Creative Projects
Upwording create physical sensory learning environments in collaboration with a range of artists, integrating Upwording principles into the creative process.
Activating the Archive
Currently open to expressions of interest
Imagine your own personal and shared collective archive of unhelpful language and hindering concepts. A place to deposit toxic terminology. Dismantle, shred, deactivate, decommission. By retiring some words they lose their potency. By releasing words to the pile of the past, we can resolve them of their function and the letters may happily skip back and form new constellations that contribute towards a desirable world for all.
The archive is a live and online touring pop-up. Hosted by Ames Pennington, with illustrations by Jack McConnell.
Activating the Archive is currently taking interest from potentials partners with whom to develop the concept, and seeking funding and hosting offers.
Tender Hotel
Grand Re Union 2020
Neustart Kultur #TakeHeart 2022
“Tender Hotel invites you to 24 hours of Love, Care & Discomfort. A remote get-away sitting just on the edge of the physical world, the Tender Hotel is an experience like no other. We await your pleasure for one day only. Tender Hotel is a unique gifted experience – a home away from home where you remote-control your atmosphere by choosing from a wide selection of experiences tailored just for you. The above languaging is an artifice. It is based on a luxury hotel advertisement. Despite our best intentions, we are going to fail and can not give you everything you need…”
Over a period of 24 hours across several time zones from Australia to Columbia, more than 200 visitors from around the globe visited Tender Hotel on an hourly basis to participate in the 45 resident artists’ offerings in and through their rooms. Arriving at the reception with a bar offering cocktails in the form of poetry, our guests experienced a variety of delights including sunrises in Melbourne, Hanoi, Johannesburg, San Francisco and Mexico, book readings, parties, writing songs, making, cooking, sharings, showings, durational sound installations, experiencing a walk in the snowy alps with a dog, darning socks the Mending Room, The Library, writing love letters to the worlds, and a view of the hotel’s underbelly; kitchen, cleaning, and shoeshine services and a couple of squatted rooms.
GRAND RE UNION’S
February Issue
In 2022-2023 an expanded group of international artists assembled over a 10 month period to further develop both concept and technologies for future hybrid versions of the hotel, integrating live and online experiences.
Tender Hotel has received funding from making both 2020 research was made possible by funding from: Kulturreferat Landeshauptstadt, München, Arts University Bournemouth, Universidad de Antioquia – Facultad de Artes.
Upwording and assistance from Islington Mill Associated Artists Alumni, and ……….. (INSERT FUNDER)(research 2022-23)
Disrupting Discomfort
Grand Re Union 2021
Being in discomfort is inherently…uncomfortable. Urges rapidly emerge to quell said discomfort. What about longer lasting discomforts, or discomforts which we don’t have the ability simply to dispel? Or discomforts resulting from a change in or reduction of habituated comforts and freedoms, such as during this pandemic. Or the discomfort that comes with confronting long-standing social injustices? Change is not always comfortable, even when one is aware that the outcome could be beneficial personally, or even globally.
What if instead of trying to get rid, we actively choose to practice staying with discomfort? Or, as Donna Haraway proposes, staying with the trouble.
During the process of the Grand Reunion’s May 2021 edition, we wondered what would happen if we invited curiosity and encouraged a focus on the wonders of what may emerge. We considered how we might disrupt our learned patterns, so geared towards production and solutions. We realised we could discard imposter syndrome and projected expectations and instead embrace the (yet) unknown.
GRAND RE UNION’S
May Issue
This resulted in Creating our Climate, fronting the two open public discussions with the following invitation:
We choose to trust that the party is made by the guests and that we are enough as we are. We shall turn up for each other, for a conversation on disrupting discomfort, hopefully…with you.
Imagination Kitchen
Living Archive, Living Story, and LibLab 2020
A collaboration between Upwording-instigator Rivca Rubin and illustrator Jack McConnell. Imagination Kitchen was a vibrant visual story painted on a greenhouse with playful images and word prompts to inspire ideas for fresh thinking and being. Placemats, to write and draw on, invited people to reflect on their experience during COVID-19. Asking, ‘What would we like to retain and take forward into the future, and what would we like to leave behind, let go of, phase out, and re-imagine new ways of living.’
This project contributed to the Living Archive of Salford Quays in 2020, the National Lottery-funded Living Story, and the LibLab at Islington Mill.
Word Wall
Islington Mill 2021-2023
Word Wall saw the animation of the scaffolding wrapping Islington Mill during its major Capital Building renovation in 2021-2023. Word Wall covered Islington Mill’s five-storey building with two-metre tall words over the construction netting. Word Wall and was able to be viewed across the neighbouring streets of Salford, communicating Islington Mill’s values, creative purpose together with Upwording statements, intentions, and invitations.