Billed as ‘the festival for people who think for themselves – run by artists for everyone’ SUPERNORMAL is a collaborative and experimental event that draws inspiration from its unique setting and its readiness to embrace art and music outside of the mainstream. It’s aim is to bring the visual arts into direct, even conflicting, contact with the rest of the creative population.
“We encourage invention, and the audience is crucially part of that creative process,” explains Keran James, co-organiser of SUPERNORMAL, herself an artist/curator at studio1.1, London. “There is no product – people don’t come knowing what they’ll see – that’s (just) entertainment. We aim to give something more.”
So what’s new this year? “More artists from more countries,” says James. “But we’re still resolutely committed to SUPERNORMAL staying a small, quite intimate event – the dynamic has to be maintained between performer/artist and audience that once a certain number is reached disappears, and just turns into ‘bands and punters’.”
With its decidedly ‘counter-culture’ impulse, Supernormal provides a welcome antidote amidst the glut of big business summer festivals. “Our imperatives are absolutely cultural, not commercial,” James asserts. “We are making no money which in a perverse way gives us free rein – liberating us from responsibility to anything but the artists. We want to ‘see what happens’ in a way that only an artist led set up can.”
Born out of BIAW (Braziers International Artists Workshop), an artists’ collective which started in 1995 that works in a multi-disciplinary way with international artists, SUPERNORMAL offers opportunities for artists to show their work outside of a gallery context, and break down the usual physical and cultural barriers by way of site-specific installations, impromptu happenings and interventions.
“Performances will break from the stage and ‘art’, however you define it, will either arrest or elude you throughout the weekend,” James adds. “[SUPERNORMAL] could be seen as on-going research, a real experiment in collective creativity and sustainability not far removed from the experiment that continues at Braziers Park itself and from which we are learning all the time.”
SUPERNORMAL festival takes place at Brazier’s Park, Oxfordshire, August 10-12 2012.
For more information visit www.supernormalfestival.co.uk
From the a-n archives: Serious Play by Abigail Reynolds
