The art of renaissance

In the heart of Liverpool’s depopulated Kensington district, 400 run-down terraced homes are scheduled for demolition and redevelopment. On nearby Clare Terrace, local housing association Community Seven owns three empty flats.

A useful asset, you might think, which could provide much-needed temporary accommodation for tenants whose lives are about to be turned upside down. But Community Seven has other plans for the flats – it is letting them, for free, to a group of artists for a year.

The group for which the association will forego £7500 of rent is Metal, an arts organisation that believes access to music, drama and visual art can rebuild a community’s confidence. In an area covered by the New Deal for Communities and a housing market renewal pathfinder, Kensington’s confidence levels can be assumed to be pretty low. But Tom McGuire, executive director of Community Seven, a subsidiary of Riverside Housing Group and the area’s main social landlord, wants Kensington to be known for more than its poor statistics on health, education and crime. “When Metal came along and said ‘we want to build a dynamic relationship between the people who live here and the arts’, we found the idea compelling. The regeneration of Kensington is about achieving better housing and making it a better place to live. But the Metal project is about adding an artistic dimension to enrich people’s lives.”

These high hopes have been matched with funding – Riverside Housing has awarded Metal a £17,000 grant from its community investment fund. In return, Metal has been asked to find a creative solution to the ugly, boarded-up windows of empty homes on Clare Terrace, and to turn a patch of land behind it into a pleasant public space. Colette Bailey, managing director of Metal, says it needs a wide remit to do its work: “We have to give the artists space to develop their art. Otherwise, they work to a brief that is constricting, and the experience of the community is the poorer for it.” But that doesn’t mean they won’t listen to local people, Bailey says. “We haven’t arrived thinking ‘Metal has all the answers’. It’ll be a process of getting to know the community.”

A bit abstract

It’s not obvious with all aspects of the project exactly how they are designed to benefit the community. So far, resident artist Franklin Aguirre has painted “Bush Stop” on the road in front of an actual bus-stop to get passengers talking. And in a piece of performance art, he lay on the ground under a white sheet in Liverpool’s Albert Dock, in an attempt to draw curious passers-by into conversation with this “dead body”.

International artists have also been invited for “informal” residences, with no specific brief. The first group of five Colombian artists made local contacts through an open day, visited schools and held workshops with All Arts, another Kensington-based arts organisation. One of them, Ruben Antorverza, led a number of workshops on grafitti and stencilling. According to Metal’s project manager Aaron Cezar, these went down extremely well: “They used graffiti art to demonstrate the potential to convey ideas through visuals,” he says.

Metal has previously helped to renovate run-down school yards and organise street parties (see box, right), and it has plenty of other undertakings in mind. Its busy programme of residences and events for 2005 includes getting Liverpool-based musician and filmmaker Patrick Dineen to start a community film project on health issues in February; a parallel project will chart renovations to the ground floor of the Clare Terrace flats, which the artists plan to transform into studio space for artists and locals alike.

In April, Metal has invited South African musician Neo Muyanga for a return visit to direct a choir performance of a work written in November last year with pupils at the local Broadgreen High School. In the same month, artists from China and Colombia will also take up residence.

Measuring the benefits of such projects is the hard part. At the end of the 12 months, McGuire says the project’s future will depend on “our assessment of the extent they’ve engaged with locals and what they can show their projects have achieved”. Tangible outcomes to date are graffiti on the walls at Clare Terrace, and a copy of “Bush Stop” painted in one of the bedrooms. And how would Metal, an organisation that believes art should be left to “do its own thing”, provide evidence of its success anyway?

“We keep good statistics, evaluate our projects and are versed in the language of reporting to funding bodies,” Bailey says. “But there is also anecdotal evidence, the individual stories and experiences you can’t measure – like the boy at Broadgreen school who started learning the trumpet as a result of Neo Muyanga’s visit.”

On the weekend before Christmas, Metal held a party on Prescot Road, Kensington’s run-down retail thoroughfare. Eighty shops put up lights and decorations and the switch-on ceremony was accompanied by a brass band, string quartet, dancers and jugglers. But attendance was lower than Metal had hoped. Giving a disappointed shrug, McGuire says: “It was wonderful, but it didn’t manage to attract as many people as they wanted.”

The project clearly has some way to go in making its presence widely felt: when Housing Today spoke to three locals on the streets of Kensington, none had heard of Metal or the Prescot Road event. But one local resident, Ruth Conway, was supportive of bringing arts into the community. “If a lot of people are interested and taking part, that’s brilliant,” she said.

McGuire remains hopeful that Metal will prove a valued tenant of Clare Terrace sand be able to reach out to residents. After all, Liverpool has been judged the European capital of culture for 2008, so why should all the artistic ventures be limited to affluent parts of the city? McGuire says: “There is real creativity and people with talent in Kensington, just as there is everywhere else. It can either be frustrated or realised.”