This Festival of Ideas event at The Attenborough Centre (ACCA) earlier this week was packed full of art devotees with a certain passion for underground culture and rave music.
The Sussex Festival of Ideas is a dynamic and engaging programme of talks, events and activities, from the School of Media, Arts and Humanities and this talk was arranged through this. Introduced with a talk about a brand new industry focused BA degree in Creative Industries at the University of Sussex, the programme is part of a wider platform of annual events which runs until June 2024.
Compered by Professor Claire Langhammer, this was simultaneously a talk, Q&A, film, and book event with Turner Prize-winning artist (and University of Sussex History of Art alumnus) Jeremy Deller.
Deller, who is a conceptual, video and installation artist covered a free-range series of memories exploring new and old projects including Sacrilege, a huge inflatable version of monolithic Stonehenge which toured the country and became part of the Cultural Olympiad during the UK 2012 Olympics.
Other events included his hard-hitting reenactment The Battle of Orgreave dating from 2001 and which was a replay of a key event during the British 1984 Miners Strike which was a bloody battle between police and miners taking place in Orgreave, Yorkshire.
Jeremy Deller discussed the similarities between these three projects as cover versions, and talked about his love of the cover version as a trope. Thinking about the Stonehenge installation as a cover, recreating Orgreave as a cover version, and mentioning his favourite cover version, that of country singer Willie Nelson’s take on Jamaican singer Jimmy Cliff’s reggae classic The Harder They Come.
He went on to explore the burgeoning rave scene from the mid-1980s onwards, comparing Edwardian footage of 19th-century factory workers leaving factories en masse at the end of each day, with ravers queuing to get into the same old industrial areas for raves in the same towns, 100 years later.
Also explored over the evening were his experience of filming both Brexit, and anti-Brexit protests in London and the ideas and signs noticed during that time whilst exploring notions of identity and multiculturalism, followed by a discussion around his artwork to commemorate the Battle of The Somme during World War 1 on 1st July 2016, entitled We’re Here Because We’re Here.
This public event which took place across the UK including Northern Ireland, was made in collaboration with Rufus Norris, director of the National Theatre, and included volunteers dressed as First World War soldiers appearing unexpectedly in areas across the UK.
The second part of this event included the full showing (in two parts due to a technical hitch!) Deller’s 2019 homage to the development and events surfacing during and through UK rave culture, Everybody in the Place: An Incomplete History of Britain 1984-1992.
This was a popular look at the memories of this period of seismic change in society during this period and filmed as seen through the eyes of first and second-generation immigrant British school students living in London. This created a meta layer of discussion and narrative around what happened, so part history lesson and part anthropological event to look at life before social media and dancing just because you want to even if no one’s watching.
I so enjoyed this. All of it, but the film especially, utilising contemporary experiences, archival footage and memories of the era. As someone who was there, it provoked many happy and also complex memories and encouraged me to think again about living on the edge of so many key points of time, and how alien it can seem to young people nowadays constrained as they are by the vigilance of social media.
You can watch it here.
This event was organised by University of Sussex in partnership with Towner Eastbourne.
