The Decorators are King's Cross and Central Saint Martins Artists in Residence 2024
- Written byInternal Communications
- Published date 08 February 2024
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The multidisciplinary art and design collective (alumni of Spatial Practices) are working on a programme combining music, sound, dance and live performance. The King’s Cross and Central Saint Martins Artist-in-Residence will culminate in “a monument for a moment”, a large-scale installation in Spring 2024, showcasing the talents of young people from across King’s Cross and Camden.
King’s Cross has a long history of young people self-organising and coming together through moments of creative individual and collective self-expression in public. The residency will pay tribute to the area’s alternative music heritage as home to the rave and clubbing scene and youth movements of the 1980s and 90s. King’s Cross became a global centre of innovation and creativity through the production of cutting-edge sounds and ‘free-parties,’ which combined the latest technologies with a D-I-Y approach, using whatever was at hand to transform empty derelict spaces into temporary magical, sensorial environments. The work will come to life through two moments in 2024.
In February, a dance challenge trail will weave together the organic emergence of dance groups around the estate with the legacy and present environment of King’s Cross.
In May 2024, the residency will culminate in a major public installation and series of performances by young artists, musicians and dancers from King’s Cross and the wider boroughs of Camden and Islington.
Led by The Decorators and delivered in collaboration with the King’s Cross-based social enterprise FishTank and students from CSM Spatial Practices, the project will temporarily unveil some of these hidden music histories of King’s Cross while showcasing the creativity of local young people today. It will build new collaborations between local youth organisations, Central Saint Martins and the King’s Cross estate, co-creating with young people to claim their place in public space as producers and playful users.
The Decorators
The Decorators is a multidisciplinary art and design collective led by Xavier Llarch Font and founded alongside Mariana Pestana, Suzanne O’Connell and Carolina Caicedo in 2011. Working at the human scale alongside large scale developments, they collaborate with local people to create experiences that prototype new community relations, networks and uses. Driven by the principle that people make places, their work is concerned with creating spatial opportunities for social interaction or participation in the communities they work in.