The other side of our ethos was the questions around public space, who is allowed to use it and for what. UK is notorious for having a lot of private land amidst the city centers and most every where, spotted around the public parks and footpaths. In preparation to the event, we tried to get permits for every performance and in this mission, the biggest hurdle seemed to be the council on how to use public space; some areas of the city centre are not permitted for people to use for events like this, for security reasons. Piccadilly Gardens is heavily policed and so instead of art or citizens activities, the town centre is a place of surveillance. Other areas can only be booked if they are paid for and the smallest structure requires insurance which pricing starts at 1700£. Leafleting needs a printed materials distribution permit unless you are a charitable, political or a religious organization.
As you might have guessed, we did not get all our permits. Either because we could not pay for it or because we couldn’t find our way through the kafkaesque bureaucracy in time.
We informed all the artists of these rogue elements and for some, the day involved some negotiating with private security companies and the police. Everybody got to present their performances in full even though Kun Fang and Youngsook Choi had to move to a new location but in the case of Maria Orengo, the security guards took part in her performance by writing on a post-it note. Thank you for all our artists for being flexible and adventures! Based on our conversations in the evening’s shindig at the Soup Kitchen, the interactions with the public and even being moved seemed to add a lot to the work and was not entirely a bad thing when one is sensitive and quick to readjust the work based on the surrounding reactions. Less control, more improvisation. For many of the artists, this was their first time performing outside in the streets and happily, the experience seemed to get them curious for more.
The performances seemed to arouse the curiosity of locals if social media feeds can be taken as an indication; The most common question was simply, what is this? The most interesting comments and questions by far where the critical questions and views on the works. Personally, I would like to say a special thank you to Dave the Rave from Picadilly Rats, who with his friends who wanted to stay anonymous, posed the most challenging questions on Tim Knights piece “This home has a heartbeat”. It is vital for artists to consider the ethics of their work where the line between social commentary and raising awareness for social issues gets blurred by the risk of appropriating someone else’s struggle or advancing one’s own career by showing light on people in vulnerable positions. There are no easy answers when boundaries are searched and pushed. Homelessness is a massive issue not only in Manchester but in the whole UK, and as a squatter and as a part of Tape Moderns practicalities (functioning in occupied properties and public space), we touch on it very often. The right for housing, in our eyes, is a human right. I am grateful that the Market Street rough sleepers came to say their piece about how they viewed the art that directly commented on their precarious situations.

Once again, thank you to all our artists John Carney, Youngsook Choi, Claire Doyle, Kun Fang, Amy Guilfoyle, Tim Knight, Maria Orengo and Jade Williams. Thank you to all our volunteering squatters for legal aid and expertise in dealing with the autorities, thanks to all our documentors and thank you to the memberrs of the public who came to engage with the art and the artists.

A collaboration between Scaffold Gallery and Tape Modern presents, Allure of Sorts.
We are holding a one one-day performance festival where performances will ripple across Manchester city centre. We invite the use of architecture, history, the cityscape and relation with the social landscape of activity. This project was born out of a need to be within life, to not be exclusive.

The event will probe on the uselessness but essentiality of art and what is the accepted use of public space; What is space and how do we occupy it? Is the white box tired? How does performance art operate in public space? Our largest pool of witnesses will be the people passing by or stopping to share the space with us and to wonder, what it is that they are actually seeing.

The artists involved will explore a variety of themes including social history, absurdity and homelessness.

Featuring new performances by

John Carney
www.johncarneyart.com

Youngsook Choi
www.youngsookchoi.com

Claire Doyle
www.clairedoyleart.com

发自我的华为手机 (Kun Fang)
www.kunfang.be

Amy Guilfoyle
www.facebook.com/AGEconceptualartist

Stefan Klein
www.stefanklein.org/

Tim Knight
www.timknight.live

Maria Orengo
www.mimi3901.com/mjamorengo

Katie Shevlin
www.katieshevlin.co.uk

Jade Williams
www.instagram.com/dance_or_die_with_jade

Free event
Follow @allureofsorts #allureofsorts on Instagram and Facebook.
Find our Facebook event here. Keep an eye out on it for we will be posting a map with all the perfromance locations and times within the next few days.

Before we move on to transforming the space back to an artist studio, there’s still a few things about the show we would like to share with you:

Last Friday we had a small event at the gallery: altercation by enne&moffa was performed for the second and last time. We had a small but a lovely crowd to experience the work and the wine with us. I don’t usually repeat a performance so it was an interesting and new experience for me as well. It was lovely to hear the thoughts of our gallery visitors and by the sounds of it, people enjoyed the experience.

So that’s a wrap. Life at the studio will continue as usual. We decided to close the show early due to an expected eviction, but it looks like we get to stay at least a bit longer. Since we never know how long we get to stay and where, we won’t give any promises of the time or location of our next exhibition, but I can promise this: It will happen. Before that though, we are looking forward to our series of public place performances taking place all over Manchester. We’ll keep you posted.

Here are a few pictures from Friday and a documentation video of altercation from the preview. Thank you to SB Cooper Films for the footage.

See the documentation video on Vimeo

[See image gallery at tapemodern.org]

[See image gallery at tapemodern.org]

I am very excited about this exhibition! It will be the first one we do with our new space, the artists we have lined up are interesting and I love the works we’ll have the privilege to show.

Naturally, we need to keep in mind that we might be evicted at any point. We have plans in place of how to get all the works safely to the next building and how to keep the ball rolling if this would happen. Because of this, we are doing this on a very tight schedule, hoping that we get to stay in this building for the whole duration of the show. Of course, I wish that we could stay for a long time since we have finally got it to run smoothly and I am utterly in love with the space.

But without further a do, let me introduce our artists:

Nicola Ellis
www.nicolaellis.com/context/

Nicola Ellis (b.1987, St Helens) currently lives and works in Manchester. She studied BA hons Fine Art at The University of Central Lancashire and following this, completed an MA in Fine Art at Manchester School of Art. In recent years she has undertaken research projects including Sculpture: A Fabrication(2017), which focused on the mechanics of large scale sculptural commissioning, and Play/Pause: the turbulent history of UK steel (2016). She is currently undertaking an open door residency at ACA and The North Pennines Observatory. She is also doing a placement in manufacturing in order to produce a commission for The National Festival of Making in Blackburn. Her work recently featured in exhibitions including; From A to C, this being B. Caustic Coastal, Salford. Da Vinci Engineered, Zebedees Yard, Hull; It’ll Hold Until It Breaks (solo exhibition), Platform A Gallery, Middlesbrough; More room for error (touring solo exhibition), Arcadecardiff, Cardiff, &Model Gallery, Leeds & Bloc Projects, Sheffield; You won’t see that bit anyway (solo exhibition), 20-21 Visual Arts Centre, Scunthorpe, UK; Head to Head: Nicola Ellis and Aura Satz, Castlefield Gallery, Manchester, UK; Part of the Programme, FAFA Gallery, Helsinki; and Cabedal, Plataforma Revolver, Lisbon. 

Riikka Enne
www.riikkaenne.com

Riikka Enne (b. 1990, Tampere) lives and works in Manchester. She studied her BA in Fine Art in Tampere School of Art (2014) and continued to her MFA in Manchester School of Art (2016). Enne works in sculpture and performance: Her work examines the gap between an individual’s experience and the tensions of society through found objects seen as revealing residue of human life, concentrating on materiality and restrictions. Recently she exhibited in Disponere, 5th Base Gallery, London; Femfest, Tanner Street, London and Pittsburgh Performance Festival (PGHPAF), Pittsburgh; Emergency Break Glass, Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester. Most recently her work has been visible as public space performances across Manchester. 

Matt Girling
www.mattgirlingartist.tumblr.com
www.instagram.com/subsurfacepondwater/

Mutabase
www.mutabase.net/
www.mutabase.bandcamp.com/releases

Review by silent radio: “With Strange Friends off the stage, the next act to wow us is Mutabase, she is incredible! I would say she is a performance artist in her own right and she captures the crowd with her haunting voice and impressive songs. She completely owns the stage, and calls herself a “DIY electro punk rocker.” With a few gigs already under her belt it seems today is the biggest one to date which is hard to believe. I can see Cristi becoming a big star and I would buy tickets to her next gig in a heartbeat.”

Sophia Moffa
www.sophiamoffa.com/

Sophia Moffa (b. 1994 Rome) is interested in the relations and tensions between the body, and the socio-political and technological events surrounding society. Initially working intuitively, experimenting and negotiating within her settings and materials, her works question topics surrounding existentialism, the human condition and modern ethics. She mainly works in performance, video and sculpture to materialize the concepts, and has exhibited in the UK, Italy, Singapore and Egypt.

Willow Rowlands
www.willowrowlands.com

We have had two events in the studio, they were like pilot runs of how to move everything quickly and transform the space to suit any kind of event the crew has planned. The other side of the building is living quarters, so combining the event space and the studio is really the only viable option. Not necessarily the most convenient solution, but so far, I have found that every time I had to move my sculptures and materials they have ended up back in the studio in a different way. As if every move was contributing to the process.

So far, there are only four of us working in the studio more or less consistently. I don’t want to crowd the space by having too many people, but we could do with a few more. Our model is still the same as it was supposed to be back in Cozy; we have a few people who have their own working stations in the studio and any one from the community who wants to do a project, build something or just needs a practice space can come in and if they need help or tools we will provide it. We have had a few people come in to do things, building carts and boxes but I think we need to get the word out more now that we have got the space up and running smoothly.

[See image gallery at tapemodern.org]

On the other hand, the thoughts about what we wanted for modestly ambitious didn’t quite work in this space. The squat seemed like too precarious a frame to invite artists from very far especially if we couldn’t pay for their travel expenses. Also, having a lot of big heavy machinery for the workshops would not work in the squat if we had to move all the time. Personally, the thought of an eviction wasn’t fully real to me, since the crew had had conversations with the owner of the building and apparently he had religious reasons why he did not want to evict us. I gathered that is a fairly safe position to be in. Alas, I was wrong.

We had just finished our space and I had managed to get some bits and bobs together for my own sculptures, but didn’t have anything quite finished. I had a studio visit approaching fast. I was going to be part of an exhibition coming up in Castlefield Gallery in July and my first studio visit with the curators Ian Rawlinson and Michael Penderguss were going to be on the nineteenth of April. On the 18th, I got a call at 7 am that we were being evicted and I should run to the squat to get my gear out of the building. I am the worst morning person but that got me up quick.

[See image gallery at tapemodern.org]

Sophia and I went to the Cozy straight away. By the time we got there, the eviction was well on its way. The first words I heard were that we had less than an hour to vacate the premises and that they got in through our basement door. I felt utterly stupefied: all that hard work we put into fixing up the place, all the work that the crew had done to make that place their home and a place to facilitate art, music and all the other activities they hosted there. All of it was gone. Not only that, I felt horrified and guilty because our door had been the one they got threw, whereas the front door barricades withstood an axe. We had fiddled with that door just a few days before, didn’t open it but we were looking at how to get it open and build a new barricade behind it so we could open and close it safely whenever we needed to. Apparently, that door had never been able to be opened by anyone so we were investigating on how to do it. I was struck with guilt by the thought that we might have done something to give them easier access knowing very well how paramount secure barricades were at the squat. This was the first eviction I was part of and I was utterly shocked and on top of that, I was panicking because I was supposed to have a studio visit there to show my work the very next day! The crew though, were not. They told me how it wasn’t my fault, that the bailiffs would’ve got in any way. Despite just losing their home, they were consoling me and promising they’d find another building by the evening and I had nothing to worry about for my studio visit. Jamil gave me a beautiful speech about how these things happen, telling me stories about earlier evictions and how they always found their feet. Buildings come and go, but because the people stay, whatever we are doing will be taken over to the next building and the one after that. So I put my faith in the crew.

In the end, we got more than an hour to carry out our things, as long as we needed actually. The security guards and the bailiffs helped us carry out some of the gear as well. It seemed to me that they were genuinely saddened to throw us out. By 5pm, the crew had found a new place they had been scouting for a while, a beautiful old naan bread bakery less than 100m from our original building, which was convenient since the amount of gear we had was astounding: lights, instruments, amps, kitchens, bedrooms, tools, materials, tents, decorations and everyone’s personal belongings. A solidarity call was sent to other squatters in Manchester and throughout the day we had loads of people coming in to help us carry things and occupy the new building.
Taking over the new building went very smoothly. There was some excitement when we realised that the building was owned by the same person who owned Cozy and he was outraged at us. He came over personally, took photos and video of us and tried to evict us straight away with the court order for Cozy’s address. The crew calmly explained to him that we have a legal right to stay on these premises and that his court order does not apply to this address. He insisted on calling the police but when they showed up, they only confirmed that we were right and wished us a good day. Later in the day when the police got off their shift, they swung by to see that we were ok and the security guards brought us pizza, profusely apologizing for having to through us out. Even today they sometimes bring us fruits and all kinds of food. I was surprised by the solidarity and wondered at this weird balance of squatters and authorities charged by evicting us and keeping us in line, but who actually are not very keen to see it through. I heard stories of evictions going down in very different ways, sometimes they get out of hand and had violent altercations. I wonder how big of a difference it made to the attitudes of the authorities that most of us talked to them like people to people and that it was an event squat where very clearly people had made a great effort to build something for themselves.

[See image gallery at tapemodern.org]

Once the building was secured, we got to work again. Bringing everything in and looking around. Half of the crew stayed up and helped me to clear the other side of the building that they had thought to become the studio and event space. After the space was cleared I started making new work. I slept two hours that night, but by the time of my studio visit the next day, the space was a studio and I was quite happy with the work I had done. It was an exhausting 24 hours, but it was so amazing! I was struck by the attitudes and spirits of the squatters to carry on, the solidarity and the way everyone came together to make it all work. After that day, I was even more convinced that I had ended up in a place with people I really wanted to stay with. Don’t get me wrong, there are loads of people with difficult pasts, mental health and substance abuse problems so the social setting is not always functional or harmonies, but people are so acutely themselves that I just appreciate any challenges to be a necessary part of the whole of it. Mostly though, I have met interesting, talented, smart and beautiful people. Some of them have come to the squats as a political act, some have come because there is nowhere else to go. I’m not going to make any effort to simplify or summaries it all since there seem to be as many reasons for people to squat as there are squatters.

After all this, many evictions followed that week. Other squats all over Manchester were evicted barely days apart and many of them ended up temporarily into our new building since we had loads of space. The piles and piles of peoples things took over the studio, people slept anywhere and everywhere and naturally everything to do with the studio stood still because peoples housing and comfort always comes first. Amongst all this though, Bald Paul threw in a comment of how I should call the studio Tape Modern since that’s the first aid fix to anything, loads and loads of gaffa tape. It gave me a good laugh, but the more I thought about it, the better it was and the name stuck. Tape Modern was born even though it took a few weeks before I actually got to any work.