How Can I Stay? Setting up freedoms

I feel the steep incline in my thighs and slippery mud underfoot as I climb the track leading up the hill behind the pink-painted cafe on Chesil Beach. I catch my breath and take in the view as the track joins the South West Coast Path. Behind me, the vast pebble beach and glistening grey-blue of the sea; above, mottled grey skies. I'm on Portland, Dorset and I have the feeling I always get when I set foot here: a mixture of excitement and a calm clear-headedness.

This moment was part of my walk to Sweet Hill Farm, where I was to spend the day with creative practitioners from across the South West looking at migratory freedoms and how to sustain creative connections. The route took me past St George’s Church on the cliff at Reforne, where I stopped to take in The SIM Project, an exhibition that explored the creative value of migration stories.

The exhibition included glass prints made by participants with experience of displacement from countries including Afghanistan, Syria, Turkey, Venezuela, Hong Kong, Ethiopia and Colombia. The project, part of b-side festival 2024, set out to give material meaning to the virtual networks of displaced people, focusing on the SIM card as an international ID and tool for intimate connections. Some of the participants were from the Bibby Stockholm, a barge housing asylum seekers which is moored off Portland, where my friends who had originally been accommodated in my chosen home of Margate had recently been sent. Already the connections were palpable.

I arrived at Sweet Hill Farm to find people huddling out of the rain with warm cups of tea, coffee or mushroom brew. Shared food, drinks and experiences were to play an important part in the event.

How can I stay? (I don’t want to not want to stay)

How can I stay? was the provocation and theme for the day and participants took time getting to know one another through their introductions and responses to the theme.

For some, the theme referenced being from a Global Majority background working in the arts in a rural and coastal setting. Fears of racism and othering were shared. This was in contrast with the positive response to the Bibby Stockholm from Portland’s creative and wider community, evidenced in the formation of the Portland Global Friendship Group.

Others talked about physical connectedness with a place through geology, the body and activities like walking. Participants talked about ill health, disability and neurodiversity; and the difficulties of being able to be physically present in creative spaces. This led to conversations about slow practice, access and collaboration.

One participant said: “How can I stay working and make my practice happen, when I find it incredibly difficult to go to cities and to travel? b-side brings art here and that’s a massive thing.”

People talked about the precarity of living in places like Portland because of the lack of paid work, affordable housing and transport. They talked about trying to find ways to sustain their art practice, find exhibition opportunities and create artist-led spaces and networks of support. They talked about choice and privilege: who gets to stay and where? They talked about borderlessness and uprootedness. Several people talked about how to balance the multiple roles of employee, parent and artist, and saw themselves as leading several “different lives” or “double lives”. Finally, people talked about home and how you might know when you’ve found it; how and whether to put down roots.

Some comments included:

“I don’t know where my place is. I would love to build roots in some way.”

“Do I have to get a sensible, non-art job? Is there another way to get funding to keep doing what I’m doing?”

“I’m physically living in my transport to enable me to travel and make art.”

For me, the theme raised the question: how can I keep coming back to this place that I feel so creatively connected with? My family is from Dorset and I have always loved the coast and the landscape. I was also fortunate to be able to re-explore Portland through a series of co-creation workshops and performative walks that I was commissioned to run as one half of the Promenade duo during b-side 2021. The connections I made then brought me back today.

Asylum, displacement and connection

Annika Frankenstein talked about how the Portland Global Friendship Group had come about in response to the Bibby Stockholm being moored in Portland Marina.

“At first we thought there was no way that this could happen…Then it arrived here. Lots of locals were terrified about refugees and there was dreadful misinformation about the people who were being sent here. We knew we had to combat this. We didn’t know what we were doing or how to organise ourselves, but Weymouth and Portland does have a really beautiful community that pulls together.

“We did a Right to Remain day course explaining the asylum process, which really helped our understanding, and every day was a learning experience about how to help people while they’re here… We weren’t even allowed through the airport-style security so how could we even reach out to them? We made a simple postcard with contact details and created opportunities for people to meet each other.”

Tom Green from Counterpoint Arts – a national organisation in the field of arts, migration and cultural change – reflected on this show of support and friendship from the Portland community:

“This story is happily a common story, where asylum seekers tend to be sent to under-resourced places and, without exception, people from those communities respond with friendship and practical support.

“What you often see is that arts and culture is a brilliant way to give a different perspective and build connections…Very often where asylum seekers are in these places people become friends, but when they are free to leave they feel there’s nothing there for them. They move to a big city where they have more cultural connections.”

Participants from Portland shared that while the Bibby Stockholm is part of a system of violence and should be closed down, it has been a positive force for the local community and its departure means that now their friends will be leaving.

This raised questions of how to maintain connections with asylum seekers and refugees when they were forced to or chose to leave communities where they had forged friendships.

Reimagining rural touring

The group considered ideas around rural touring, and how important it is to have different art, perspectives and experiences happening in different places. We examined the questions:

• How do you know if what you’re doing is worthwhile, how might you assess that?
• How do you get your work to places where it will be meaningful, without diluting it?

We heard that the classic rural touring format could be problematic, with artists brought in to places for a very short time. This could be well received by artists in that place, but does not engage the wider community.

Festivals were seen as a more positive model that placed visiting artists in a context that people were already familiar with. Locals would trust the festival and get to see things that they wouldn’t necessarily go to otherwise.

The group also talked about sustainable travel and ways to encourage that, where appropriate. Ideas included ensuring that travel time was funded; providing substantial discounts to events where people could prove they had travelled on foot, bike or public transport; including a ‘green fund’ in the artist budget to enable sustainable travel; and encouraging environmentally linked activities, such as litter picks, along the route.

We considered issues with racism and inclusion, with the example of theatre companies who want to diversify their performers but artists who do not always want to tour rurally. There were both real and perceived risks and challenges for Global Majority and LGBTQI+ artists going into rural areas, and yet those places need access to these artists to counter discrimination.

Festivals were also recognised as good at encouraging their communities to show themselves as kind and supportive. Building on these qualities and bringing in music and food, which transcend social divides, was a potential solution.

Creating connections between groups that were very rooted in their places to examine what’s universal and what’s specific about their experiences was seen as a positive idea. Building on that, other ideas included exchange as practice, town twinning and artist buddying.

The group recognised the importance of provocation, openness and cross-pollination; as well as programmers who were anchored within the community and could build trust.

Hannah Rose from Visual Arts South West said:

“You don’t necessarily know if something is worthwhile for years and years. Sometimes it takes ten years to look back on something you’ve done and understand that. But it is possible to build the relationships that allow for the ripple and reverberations to happen.”

Money, value and asking for what you need

“Money is uncomfortable, but important,” said Rachael Clerke, who describes themselves as an artist, Scottish, queer and a cyclist. They led a conversation on alternative economies, desire and asking for things, which started with them declaring how much they were being paid to run the session.

They led us through several quick-fire activities, including lining ourselves up in order of how comfortable we felt talking about money, getting us to play scratch cards and declare what we would spend the money on if we won, and providing one another with one piece of financial advice.

Their advice for setting a price for your art was to start higher than you feel comfortable with. “If you’re very comfortable with your rate you’re not charging enough,” they said.

Rachael also shared ‘The Triangle Rule’, which encourages you to only take on work that feeds at least two points of the triangle:

• My heart: “I really want to do it”
• My career: “this will develop me and/or get me closer to where I want to be”
• My bank balance: “this will pay me well enough to be meaningful”.

Acknowledging how tough it is for creatives, especially those working in rural areas right now, Rachel challenged us to act. They encouraged us, there and then, to write to our local MPs and/or Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy to highlight the importance of the arts and funding for it. We won't hold our breath but it felt good to collectively take rapid action.

Framing ourselves in the landscape

The group was offered the opportunity to have their headshots taken in the landscape of Portland as part of the day. This was recognised as an important asset for artists to have, but not something they often found easy or affordable.

It provided us with a chance to see ourselves and one another in this place where many of us have, or are growing, roots.

Knot making to tell stories and solidify ties

Our final activity was led by artist Carrie Mason, who was part of the b-side New Curators 2023 project The Siren (of rOpes + Dreams). Carrie combines systematic mark making with an experimental approach to using materials, and this activity involved khipu (or quipu), the ancient South American technique of recording information using knotted cords.

She explained that it had been used for census or tax purposes and to share information between villages or tribes. Its beauty is in storytelling, though the story is encoded through the knots so it could be used for secret or private information.

We were shown different knots and how to start off a khipu and given tags to share our names, wants and needs for others in the group to respond to. People were encouraged to read through the wants and needs and add their names where these were relevant to them.

It was a beautiful way to physically demonstrate our new ties and to ensure that connections made during the day could be sustained in the future.

Acknowledgements
Jessica Taggart Rose is a poet concerned with humanity, nature and how they interact. Her debut pamphlet, The river has no colour, is out in November 2024 with The New Menard Press. Widely published in anthologies, journals and zines, Jess performs across the UK and, sometimes, in Europe. She is one half of the Promenade duo, performing a series of performative walks for b-side 2021.

A founding member of Poets for the Planet, Jessica runs writing in nature workshops, developed as part of the Artful Scribe Writers Against Coastal Waste project in partnership with Southampton University. She lives by the sea in Margate, Kent where she's part of the Margate Bookie lit fest team and runs Margate Stanza