Re/Place
Re/Place – stories that are right up your street
Re/Place is led by writers Sarah-Clare Conlon and David Gaffney, who specialise in commissioning new writing related to place, and staging live literature events. Re/Place projects also expand audience participation by offering other activities: place-themed workshops, panel discussions, Q&As, guided tours, creative writing competitions, sound installations, and other artistic interventions in the public realm.
Re/Place has delivered creative projects in several towns and cities with dozens of respected and well-published writers and artists. The projects are enquiries into places, spaces, history and heritage, using psychogeography and urban exploration, and are rooted in communities and local culture. Recent projects have focussed on the town centre of Macclesfield (Macc Stories), obsolete technology (FaxFiction) and Manchester’s Victoria Baths (Weekend of Words).
Original commissions by Re/Place have gone on to be published in magazines and anthologies, including Salt’s Best British Short Stories series and Dostoyevsky Wannabe’s Cities: Manchester, and to win prizes; in 2020, Abi Hynes’ story ‘The Savage Chapel’, a commission for Macc Stories in Macclesfield, won first prize in the Cambridge Short Story Prize.
Here are a few of the writers commissioned:
Socrates Adams, Jenn Ashworth, Elizabeth Baines, Jo Bell, Sarah Butler, Claire Dean, Kate Feld, Tom Fletcher, Rosie Garland, Abi Hynes, Tom Jenks, Anneliese Mackintosh, Stephen May, Phil Olsen, Valerie O’Riordan, Fat Roland, Nicholas Royle, Reshma Ruia, Adrian Slatcher, Joe Stretch, Peter Wild, Lara Williams
…and artists:
Dan Berry (illustrator), Darren Cunningham (illustrator), Gary Fisher (sound artist), Alison Erika Forde (painter), Daniel Hopkins (composer), Sara Lowes (composer), OLA (electronic music producers)
SARAH-CLARE CONLON
Sarah-Clare Conlon is a copywriter and proofreader, Literature Editor of arts and travel site Creative Tourist, and the inaugural Writer-in-Residence at Manchester’s Victoria Baths. A Salt Prizes winner and Best British & Irish Flash Fiction listed, she was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize 2020, and her prose and poetry has appeared in literary journals including Confingo, Flash, Lighthouse, PN Review and Stand.
Regular projects have included Les Malheureux with David Gaffney, combining stories with music and projections, and the FlashTag collective (both 2011–15), and popular prose and poetry evening Verbose, which she organised, promoted and compèred for three years (2015–17), building from scratch a supportive, inclusive and diverse community that continues to thrive in the care of previous audience members.
She is lead artist for the biennial Re/Place project, specially commissioned site-specific text performances for Chorlton Arts Festival 2015, Didsbury Arts Festival 2017 and Victoria Baths’ Weekend of Words in 2019, all Arts Council funded. Also in 2019, she was commissioned to contribute to Burnley Literary Festival’s Flash In A Van event, the FaxFiction project at Sale Waterside’s Refract:19 and Macc Stories for Macclesfield’s LIT festival, and she was invited to take part in her fourth European Poetry Festival, collaborating with poet Jazmine Linklater.
Sarah-Clare performs widely, including internationally, appearing at Paris Lit Up as featured performer in 2020. She has read at various anthology launches and has been an invited reader at Bad Language, Peter Barlow’s Cigarette and The Other Room, and festivals including Flash Fiction Festival, Lancaster Litfest and Manchester Literature Festival. Since lockdown, she has appeared online at Altrincham Word Fest, The Other, Word Central, Liverpool’s A Lovely Word, London’s Leap In The Dark, and book launches in Leeds and Saddleworth.
She has been invited to organise and compère two of David Gaffney’s book launches, featuring writers and musicians, the flash fiction strand of Transition Festival Bury in 2016 and a flash fiction evening for Rochdale Literature & Ideas Festival in 2015. In 2012, she took part in 24 Arty People at Contact Theatre. She has also delivered workshops and has judged creative writing competitions.
DAVID GAFFNEY
David Gaffney’s first collection of short stories, Sawn-Off Tales, was published by Salt Publishing in 2006 to excellent critical response. His second collection, Aromabingo, was published in 2007, and his novel Never, Never was published in 2008 on Tindal Street Press with strong reviews in The Observer, The Guardian and The Independent. David’s third collection, The Half Life Of Songs was published in 2011 and his most recent collection, More Sawn-Off Tales, came out in 2013. His last novel, All The Places I’ve Ever Lived – an experimental work blending non-fiction and fiction – had Arts Council funding support and was well received when it launched in 2017. His third novel, Out Of The Dark, is due to be published in 2021. His graphic novel with Dan Berry, The Three Rooms In Valerie’s Head, was published in 2018 and is currently being adapted for screen by Warner Brothers. His story Insight in Confingo Publishing’s We Were Strangers anthology was critically acclaimed in many reviews and his story The Staring Man (the result of a Re/Place project) was included in the 2018 Best British Short Stories anthology from Salt Publishing.
David also works with literature in a live setting and on commissions, residencies, collaborations and in communities. He devised and delivered Buildings Crying Out, using lost cat posters (Lancaster LitFest 2009); 23 Stops To Hull, a set of stories about every junction on the M62 (Humber Mouth Literature Festival 2009); Sawn-off Opera, with composer Ailís Ní Ríain (BBC Radio 3); Destroy PowerPoint, for Edinburgh Festival 2009; The Poole Confessions, stories told in a mobile confessional box (Poole Festival 2010); Station Stories, in which six writers linked to the audience with wireless headphones performed in Manchester’s Piccadilly Railway Station, (Manchester Literature Festival 2011); Errata Slips (Cornerhouse Manchester 2011); and Men Who Like Women Who Smell of Their Jobs (Manchester Literature Festival 2014), with painter Alison Erika Forde. He also delivered FaxFiction for the Refract festival (2019), a literature project in which six writers responded to recent obsolete technology and performed live using these devices, Flash In The Van for Burnley Literature Festival (2019) and Macc Stories for Macclesfield LIT festival (2019). David was also artistic lead for Arts Council-funded socially engaged project PowerLines with Salford Welfare Rights. David delivers talks to creative writing students across the North, at Manchester Metropolitan University, University of Manchester, Bolton University, Chester University, Edge Hill University and others, and he runs a popular ten-week short story course at Waterside Arts Centre. He has written articles for the Guardian, Sunday Times, Financial Times and Prospect magazine, and judged the 2015 Bridport Prize. In 2016, David was a Visiting Fellow at the University of Manchester. David has two books out in 2021 – a novel, Out Of The Dark, and a graphic novel Rivers
“Sad, funny fables recalling evanescent moments of connection and happiness. One hundred and fifty words by Gaffney are more worthwhile than novels by a good many others” – The Guardian
Re/Place – previous projects
A few of the previous iterations of the Re/Place project are listed in more detail below.
All projects were supported by Arts Council England.
Macc Stories for LIT Macclesfield
Macc Stories was a set of six brand-new short stories commissioned especially for the LIT festival in Macclesfield in November 2019. Six acclaimed, published and award-winning writers from Manchester were invited to Macclesfield to create pieces of fiction from the point of view of outsiders, arriving on different days during early autumn to poke about the place and find out about its history and inhabitants. They learnt why it’s called the Silk Town, discovered what’s behind the Treacle Market, explored the Forest, chatted to Maxonians and generally found inspiration in the mills and hills. All kinds of details and interpretations fed into the stories, resulting in all kinds of styles and themes – everything from fashion and football to worshippers and woodlands, with some intriguing and unplanned interlinking moments. The writers – Sarah-Clare Conlon, David Gaffney, Abi Hynes, Nicholas Royle, Reshma Ruia and Joe Stretch – performed the six short stories as part of Macclesfield’s LIT festival. For an extra layer of intrigue, each story was set against its own backdrop of specially commissioned visuals by Not Quite Light photographer Simon Buckley, who captures on film the half-light of dawn and dusk, including the now-famous Stephen Fry-praised Lowry-esque Manchester Rainstorm, Deansgate featured in the Observer.
Re/Place for Chorlton Arts Festival
Always wanted to go behind the scenes in Longford Cinema or Cosgrove Hall? Ever wondered what the Sedge Lynn used to be or why Chorltonville is unique? Never knew about the Chorlton Park paddling pool or what happened to the Chorlton Green church whose graveyard and lychgate still remain? As part of Chorlton Arts Festival 2015, six critically acclaimed and award-winning writers each sharing an interest in psychogeography and urban exploration penned pieces about ghost places and the re-appropriation of spaces. Sarah Butler, Sarah-Clare Conlon, Claire Dean, Kate Feld, David Gaffney and Nicholas Royle performed their site-specific short stories and presented postcards from the past at a special event, which included a screening of private home movies shot in Chorlton in the fifties and sixties, provided by the North West Film Archive.
Re/Place(d) for Didsbury Arts Festival
From the Gates of Hell to a grand Victorian railway hotel, DAF goers were invited to take a tour of local places through the site-specific short stories of critically acclaimed and award-winning writers Elizabeth Baines, Sarah Butler, Sarah-Clare Conlon, David Gaffney, Nicholas Royle and Adrian Slatcher, set against a backdrop of archive film and photography. To bring audiences “stories that are right up your street”, the six Re/Place(d) writers explored places and spaces from around Didsbury, including a grand railway hotel gone to the dogs, a Victorian villa with unique stained glass windows and an Art Deco block of flats with a mysterious safe. The writers explored the locations, found out about their history and chatted to current users. Partners such as North West Film Archive, Manchester Modernist Society, Loiterers’ Resistance Movement, Didsbury Parsonage Trust, Didsbury Open Gardens, the area’s residents’ associations, and local history and reading groups all played a part in contributing.
Re/Place(s) for Victoria Baths Weekend Of Words
Audiences were invited to dive into the public places and secret spaces of this historic building with six specially commissioned short stories inspired by Victoria Baths performed in the middle pool. Illuminated by magical projections, this atmospheric, entertaining and social evening, during the Baths’ first-ever Weekend of Words festival, saw the bar open and the writers in their midst. The Re/place(s) project incorporated an interest in places and spaces, history and heritage, psychogeography and urban exploration, and in this case, the act of swimming – linking to a renewed interest in public and community swimming – in municipal baths, lidos and even wild water. The six commissioned writers explored “Manchester’s Water Palace”, found out about its history since 1906 and chatted to current and former users, working with the Victoria Baths Archive Team to tap into the extensive on-site archive material as inspiration for the stories.
Station Stories for Manchester Literature Festival
Station Stories was a unique site specific live literature promenade event using technology and live improvised electronic sound. From platform to platform, café to café and shop to shop, six writers guided audiences on a tour of Piccadilly Station and read specially commissioned stories inspired by the hub and the people who use it and work there. A unique live literature promenade performance, it featured live improvised sounds using samples of ambient station noises as they happened. Audiences were linked to the writers’ microphones by headsets using wireless technology, making the event unobtrusive and ensuring the audience heard every single word, while still experiencing the live ambience of the location. A musician accompanied the writers and improvised music using sampled live sounds from the station, manipulating these sounds and playing them into the audience’s headsets between and underneath the text. The writers interacted with passing members of the public unaware that a performance was taking place. Station Stories explored the day-to-day life of the station – its platforms, its workers, the journeys people take, the waiting, the encounters, the thrill, the loneliness, the joy. It expressed the peculiar, unique qualities of this marginal, in-between world, where anything can happen – and often does. "Absolutely knocked out by the @stationstories performance in Piccadilly Station today. Spellbinding and inspiring. 2 more days to see it. Go!!” Guy Garvey via twitter
FaxFiction for Refract:19 festival
FaxFiction saw six writers produce six brand-new pieces of text which focussed on old technologies – think the music cassette tape, the personal calculator, the floppy disc, home recorded video tapes, analogue cameras, instant Polaroids, 35ml slides in a carousel, acetate slide projectors, dial-up internet modems, ansamachines, old WEM tape echo machines for singers, part work magazines, vinyl records, megaphones, Myspace websites, CB radio, viewmasters, dictaphones, Ceefax, reel to reel tape, and dozens of others. The project ended with a performance which utilised some of these technologies to bring the works to life. The project was engaging – there is a fascination around how we functioned with these old machines, and how these “modern” artefacts will become the relics of the future.
The Three Rooms In Valerie’s Head for Lakes International Comic Art Festival
A live graphic novel performance with specially commissioned music, The Three Rooms In Valerie’s Head by Dan Berry and David Gaffney was a Lakes International Comic Art Festival commission. Experimental and original, it featured a live performance at the globally renowned festival in Kendal of the graphic novel with projected images and specially commissioned music by acclaimed recording artist Sara Lowes. The piece explores relationships, memory, loneliness and obsession in a darkly humorous way, and was also published in book form. Dan Berry is an illustrator, designer, cartoonist and lecturer. David Gaffney is an acclaimed short fiction writer and this was his debut comic art collaboration.
Men Who Like Women Who Smell Of Their Jobs for Manchester Literature Festival
Alison Erika Forde creates daydream-inspired paintings and misleading twists on reality with a pinch of mischief and dark humour. For Manchester Literature Festival 2014, she produced a set of works based on the short stories of David Gaffney. Called Men Who Like Women Who Smell Of Their Jobs, it was exhibited at the John Rylands Library in Manchester. The exhibition was launched at the John Rylands Library, and featured an introduction to the work by Alison, a reading from David Gaffney, performances by short fiction writers Socrates Adams and Anneliese Mackintosh, and ended with an intimate sharing of specially commissioned music based on the texts from electronic/ambient two-piece O>L>A.
Re/Place is led by writers Sarah-Clare Conlon and David Gaffney, who specialise in commissioning new writing related to place, and staging live literature events. Re/Place projects also expand audience participation by offering other activities: place-themed workshops, panel discussions, Q&As, guided tours, creative writing competitions, sound installations, and other artistic interventions in the public realm.
Re/Place has delivered creative projects in several towns and cities with dozens of respected and well-published writers and artists. The projects are enquiries into places, spaces, history and heritage, using psychogeography and urban exploration, and are rooted in communities and local culture. Recent projects have focussed on the town centre of Macclesfield (Macc Stories), obsolete technology (FaxFiction) and Manchester’s Victoria Baths (Weekend of Words).
Original commissions by Re/Place have gone on to be published in magazines and anthologies, including Salt’s Best British Short Stories series and Dostoyevsky Wannabe’s Cities: Manchester, and to win prizes; in 2020, Abi Hynes’ story ‘The Savage Chapel’, a commission for Macc Stories in Macclesfield, won first prize in the Cambridge Short Story Prize.
Here are a few of the writers commissioned:
Socrates Adams, Jenn Ashworth, Elizabeth Baines, Jo Bell, Sarah Butler, Claire Dean, Kate Feld, Tom Fletcher, Rosie Garland, Abi Hynes, Tom Jenks, Anneliese Mackintosh, Stephen May, Phil Olsen, Valerie O’Riordan, Fat Roland, Nicholas Royle, Reshma Ruia, Adrian Slatcher, Joe Stretch, Peter Wild, Lara Williams
…and artists:
Dan Berry (illustrator), Darren Cunningham (illustrator), Gary Fisher (sound artist), Alison Erika Forde (painter), Daniel Hopkins (composer), Sara Lowes (composer), OLA (electronic music producers)
SARAH-CLARE CONLON
Sarah-Clare Conlon is a copywriter and proofreader, Literature Editor of arts and travel site Creative Tourist, and the inaugural Writer-in-Residence at Manchester’s Victoria Baths. A Salt Prizes winner and Best British & Irish Flash Fiction listed, she was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize 2020, and her prose and poetry has appeared in literary journals including Confingo, Flash, Lighthouse, PN Review and Stand.
Regular projects have included Les Malheureux with David Gaffney, combining stories with music and projections, and the FlashTag collective (both 2011–15), and popular prose and poetry evening Verbose, which she organised, promoted and compèred for three years (2015–17), building from scratch a supportive, inclusive and diverse community that continues to thrive in the care of previous audience members.
She is lead artist for the biennial Re/Place project, specially commissioned site-specific text performances for Chorlton Arts Festival 2015, Didsbury Arts Festival 2017 and Victoria Baths’ Weekend of Words in 2019, all Arts Council funded. Also in 2019, she was commissioned to contribute to Burnley Literary Festival’s Flash In A Van event, the FaxFiction project at Sale Waterside’s Refract:19 and Macc Stories for Macclesfield’s LIT festival, and she was invited to take part in her fourth European Poetry Festival, collaborating with poet Jazmine Linklater.
Sarah-Clare performs widely, including internationally, appearing at Paris Lit Up as featured performer in 2020. She has read at various anthology launches and has been an invited reader at Bad Language, Peter Barlow’s Cigarette and The Other Room, and festivals including Flash Fiction Festival, Lancaster Litfest and Manchester Literature Festival. Since lockdown, she has appeared online at Altrincham Word Fest, The Other, Word Central, Liverpool’s A Lovely Word, London’s Leap In The Dark, and book launches in Leeds and Saddleworth.
She has been invited to organise and compère two of David Gaffney’s book launches, featuring writers and musicians, the flash fiction strand of Transition Festival Bury in 2016 and a flash fiction evening for Rochdale Literature & Ideas Festival in 2015. In 2012, she took part in 24 Arty People at Contact Theatre. She has also delivered workshops and has judged creative writing competitions.
DAVID GAFFNEY
David Gaffney’s first collection of short stories, Sawn-Off Tales, was published by Salt Publishing in 2006 to excellent critical response. His second collection, Aromabingo, was published in 2007, and his novel Never, Never was published in 2008 on Tindal Street Press with strong reviews in The Observer, The Guardian and The Independent. David’s third collection, The Half Life Of Songs was published in 2011 and his most recent collection, More Sawn-Off Tales, came out in 2013. His last novel, All The Places I’ve Ever Lived – an experimental work blending non-fiction and fiction – had Arts Council funding support and was well received when it launched in 2017. His third novel, Out Of The Dark, is due to be published in 2021. His graphic novel with Dan Berry, The Three Rooms In Valerie’s Head, was published in 2018 and is currently being adapted for screen by Warner Brothers. His story Insight in Confingo Publishing’s We Were Strangers anthology was critically acclaimed in many reviews and his story The Staring Man (the result of a Re/Place project) was included in the 2018 Best British Short Stories anthology from Salt Publishing.
David also works with literature in a live setting and on commissions, residencies, collaborations and in communities. He devised and delivered Buildings Crying Out, using lost cat posters (Lancaster LitFest 2009); 23 Stops To Hull, a set of stories about every junction on the M62 (Humber Mouth Literature Festival 2009); Sawn-off Opera, with composer Ailís Ní Ríain (BBC Radio 3); Destroy PowerPoint, for Edinburgh Festival 2009; The Poole Confessions, stories told in a mobile confessional box (Poole Festival 2010); Station Stories, in which six writers linked to the audience with wireless headphones performed in Manchester’s Piccadilly Railway Station, (Manchester Literature Festival 2011); Errata Slips (Cornerhouse Manchester 2011); and Men Who Like Women Who Smell of Their Jobs (Manchester Literature Festival 2014), with painter Alison Erika Forde. He also delivered FaxFiction for the Refract festival (2019), a literature project in which six writers responded to recent obsolete technology and performed live using these devices, Flash In The Van for Burnley Literature Festival (2019) and Macc Stories for Macclesfield LIT festival (2019). David was also artistic lead for Arts Council-funded socially engaged project PowerLines with Salford Welfare Rights. David delivers talks to creative writing students across the North, at Manchester Metropolitan University, University of Manchester, Bolton University, Chester University, Edge Hill University and others, and he runs a popular ten-week short story course at Waterside Arts Centre. He has written articles for the Guardian, Sunday Times, Financial Times and Prospect magazine, and judged the 2015 Bridport Prize. In 2016, David was a Visiting Fellow at the University of Manchester. David has two books out in 2021 – a novel, Out Of The Dark, and a graphic novel Rivers
“Sad, funny fables recalling evanescent moments of connection and happiness. One hundred and fifty words by Gaffney are more worthwhile than novels by a good many others” – The Guardian
Re/Place – previous projects
A few of the previous iterations of the Re/Place project are listed in more detail below.
All projects were supported by Arts Council England.
Macc Stories for LIT Macclesfield
Macc Stories was a set of six brand-new short stories commissioned especially for the LIT festival in Macclesfield in November 2019. Six acclaimed, published and award-winning writers from Manchester were invited to Macclesfield to create pieces of fiction from the point of view of outsiders, arriving on different days during early autumn to poke about the place and find out about its history and inhabitants. They learnt why it’s called the Silk Town, discovered what’s behind the Treacle Market, explored the Forest, chatted to Maxonians and generally found inspiration in the mills and hills. All kinds of details and interpretations fed into the stories, resulting in all kinds of styles and themes – everything from fashion and football to worshippers and woodlands, with some intriguing and unplanned interlinking moments. The writers – Sarah-Clare Conlon, David Gaffney, Abi Hynes, Nicholas Royle, Reshma Ruia and Joe Stretch – performed the six short stories as part of Macclesfield’s LIT festival. For an extra layer of intrigue, each story was set against its own backdrop of specially commissioned visuals by Not Quite Light photographer Simon Buckley, who captures on film the half-light of dawn and dusk, including the now-famous Stephen Fry-praised Lowry-esque Manchester Rainstorm, Deansgate featured in the Observer.
Re/Place for Chorlton Arts Festival
Always wanted to go behind the scenes in Longford Cinema or Cosgrove Hall? Ever wondered what the Sedge Lynn used to be or why Chorltonville is unique? Never knew about the Chorlton Park paddling pool or what happened to the Chorlton Green church whose graveyard and lychgate still remain? As part of Chorlton Arts Festival 2015, six critically acclaimed and award-winning writers each sharing an interest in psychogeography and urban exploration penned pieces about ghost places and the re-appropriation of spaces. Sarah Butler, Sarah-Clare Conlon, Claire Dean, Kate Feld, David Gaffney and Nicholas Royle performed their site-specific short stories and presented postcards from the past at a special event, which included a screening of private home movies shot in Chorlton in the fifties and sixties, provided by the North West Film Archive.
Re/Place(d) for Didsbury Arts Festival
From the Gates of Hell to a grand Victorian railway hotel, DAF goers were invited to take a tour of local places through the site-specific short stories of critically acclaimed and award-winning writers Elizabeth Baines, Sarah Butler, Sarah-Clare Conlon, David Gaffney, Nicholas Royle and Adrian Slatcher, set against a backdrop of archive film and photography. To bring audiences “stories that are right up your street”, the six Re/Place(d) writers explored places and spaces from around Didsbury, including a grand railway hotel gone to the dogs, a Victorian villa with unique stained glass windows and an Art Deco block of flats with a mysterious safe. The writers explored the locations, found out about their history and chatted to current users. Partners such as North West Film Archive, Manchester Modernist Society, Loiterers’ Resistance Movement, Didsbury Parsonage Trust, Didsbury Open Gardens, the area’s residents’ associations, and local history and reading groups all played a part in contributing.
Re/Place(s) for Victoria Baths Weekend Of Words
Audiences were invited to dive into the public places and secret spaces of this historic building with six specially commissioned short stories inspired by Victoria Baths performed in the middle pool. Illuminated by magical projections, this atmospheric, entertaining and social evening, during the Baths’ first-ever Weekend of Words festival, saw the bar open and the writers in their midst. The Re/place(s) project incorporated an interest in places and spaces, history and heritage, psychogeography and urban exploration, and in this case, the act of swimming – linking to a renewed interest in public and community swimming – in municipal baths, lidos and even wild water. The six commissioned writers explored “Manchester’s Water Palace”, found out about its history since 1906 and chatted to current and former users, working with the Victoria Baths Archive Team to tap into the extensive on-site archive material as inspiration for the stories.
Station Stories for Manchester Literature Festival
Station Stories was a unique site specific live literature promenade event using technology and live improvised electronic sound. From platform to platform, café to café and shop to shop, six writers guided audiences on a tour of Piccadilly Station and read specially commissioned stories inspired by the hub and the people who use it and work there. A unique live literature promenade performance, it featured live improvised sounds using samples of ambient station noises as they happened. Audiences were linked to the writers’ microphones by headsets using wireless technology, making the event unobtrusive and ensuring the audience heard every single word, while still experiencing the live ambience of the location. A musician accompanied the writers and improvised music using sampled live sounds from the station, manipulating these sounds and playing them into the audience’s headsets between and underneath the text. The writers interacted with passing members of the public unaware that a performance was taking place. Station Stories explored the day-to-day life of the station – its platforms, its workers, the journeys people take, the waiting, the encounters, the thrill, the loneliness, the joy. It expressed the peculiar, unique qualities of this marginal, in-between world, where anything can happen – and often does. "Absolutely knocked out by the @stationstories performance in Piccadilly Station today. Spellbinding and inspiring. 2 more days to see it. Go!!” Guy Garvey via twitter
FaxFiction for Refract:19 festival
FaxFiction saw six writers produce six brand-new pieces of text which focussed on old technologies – think the music cassette tape, the personal calculator, the floppy disc, home recorded video tapes, analogue cameras, instant Polaroids, 35ml slides in a carousel, acetate slide projectors, dial-up internet modems, ansamachines, old WEM tape echo machines for singers, part work magazines, vinyl records, megaphones, Myspace websites, CB radio, viewmasters, dictaphones, Ceefax, reel to reel tape, and dozens of others. The project ended with a performance which utilised some of these technologies to bring the works to life. The project was engaging – there is a fascination around how we functioned with these old machines, and how these “modern” artefacts will become the relics of the future.
The Three Rooms In Valerie’s Head for Lakes International Comic Art Festival
A live graphic novel performance with specially commissioned music, The Three Rooms In Valerie’s Head by Dan Berry and David Gaffney was a Lakes International Comic Art Festival commission. Experimental and original, it featured a live performance at the globally renowned festival in Kendal of the graphic novel with projected images and specially commissioned music by acclaimed recording artist Sara Lowes. The piece explores relationships, memory, loneliness and obsession in a darkly humorous way, and was also published in book form. Dan Berry is an illustrator, designer, cartoonist and lecturer. David Gaffney is an acclaimed short fiction writer and this was his debut comic art collaboration.
Men Who Like Women Who Smell Of Their Jobs for Manchester Literature Festival
Alison Erika Forde creates daydream-inspired paintings and misleading twists on reality with a pinch of mischief and dark humour. For Manchester Literature Festival 2014, she produced a set of works based on the short stories of David Gaffney. Called Men Who Like Women Who Smell Of Their Jobs, it was exhibited at the John Rylands Library in Manchester. The exhibition was launched at the John Rylands Library, and featured an introduction to the work by Alison, a reading from David Gaffney, performances by short fiction writers Socrates Adams and Anneliese Mackintosh, and ended with an intimate sharing of specially commissioned music based on the texts from electronic/ambient two-piece O>L>A.