Serena Teehan and Peter Dowie

Working with Bradòg Street Programme

Serena Teehan [DIT] and Peter Dowie [DIT]

Title: Untitled



For the seven weeks/2 nights per week that we spent on the streets of the North inner-city we tried to maintain a commitment to ground-up arts practice. We ended up, in fact, having fourteen separate engagements as each visit seemed to generate its own participants. It depended largely on chance encounter. The target was who ever we could attract and the time frame as long as we could hold them within a particular practice.

The work selected is one of the smaller pieces completed, involving three young children singing in a stairwell of the Dorset Street flats complex. It is a fragment, nothing more, of a practice that made itself about building on an existing atmosphere; where their interaction would eventually shape their participation in a finished piece and somehow redefine the familiar space. Like all fragments it carries with it random associations. The physicality of the stairwell’s presence carries with it the memory of a hundred conscious moments and discontinuities. As we recorded the scene, we were no longer the “Artist” as estranged narrator, but part of something, perhaps the struggle against a kind of cultural amnesia that erodes and undermines connectedness with our own past and collective present in which things have to made real.