A mixed bag of people – students, artists, community arts practitioners, curators, academics, community workers and volunteers and one person from the Transport network piled onto community transport minibus, driven by Mark – thanks Mark. They were given a whistle stop tour of the route and the artworks. Architectural critic Phil Griffin was on board to make the journey more entertaining and informative about Manchester’s varied regeneration with added historical and contemporary anecdotes.
Cultural Tourism. Was there any connection between the lives of the people on the bus and the lives of the community centres. Questions were asked about the centres and I know that some people were certainly on the lookout for opportunities to create stronger connections between their own work in the arts or academia and wider society. Perhaps learning about the places would increase their own cultural capital? One passenger from Manchester International Festival had just arrived in Manchester and found the tour a good way to get an overall view of the city – visiting neighbourhoods she’d never have known about otherwise and she told me that taking part in something small and obscure(!) like this was where she would really learn about the city and what artists were doing out there.
Cilla Baines from the long established and very successful Community Arts North West wanted to replicate the idea of a tour, one that would re -visit key sites and places where community arts projects around Manchester have occurred, recognising the historical significance of that area of practice to the city.
At each place, the tour group created more interest in the work itself from passers by. The fact of 15 or so people crowding around the art works drew people over, like a mini version of the art world generally I guess – what are they looking at, it must be something important?. People asked questions about the work – what was it for, what was it about – the usual questions. Particularly in Wythenshawe – a suburb that was built on the principals of a garden city – and detached from the rest of Manchester by the M56 – someone asked – so is this about Wythenshawe? Well not exactly, but then again yes…the people represented on Joe Richardson’s socio-organi-gram of CN4M and it’s environs 2008 may well have an effect in this isolated, yet self contained community and he's showing how they connect with others.
At any rate Joe’s piece may have had more relevance than the chainsaw carved tree trunk of two birds on a log that it had replaced two weeks earlier – and despite a few cracks in one of the fragile gold leafed pasting tables, where presumably someone had leaned a little too hard on the work, no further damage was reported to any of the works. And unlike the carved log, we didn’t put a cordon around anything!
