On Friday 28 June we were joined in the Studio by Andy Field to give a Lunchtime Talk about his project 34 Bristols. Andy is co-director of the award-winning Forest Fringe, a community of artists making space for risk and experimentation at the Edinburgh Festival and elsewhere. For the last year he has been associate artist producer at Arnolfini in Bristol, where he has been producing 34 Bristols.

From a small village in New Brunswick to a ghost town owned by a mining corporation in Nevada there are thirty four places in the world called Bristol.

Andy explained that 34 Bristols is a collective attempt to consider our relationship to these faraway places. For each of these 34 places an artist has been invited to create a new piece of work. A performance, an installation, a story, bit of text, a picture. The artists were invited to respond to this distant place in any way they wanted. All these projects will be presented together this weekend as a miniature festival taking place in venues across the city.

He went on to say that this project will be a chance to think about distance and time and the chaotic knots that history manages to tie everything into. Perhaps most importantly, it is an opportunity to consider the many versions of this city that exist; places real, remembered or imagined. And, of course, it is a chance to build new Bristols made out of words and gestures. Reconstructions of distant places we’ve never actually visited scattered across the city that first gave them their name.

Andy explained that this project wouldn’t have been possible ten, or perhaps even five years ago. The basic tools that he and the artists have used to learn about and encounter these distant places simply didn’t exist. You couldn’t read the proceedings of town hall meetings, calculate the exact distance between this city and another in a matter of seconds, visit a tiny township’s website, send messages to its inhabitants on facebook or speak to them on Skype. Similarly as time advances new technology will be available to help us discover the towns in different ways.

Andy then opened the floor and spoke with the audience about ways to develop the project. From each town creating their own festival of 34 Bristols, to getting artists from each city to create a response about another town, to bringing artists from each town to this Bristol to create a piece of work. There are so many ways this project could be developed and expanded for Bristol and for other cities and towns around the world.

34 Bristols kicks off this Friday with ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ by Amy Sharrocks. The performance is a walk via mobile phone, satelliting around separate cities:

You are in Bristol. I will start in Bristol Road, London E8.
We will decide together which roads to walk down, describing the places and people we encounter and the surroundings we find ourselves in. Using no street names, we will build for each other a city in the other mind’s eye. A city of our own construction and naming, led by each other’s footsteps - who is going to choose where we walk today? Each walk takes approximately 30 minutes. You may not end up where you start.

Then from 8pm-10pm there will be the official project launch at Arnolfini on the 5th Floor.  Activates take place over the whole weekend and range from performances, to dinner parties, storytelling to mass drumming on the Harbourside.  You can find the full programme of events and programme on the project website here.

34 Bristols is a collaboration between Arnolfini, Bristol Old Vic, In Between Time, MAYK, M-SHED, Residence, Spike Island and Theatre Bristol.

The project is supported by Jerwood Charitable Foundation and Arts Council England.