Participate (the diversity fayre): Geoffrey Chambers
Participate is an immersive art event, very much like a school sports day or village Fair typical in Thanet. Join in, fill out ‘the check your privilege’ questionnaire and enter your bubble. Participate.
instagram.com/imalion1
facebook.com/dread.fiyah.hand
Thank you to Looping the Loop for commissioning this project as part of Margate NOW 2020. Looping the Loop is a Thanet-based organisation on a mission to make live performance available to everyone in Thanet. We programme nationally acclaimed shows, support local artists, run participatory workshops, create live events in unexpected spaces and pop up with our street theatre actors all over Thanet bringing laughter and mayhem, joy and belonging.
loopingtheloopfestival.org.uk
instagram.com/looping_the_loop_festival_
facebook.com/loopingtheloop
What is your practice?
Interdisciplined artist and filmmaker
What drew you to this artform?
As a child I was always an avid and passionate drawer and mark maker which led me to explore other forms of art. From music, ceramics to digital forms and filmmaking, drawing has led me into finding ways to express complex ideas on overlapping perceptions, experiences and expressions across different media.
Who is your art hero?
Theaster Gates
As restrictions are lifting where will you be heading to first in Margate?
My favourite place is the Walpole Bay tidal pool.
Tell us a bit about this place
The pool is my go to place, it is not just fringed by a fantastic sandy beach it is a short walk from there to the Harbour and tide permitting, Botany Bay.
Swimming in the pool is a special treat as it is constantly fed by the tide, its clean, a safe place to swim for all abilities and for those who don’t want to swim, fishing for crabs at the edge in its clear waters is fun. A personal joy is swimming at sunset where the water is often lit in rose and gold.
What do you see the artist’s role being in the overall effort to dismantle systemic racism?
Systemic racism comes in many forms and most people are unaware that they consume a diet of media, history and education that is steeped in racism and anti blackness and bias. The role of the artist especially the anti racist artist is not just to highlight the fissures and separation that the myth of race fosters but to illuminate within the dissonant thinking that reproduces the othering into human values that sees all humans with a collective desire for unity.
As an artist who inhabits Black spaces it is through observing and experiencing the effect of systemic racism on non white bodies that we become best at imagining what freedom actually looks like.
