the terrain.
The idea of the return or haunting is central to this work, and the plasticity of fiction, its capacity to be continually re-made, is a useful metaphor for the city. I draw on my own biography, the psychic sediments of Yorkshire where memory is experienced as tremors in the landscape. The writing is solvent, dissolving temporal distances and boundaries.
The work is as an affective portrait of Leeds in 2019. I drift through Trinity and Victoria Gate to map the emotional contours of a city at a particular moment. The medieval boundaries are traced by delineating the edges of the retail zone, the Business Improvement District. These are sites where repressed and partially erased voices become audible, the soft points and thresholds, the interstitial zones- Merrion Centre, Kirkgate Market, Quarry Hill, York Road, Mabgate.
The idea of mapping a city's psychic infrastructure goes beyond the observations of the individual and moves towards a collective mapping, a socio-geographic reading of the terrain. Fred Moten talks about hapitcality, the feelings you tune into through others. Cedric Robinson said that the dispossessed created solvent objects that could erode attempts to fix the city in a colonial bind.
We articulate these feelings by following the lanes, tracks and burrows that branch away from the designated route, the scrawls in the margins undermining the official text. The work emerges from derelict warehouses of Leylands, the imprint of Quarry Hill flats, the brick fields and fire clay of Burmantofts. These are the sites of becoming, generators of larval subjectivity, places neoliberalism can't assimilate.