Since graduating we have been living and working together, converting our living room into a shared studio. This has given us the opportunity to collectively deal and converse about the issues of post-university life. Whilst doing so we thought that creating a more formal framework would allow us to address these common concerns in a more productive manner.

We aspired to make a space outside of the university, for conversations about current concerns with our practice, situation and the systems that follow after university- life as a practicing artist. Our main concern was that there was no environment to talk about work, and with people who are interested and engaged in a similar dialogue. We found that private views and exhibitions had become merely a social space where nobody would take the time to talk about the work in front of them, let alone their own practice. We were unhappy with the state of passivity that was now surrounding us and wanted to create a space where criticality and practice could exist.

From these concerns we decided that we needed to create the space and situation to talk about such problems and therefore try and resolve them. By running crits, reading groups and discussions we hoped to house some of these concerns and allow for a critical exchange between practicing artists.

We also found that one of our main drives for making work post university was for deadlines, exhibitions, residencies etc and we were no longer focused on experimentation and the development of our practice but with having finished, concise and chiseled portfolios that we could send off to varying opportunities in the free time we have outside of our payed jobs. With this in mind, we set up 3OWORKS3ODAYS (where artists would sign up and submit a work everyday for the month of April, the project concludes with a publication about the process of the project and notions of artistic production). The main objective for this project was to allow space for experimentation and mistakes; we wanted to cut out the rhetoric of competition by not having a selection process and thus exclude the drive to make the ‘best work’. The only rule was that you had to submit one work each day, in any medium or form, thus putting the responsibility on the artist, not the curator. To develop their own practices, decisions and criteria for what they consider a work, to commit to giving themselves the time each day to dedicate to their work and practice.

Once 30WORKS30DAYS concludes we are aiming to continue to launch projects with similar intentions, in relation to productivity, criticality and practice. These will take various forms from residencies to alternative forms of exhibition and publications. We are also open to collaboration, if anybody would like to get in touch please contact us on info@12ocollective.com.

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So hello, we are SHIFT/, seven of Scotland’s most dynamic, provocative and lyrical spoken word artists (but by no stretch of the imagination, the only ones). Formed by Rachel McCrum and Bram E Geiben, we have joined forces – like some super-powered comic book phalanx – as an artist-led collective to create a platform for poetic performance in the Edinburgh Fringe that works for us.

As well as Rachel and Bram, SHIFT/ is powered by Rachel Amey, Harry Giles, Jenny Lindsay, Ali Maloney and Sam Small. Between us we have a wealth and diverse range of experience. Collectively, we have won slams, shattered boundaries, toured the world, won awards and broken hearts; promoted, wrought and slogged.

As the Scottish poetry scene is running on full, breath taking, power, SHIFT/ exists to take seven unique and exciting shows to Summerhall – crossing bridges between performance poetry and physical theatre, stand-up and live art, spoken word and music, solemn introspection and punk spit – a different show for each night of the week.

Right now, we are writing, devising, crafting our shows, which could touch upon anything including, but not limited to: cyberpunk dystopian opera, political analysis, BSL, love, clowning, messing around in boats, love on drugs, nihilism, optimism, Dadaism, borders and colonialism and Lovecratian tentacle apocalypses.

We’ll be in the Cairns Lecture theatre in Summerhall every night of the Fringe at 9:30. For full line-ups and updates, get SHIFT/ed at www.shiftword.com.

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LATERAL NORTH is a research and design collective based in Glasgow, Scotland run by Graham Hogg and Tom Smith. Here they tell us a bit more about how they got together and the kind of work they do.

LATERAL NORTH looks to investigate Scotland’s new place and identity within an economically emerging northern region; exploring the relationship between people, culture, places, industries and economies.

With a shift in approach and traditional ideology, LATERAL NORTH engages in cross-sectoral, multidisciplinary design and research. This collaboration allows discovery, investigation and testing of previously over-looked opportunities and engage people in long-term, strategic, holistic visioning.

Our integrated design approach involves extended engagement alongside creative professionals and attempts to deliver a competent design resolution for projects ranging from historic site conservation and community trust developments to exhibition and graphic design.

LATERAL NORTH began life at Strathclyde University. Finishing our architectural education we decided that rather than go the traditional route of working for a practice we wanted to try to start up our own practice and build on the work we had undertaken through our fifth year at university – imagining a future Scotland that orientates itself north.

Our first major project was to produce An Atlas of Productivity which followed on from our New Northern Frontiers project at university. We have since produced and sold 500 copies of this and are currently working on a softback copy of the atlas. The atlas gained us a lot of new followers and allowed us to showcase the visioning work that we could do having undertaken well over 50 presentations in the last two years.

It was at this juncture that we began to work alongside communities throughout Scotland with most, at first, being found within rural and remote locations. Our current projects though include a community master plan and visioning exercise with the Stirlingshire community of Fintry, designing a past / present / future publication for Rutherglen and Cambuslang based Bike Town which details future visions for getting everyone cycling, a wayfinding project for Dumfries with the Stove Network and many other similar community orientated projects.

Our practice is constantly looking to work with different individuals, organisations and communities on a series of different projects and challenge what it is that architects do. Our multidisciplinary approach has led us into recent discussions with universities about 3D interfaces and how our work can be viewed in virtual landscapes, designing exhibitions on Scotland’s relationship with the Nordics and finding out about food security and a sustainable food network within Scotland (and its relationship to architecture), for example.

This exploratory approach means that there is no day that is the same – our work constantly changes with our network of collaborators increasing each day. It’s exciting, different and interesting, and useful to us as we continue to learn new skills, techniques and technologies.

One of the most exciting projects that we are currently developing though is our Possible Scotland project which is a collaboration between ourselves, Glasgow based author Sue Reid Sexton and Helmsdale based cultural and heritage centre Timespan. For part of the time we share an office with Dualchas Architects in Glasgow Green (see image above) while the rest of the time is spent working mobile from our Possible Scotland travelling workshop (images below). The project is in its early days and we are intending to travel throughout Scotland over the course of the summer hosting workshops on everything from creative writing to architectural solutions to design opportunities. We are actively seeking organisations and communities to contact us about coming to visit them and host a workshop finding out what possibilities they have in their back garden, street, community, town and country.

We hope to continue undertaking exciting projects throughout Scotland and also further afield as we take a keen interest in developments within the Nordic and (in particular) Arctic region.
Our practice wouldn’t be here though without a plethora of individuals who have supported us through starting up our collective over the last year and a half. In particular though we want to just take this opportunity here to thank Alex Hobday, Catriona Macdonald, David Hasson, Ewan Imrie, Lizzie Smith and Ulrike Enslein who have been a huge support in our start up.

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After graduating we got involved in the summer project Somewhereto_ Re:store which was set up to regenerate unused space within Glasgow city centre by creating a creative pop-up venue. We documented the ongoing of the space for the duration of the pop up (one month). This was our first mural together and where we realised we could possibly take it further and start a collective. The name came about as the newspapers were coming and we had to think of something quick – Mairi and her partner had the name Little Book Transfers kept aside for the day they started a band together, but as it had been a few years and they hadn’t gotten round to it, we thought we had to put the name to good use as it just suited what we wanted to do perfectly! (We are still going to have a band one day!)

We work doing illustrations used to create private commissions, illustrated objects, live art and wall and window murals, ranging from small to large (around 25ft!). Our work is often feminine and is inspired by nature and form. It has a surreal undertone and can often be described as humorous and whimsical. We also work with blocks of colour, which we illustrate on and around.

We work together in our office/studio space smack bang in the centre of Glasgow. We normally come up with small, basic sketches, together or apart and verbalise our ideas to each other whilst using Illustrator for mockups. There isn’t much in-between from initial sketch to finished product as we do a lot of our work on the spot and change things as we go when creating mural work. We work in a spontaneous way, making the process more exciting, where we have loose sketches at hand, but it is all very much freehand! We go with what feels right for the space when we turn up to different sites and locations.

The highlight of our career so far would be last year (as we have only been working as a collective for roughly a year) when we had a 5 month long feature in the Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow in correspondence with Generation: 25 Years of Contemporary Art. We created a 25 year long timeline which consisted of 25 individual illustrations which we free-handed onto the walls of the GoMA balcony. We montaged and illustrated a selection of world history and art events that took place to create humorous yet informative work for each year.

Our first solo show at The Good Spirits Co. on Bath Street will showcase a selection of large illustrated boards and screen prints inspired by exotic botanicals and the female form. The show will run from 12 March until 19 April.

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Not Finished Article (NFA) is a collective of four established women artists based in Scotland: Nicky Bird, Alicia Bruce, Caroline Douglas and Sylwia Kowalczyk. They told us a bit more about how they came together.

As a collective we have distinct, yet complementary practices which together incorporate photography, moving image, the found photograph and the museum collection. Portraiture and community collaboration also play a distinctive role.

We meet regularly in our studios to share work in progress and support one another. The group has been meeting informally for several years including summer trips to the opening week of Rencontres Arles photography festival. We secretly named ourselves PPP for a few years and having informal catch-ups at each others flats to share and discuss work (PPP meant Photography, Pizza and Pinot Grigio). This name changed to Not Finished Article when we started to get exhibition offers as a group including 2014 Frames projections at CCA, GI Festival and Street Level Photoworks.

NFA will discuss their collective practice at TalkSeePhotography’s February event this coming Monday 9 February at CCA, Glasgow. They will also reveal a new collaborative outdoor work at Porty Lightbox, Portobello, Edinburgh as part of ‘Exquisite’ International Women’s Day Exhibition running from Friday 6 March until April 2015.

Exquisite by NFA

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With backgrounds in graphic design, interactive design, and type design we work in collaboration with people and organisations to develop design projects across various media. We view our clients as collaborators and seek opportunities to work with those involved in their own creative pursuits, where we can learn from each other, and extend and complement each other’s domain knowledge with a shared investment in the quality of the work produced.

In times where the conventions of communication are constantly in flux, we are interested in exploring the boundaries of, and relationships between media. Critical thinking, systems thinking, focus on content, and dedication to craft are central. We view digital and analog not as a schism, but as a continuum in which we can speculate on ways of reading, methods of interaction, forms of graphic design, and how these can be manipulated, challenged, reverse engineered, and re-purposed.

We also want to use the collective to work on self-initiated, playful research projects that explore how we shape our media, and how they shape society in return, from post-Gutenberg to post-internet. One example of this is Indygraph, an online barometer that captures Twitter users’ feelings about the Scottish independence referendum that took place in 2014:

From Sunday 31 August until the result was decided, Indygraph tallied 3,970,038 tweets that contained the hashtags #yesScotland, #voteYes, #betterTogether or #noThanks in 30-minute intervals. It correlated them to news stories matching the search terms “independence,” “referendum” and “Scotland” on Google News.

More recently, we have launched Predominant.ly, which simply put, is a web application to discover music by colour. The idea arose partly as an antidote to the ‘spreadsheet looking’ apps like iTunes and Spotify that we use to manage our music, and partly out of curiosity. The interfaces we use to interact with our music make it unlikely that we find something that falls outside of our normal musical tastes, something that lets us broaden our horizons, or expand our musical base.

We like to spend time making projects like Predominant.ly because the oft-recited idea that design is only about “solving problems” sets the bar rather low, requiring a problem as a prerequisite for a designer to make something. We want to design things that can elevate an experience beyond completing a task or solving a problem, to a memorable encounter that has a positive or fulfilling effect, in even the smallest of ways.

Our electronic displays are the portals through which an increasing number of our interactions take place. You use the same glowing rectangle to speak to your mother as you do to submit your taxes, making our experiences less distinct. In the age of the screen, where we risk a tendency to rely on a familiar visual language, design that is specific to its content is becoming increasingly important.

By treating experiences as separate and unique, we can avoid repeatedly applying the same solution, however well it may function. In the case of Predominant.ly, we want to bring an element of serendipity back into the search for music, making the experience as personal and delightful as stumbling across a long-forgotten favourite in a second-hand record store.

Alongside studio work, all four members of Open Work teach. Lizzie and Susana both teach in the Graphic Design department at KABK (Royal Academy of Art) in The Hague, Dan at ArtEZ in Arnhem and Kai at Écal in Lausanne and HfbK in Hamburg.

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2|1|4|1 was founded in May 2013 by Glasgow and Edinburgh based artists Rosie Roberts, Kirsty Macleod and Frances Lightbound. Here they tell us how it all came about.

2012 alumni of Glasgow School of Art and Gray’s School of Art, Rosie wrote the manifesto, approached Fran and then Kirsty and we set out on a quest to find like-minded artists – also in the youth of their careers – to join us in our mission to alter the flow of opportunities and information in the notoriously hazy, nepotistic, post-graduation art world.

We held our first meeting with the original members in May 2013 and started to act together as a collective straight away; writing articles for the website, meeting monthly to discuss our plans and what was going on with the emergent art scene in Scotland. We interviewed, previewed, and reviewed many wonderful artists and exhibitions from Turner Prize nominees to final year students.

Our Manifesto outlined a commitment to bridging the gap between graduation and a sustainable career in the arts. Our values demand transparency and a desire to implement a go-to support system for all fresh graduates and early-career artists.

This support system not only includes free publicity for artists, their events and related happenings but also a curatorial programme. Within this programme we strive for accessibility, a rational approach to application systems and critically engaging exhibitions, whether this be in the form of showcases or more specific projects. We have a great residency/exhibition opportunity coming up next spring, which is a collaboration with The Number Shop – a new space in Edinburgh.

Every year we have a members show and party, our first one was in SWG3 with a mammoth turn out, a great party and a wonderful integrated programme with discussion groups, screenings, and in conversation events. This year it was a little more informal but with an equally engaging integrated programme including lectures, book launches and a super fun raffle. It was held at The Old Hairdressers a couple weeks ago. Our membership is constantly fluctuating with old members moving on and new ones coming in which makes these annual shows a really dynamic example of what the collective stands for – a critical commitment to the making and exhibiting of contemporary visual art.

Right now, one thing is clear to us as a collective: artists, whether they be young, old, established or fresh meat, recognise the important role that they play in a fulfilling society, and that this role can only be exploited or under-valued to the detriment of those who do so.

We always wanted 2|1|4|1 to be a place of free and open discussion, to offer the opportunity of critical writing for people presenting work, without feeling like any hierarchy outside of the strength of the work itself would be recognised. Nepotism, money, grand establishments and age-old thinking can only lock the door of opportunity if we let them, which we don’t plan on doing anytime soon!

Find more information about 2|1|4|1 Collective and read their manifesto on their website.

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A Fine Beginning is a Welsh photography collective, established by James O Jenkins, with the ambition to develop a platform to discover and showcase contemporary photography being made in Wales today. The collective takes its name from the first chapter of Dylan Thomas’s unfinished novel ‘Adventures in the Skin Trade’.

The collective launched with a publication in May 2013 at the publishing weekend of the inaugural Diffusion: Cardiff International Festival of Photography. The issue showcased the work of four of our current members; Gawain Barnard, Jack Latham, Abbie Trayler-Smith and James O Jenkins. In foregrounding photography in Wales, the festival provided an opportune moment to launch the first instalment of A Fine Beginning.

A Fine Beginning aims to offer a platform to photographers making work in Wales to have their photography seen and appreciated in Wales and beyond. To find out about future projects or to submit your work, please get in touch (@afinebeginning).

Our first exhibition ‘A Fine Beginning: Made in Wales’ was at Arcade Cardiff (14 – 30 March 2014). The exhibition showed work from the collective as well as selected images from work we have featured on our blog. The second ‘Made in Wales’ exhibition opened at Oriel Colwyn on 5 September (to 31 October 2014) and shows work by 21 photographers we have featured on our blog.

On 28 August, our joint exhibition with the Scottish collective Document Scotland called ‘Common Ground’ opened at Street Level Photoworks in Glasgow. The exhibition features new work from the collective and runs till 19 October.

The Collective

Rutherglen – James O Jenkins

James O Jenkins
(b. Gorseinon) is a photographer and co-founder of Portrait Salon. He has exhibited at The Photographers Gallery, The Association of Photographers and Hotshoe Gallery. His work has been published widely including The Sunday Times Magazine, The Independent on Sunday and Creative Review. In 2012 he published his first book ‘United Kingdom’, a visual study of traditional annual UK customs, which has been shown in London, Helsinki, Arles and New York. In 2013 his series ‘United Kingdom’ was featured at The Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art.

The Big O – Abbie Trayler Smith

Abbie Trayler-Smith
(b.Newport) is a documentary and portrait photographer whose work draws primarily on an emotional response and engagement with her subject. Having spent 8 years at The Daily Telegraph, covering news and features around the world, including the Iraq war and Asian tsunami, she now travels globally on assignment for a wide variety of clients and enjoys spending time on personal long-term projects in the UK. Abbie’s study ‘Still Human Still Here’ on destitute asylum seekers in the UK was exhibited at foto8’s HOST gallery in London in 2009 along with her award winning accompanying multi-media short film. Her portrait of Chelsea from the series ‘The Big O’ won 4th prize in The National Portrait Gallery’s Taylor Wessing Prize 2010. She joined Panos Pictures in 2007 and became a member of Panos Profile in 2010.

A Line Runs Through Us – Gawain Barnard

Gawain Barnard
(b. Rhondda) completed an MFA in Documentary Photography at the University of Wales, Newport in 2009. His Photographic work and research has mainly focused around the environment and people of his youth. Making quiet portraits of adolescence and precise observations of their surroundings Gawain brings new and fresh reflections of the once industrialised regions of South Wales. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and is represented by Millennium Images.

Looking for Lilacs – Jack Latham

Jack Latham
(b. Cardiff) is a Welsh photographer based in Brighton. A 2012 graduate of the BA Documentary Photography course at the University of Wales, Newport, his work focuses on more conceptual subject matter and is often presented in the form of large format photography and self-published books. His photographs were first published in the British Journal of Photography in their “2012 Student Profile”, which highlighted up and coming talent across the UK. Jack has continued to work both in the UK and internationally and some of his most recent work is currently being exhibited in New York. In addition to his own practice he co-curates a monthly lecture series in Brighton “Miniclick“.

Common Ground runs at Street Level Photoworks until 19 October. For more about Common Ground, take a loot at this feature about Document Scotland.

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Document Scotland was formed by Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert, Colin McPherson, Stephen McLaren and Sophie Gerrard in 2012. We were brought together by a common vision to witness and photograph the important and diverse stories within Scotland at one of the most important times in our nation’s history and to encourage, promote and support photography in Scotland.

‘Kirriemuir’ from ‘Scotia Nova’ by Stephen McLaren

Ironically, the original idea for Document Scotland was not cooked up in Edinburgh or Glasgow, but in Beijing. Jeremy, Stephen and Colin were working on an assignment there together and over a couple of beers we hatched the plan for the collective. It was relatively straight-forward in terms of organisation: we wanted to keep things simple and carry on working to our own agendas but allow areas where we did coincide and overlap to become the basis for Document Scotland. With Sophie soon on board, we built a website which we filled with our own content and invited contributions in the form of blogs, photo-essays and portfolios from other photographers shooting stories in- or about Scotland.

Once we built a bit of momentum, we began to reach out to some of the key players in Scottish photography and initiated conversations about what could be achieved in the short term and what was strategically important in the long run. We weren’t surprised to find that photography in Scotland is a small world, but it’s a environment which is very supportive and constructive. We think most photographers working at present understand the political and cultural backcloth at present and are very focused on making work.

Within our first year, we had staged a group exhibition which included work by 10 exciting contemporary Scottish photographers. In addition, we produced two newspapers and have subsequently produced an electronic magazine and a downloadable PDF, all featuring our own and/or other peoples’ work.

‘Unsullied and Untarnished’, a series by Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert

2014 is an especially busy year: we kicked off with a show at Scotland House at the EU Brussels, then came the Beyond the Border exhibition at Impressions Gallery, Bradford, followed closely by Common Ground, our latest show which opened on 26 August at Street Level Photoworks in Glasgow, which is supported by Creative Scotland. In addition, we have launched an 84-page publication to coincide with Common Ground. This features diverse photo essays from the collective, as well as contributions from Welsh collective A Fine Beginning, Malcolm Dickson (Street Level) and Anne McNeill (Impressions). We also took the opportunity of the publication to announce the great Scottish photographer Harry Benson as our honorary patron.

For more information about Document Scotland, see their website. Common Ground is at Streetlevel Photo Works until 19 October.

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Ahead of their next performance Cargo, Camera… Action!, Central Station caught up with the Glasgow based sound/art/performance collective 85A.

When did 85A start?

Our first event was in 2008. We didn’t have a name until 2010. There’s been nineteen shows we’ve done together. We have a problem saying no…!

When we make work, especially with Chernozem, the film we made, the idea comes from a few people and then expands. In that case, we expanded it to make a theatre performance before the film had finished. Then we screened the film with another theatre performance around it. It’s almost like a season or something. Our audience gets really excited. They can see it and then come back and participate with it again. It allows them to experience the story or the thematic content in various ways by physically being part of it or watching it.

How did you come up with the name 85A?

It was on the submarine in one of our early shows. We were doing a show about a submarine and then we decided we needed a name and we looked no further than the name on our submarine. It’s the submarine’s ident.

Looking back, what do you think inspired you to start a collective?

We’ve never had so much time for reflection. We keep moving forward. Things just get thrown our way that are too exciting to say no to. It’s been consistently less shows and bigger shows but still about five a year. We do a summer season and we work on a London based circus each summer as well. So that’s another project we do together and we live together in different shapes and forms. It’s a family now!

How do you describe yourselves and what you do?

That’s a big question. We’re a multi-disciplinary artists collective. We work across disciplines and there’s generally, in no particular order, music, puppetry, masks and audience interaction. We like to work site-specifically and put on our own events. We work with film as well and a lot of us have a visual arts background but a lot of us have been moving gradually away from it in multiple directions.

We combine the forces of visual arts, design and music to create performative event based works that could almost be seen as durational. Often, they roll into a party so we can have a more focused performance which would then turn into a music event towards the end.

You often work with masks, costumes, and other disguises so how does anonymity relate to your work?

There’s a freedom to it and also a reaction to a lot of the current climate of arts, business and personal hype. Everything is attached to a face. People as well as artists seem to really be in a look-at-me phase, sharing everything and getting everyone to take a look at themselves. Often behind the mask or image, there’s not much. We’re trying to make a counterpoint to it, where we‘re a lot more secretive about who we are and the way we do things, but when people come to our event, there’s a lot of us. We’re very generous and there’s a lot of us to be with!

On the same note, you often ask your audiences to wear masks. How does this add to the performance?

It blurs the lines between the crew and the audience. The audience start to feel like they can act up, like they’re crew. Because you’ve got that anonymity, wearing a mask allows you to be something other than the face that you project. If you go to quite a lot of art shows or the pub, you can’t really relax. You have to keep this pretense up. If you have a mask on, you can do whatever you want and nobody can see it’s you. There’s a certain freedom within that.

Dark Behaviour looked like so much fun, can you tell us a bit more about your experience making it?

We’ve done about five masquerades now so it’s almost like we’re developing a bit of a scene. Each time, people experiment more with their costumes and masks and movement. We’ve really noticed the effort that people go through, especially the last two masquerades. People probably dress like this for other things, but now they’re really finding out about what we’re doing and using that as a platform for their own costume. The masks were great at Dark Behaviour. In Edinburgh the costumes were really good as well.

Do you have a core group of people you work with?

There’s twelve of us who are in an e-mail thread with each other. When we come to do projects, our numbers go up. We also have associate artists who we’ve been working with for about five years now who are growing with each project. We’ve been headhunting other artists that we want to work with, performers or people who can build etc. We’ve never advertised or asked for volunteers. We just kind of find people. You get fed if you work with us, and you get a patch or a t-shirt!

On your website, you call yourselves ‘cultural agitators.’ How are you disrupting the norms related to visual and contemporary art practice?

We’ve successfully removed ourselves from it. Before 85A, quite a few of us were involved in a gallery called Lowsalt, where we would organise group exhibitions. We were asking artists to collaborate with one another, to share a space, and we would always encourage a performative element on the opening night and really play to the event. Within that, we found each other as a group. Through being a gallery working mainly with solo shows, we got a really good response from the Arts Council and funders in general. We did GI a few times. We always gave too much, we would be given some funding and put on three giant shows, one gallery based, one all around the city, and then some inflatable sculptures which was also city wide.

We decided we wanted to work together as a group anonymously. Then suddenly, we were getting turned down from funding and we felt that the new direction we had chosen for ourselves wasn’t fitting with what was on offer for artists. We just decided to take it somewhere else and haven’t really looked back. We’ve ended up getting permission from so many other organisations whether it be NVA who asked us to create something for an urban food festival, or Govanhill Baths to do a music festival, music festivals outside of Scotland, film festivals.

There are a lot of multi-disciplinary visual artists in the fine arts scene, but their work is only multi-disciplinary to a point. That’s where a collective is different because there are people within that who themselves are working multi-disciplinarily and you’ve all got a different base or background and that allows the work to shape shift and become malleable. All of these elements create something that we’re quite happy to feel is outwith the bubble of visual arts.

We’re also independent in the sense that we are in control of all the logistics. We have vehicles, we can take over a space. We have all the equipment to put on a show, sound, video, lighting. We’re a production company so in that sense, it’s beyond multi-disciplinary.

85A’s Voltage and Vitalism at The Kelvingrove Museum, Glasgow 2012

A lot of inspiration seems to come from German Expressionism and Victoriana, is there a reason you have a particular affinity to these and/or other periods?

Expressionism has been a big player in the aesthetics of a lot of our work which is down to one of our members who does all our graphics. It’s been a big influence. There’s a kinship beyond the stylistic element with the Weimar Republic and the Constructivists and times of political upheaval. There was a lot of interesting art being created back then.

The Victoriana theme of the Kelvingrove event was scientific times. That show was about electricity and the inventions were really exciting. They asked us to be part of an event that already had that overarching theme. We were making work to poke a stick at the ideologies that are so celebrated, like imperialism and make some work that was brought these quite interesting or slightly backwards thoughts to the forefront.

It’s not all about the past though. We’ve got other influences and they’re quite diverse. Industry, maybe in music or in film. It goes a bit beyond that. It’s not just artistic influence either. We’ve been working in festivals quite a lot, music festivals and arts festivals in the outdoors. You do see quite a lot of something on another scale that mixes all of that and that’s another influence. People who are travelling and parties have brought in autonomous elements like subcultures that have taken hold in the festival scene in the UK.

Do you have specific emotions or reactions that you’re trying to invoke from the outset?

There are elements within each show where sometimes there might have been an undercurrent from the start or they might protrude later on as quite an obvious statement that you could read something into but it’s never been forced.

We think of ourselves as the audience and what we would like to do. Whether we’ve been whizzed around on a ghost train or ‘yeah! let’s get crushed by some kind of god of the party’. I think we come at it from a participant’s point of view and through devising it, you feel it.

The drama and the emotion happens. There’s ten of us talking like this. You feel the emotion in the room. You feel the response. If we’re talking about something like The Orzel, it equates to a certain chapter in history, World War II. This is not really the kind of message that we feel passionate about more than any other. We like the story and the treatment and we want to stay true to the intention of the piece. We pick up the emotions as we go along.

We do say something like, “we’re going to do a rain or shine show and it’s going to be for everybody. All Ages.” There is a difference but within that you can still have a somber emotional context. We think about our audience, whether we’re given an audience or we’re going out to find one. There are emotional political elements within everything we do because that’s the kind of people we are. We’re not going to not say things but we maybe will say them in a different way to a family audience. We’re not going to put them through some horrific experience if there are children there. We’ve always kept hold of that.

Even when we’re at a festival and it’s fun during the day, we’re still crushing people, we’re still sacrificing people because that’s the humorous grotesque stance we have. It’s about not taking everything so seriously but it is about having something to say. There’s an absurdity in what we do. I think that’s there as well and sometimes it can be really dark but tinged with humour so it’s never overwhelmingly dark. We’re not just jesters, we’re serious in our absurdity.

85A’s The Crusher at Secret Garden Party Festival in Cambridge

With so many different elements going into performances, how do you control them when the performance is underway?

There are roles that are formed within that. We stage manage each other and people will head up departments for props or costumes or food, driving. Experience of working together also builds that and working with so many people.

We’ve experienced madness and anarchy. When you’re at a party, a festival or a demo or self-organised you become familiar with the crowd’s reaction. You want to encourage people to let go but you want to keep things safe. These are the rules and regulations of such spaces and technical things that you should or shouldn’t do. At the same time, you know that you need to be able to get your audience to feel that it’s totally mad but really it isn’t. You need to have experience of both worlds, the entertainment industry and the world of total chaos and seeing how far you can connect the two and have them coexist in one space. If it’s mega official and everything has got to be done by the book, we’re really good at doing risk assessments now and knowing regulations. Some other place they might not care so much and we can do the same show with four times less effort because there is less paperwork.

We work a lot with performers where we’re improvising.I think a lot of that comes through trust and practise together. If you can improvise together and discuss and have a laugh and say stupid things and then party together and then create work, there is a trust. Yes, you have an overall direction or scene but within that there will be a few improvised elements that you kind of give to people and they do great work. That’s why we all work together.

Stay tuned for more from 85A next week when they talk about Cargo, Camera…ACTION!

More: Website

Photos courtesy of 85A. Interviewed by Madeleine Schmoll.

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