Friction Arts Presents: Reality Estate.

Our first blog entry! To start us off I thought I’d write a bit about how the project came about.

As with all good projects we began dreaming this project in our favourite pub. The we is Lee Griffiths and myself, Sandra Hall, both directors of Friction Arts. The Curio-City shop had been going for about 1 year and projects were really beginning to kick in and a buzz happen.

So there we were waxing lyrical about the artists that work with us, the people we’d been working with in the shop, the visitors we’d had from abroad – Isaura and Matthew. They are peace campaigners working with artists Shannon Flattery and Tim Mason in Boston USA against intense gun and gang violence in their area, that robbed Isaura of her eldest son Bobby.

Isaura and Matthew, her youngest son had visited with us in March 2006. He had spoken to young offenders that I and artist Si Walker work with regularly, attended and led community dinners/talks at the shop. They’d met parents that had lost children to gang violence from Birmingham, shared war stories late into the night.

As well as their campaigning they’d had an opportunity to be together, a rare opportunity as Isaura is such an-in-demand beacon in her community. Matthew had rarely visited outside of Boston and had a profound and revelatory experience with us, including the realisation of the intense pressure he lived with. He had never spoken of his brother’s death, leaving that to Isaura; his visit with us changed this. He returned to Boston proclaiming ‘he had found his voice’ and was going home to impact his community.

Five weeks later Matthew was murdered in Boston and we were all catapulted into a surreal US landscape. Lee and I were invited to the wake and funeral as guest speakers, an honour and a shock as the horrors of inner city US ghetto revealed themselves to us through conversations, body language and intimate stories from an extraordinary community.

So what has this got to do with ‘Reality Estate’? – well in that oblique way that pub conversations work….we were discussing, comparing the cities, reflecting on Matthew, passioning about Birmingham.. as individuals and as a group of artists Friction love and celebrate Birmingham warts ‘n all… one catchphrase is ‘no-one comes to Birmingham to be famous’.

We were all bemoaning the fact that as a humble city Birmingham doesn’t talk itself up enough – and a gem of an idea began to merge between ‘finding your voice’ – telling the truth of inner city lives – the extraordinary of the ordinary – the people that we had been meeting through our activities in the shop. Lee then crystallised this into a framework for ‘Reality Estate’ and here we are 10 weeks to countdown and I haven’t even begun to talk about what’s been going on……

You can also see some short clips of myself and Lee talking about the project background.