2016-2021
A new public programme for the Barbican's foyer spaces, developed, produced, curated and programmed by Razia Jordan and me, in collaboration with internal colleagues and independent artists and producers.
The programme was designed to nurture space for cultural production beyond traditional art form disciplines — talks, events, festivals, residencies, installations and exhibitions. It was also part of a larger project to redesign the Barbican's foyers, led with Laura Whitticase, working with architects Witherford Watson Mann.
Projects over five years included commissions for the exterior wall of the concert hall; live residencies in a newly-created studio space; rapid-response talks and events; literary festivals; architectural installations and interventions; 3D light installations; and cinemas for sound.
In May 2020, Razia and I co-wrote an essay reflecting on our experiences curating these spaces , which you can read here. This press release from late-2020 offers a broader sense of our activity.
The anthropologist Isobel Gibbin observed our work closely:
Until recently, the foyers were ungoverned spaces that nobody seemed to know what to do with; they were threadbare, undecorated, and badly furnished. Barely anyone hung out there during the daytime, and they seemed to have none of the ‘character’ or ‘vibe’ that people talk about now. Whilst small exhibitions or artworks would be put on display every now and then, these opportunities mainly came along by chance and there was no real curatorial vision. Over the past few years, however, the foyers have been subject to strategic planning and conversations about what they ought to be. The Incubator team, along with a diverse, ad-hoc coalition drawn from all over the Centre (the ‘Foyer Group’) were responsible for most of these changes. They secured the money, worked with architects on a design for the area, and brought the space to life by drawing up a free arts programme. They also resolved some of the factional tensions between previous ‘owners’ of the foyers, drawing a number of different curatorial perspectives into the mix. ‘Culturally it was just a war zone. Nobody could have a conversation about this space. People were very territorial, very oppositional...’ ... Where the concert hall or theatre were wedded - by the constraints of their physical design - to specific genres, the foyers could play host to almost any artwork. They were free to enter, and unassigned to any one social group.”
The foyer group Isobel refers to consisted of Tim Bifield, Rachel Lincoln (succeeded by Adam Davison) and Pheona Kidd.
Just as the metaphor of boundaries extended to perceived divisions within the institution, the foyer’s lack of boundaries was used to designate proper ways of working within them. The Foyer Group was an informal one, formed through conversation and sheer enthusiasm for the idea of a creative programme for the space. It comprised workers of different levels from several departments, some of whom had not worked together before. It was rarely discussed at line management meetings, and disembedded from most of the usual Barbican hierarchies. Time spent on the foyers was stolen, piecemeal, from the working day. It ran on favours and goodwill – which, though seemingly never in short supply at the Barbican, were very hard to forecast. This was in many ways an impractical arrangement that required a lot more flexibility and informal co-ordination than normal ways of working. There was some debate amongst the interviewees about whether this was a good thing. Formal allocation of time and resources would be welcome, but participants were unwilling to forgo the egalitarian, cross-departmental, and unstructured nature of the group: ‘perhaps using the existing hierarchy in this way undermines the point of the project?