Expect fun with an exciting twist at The Lock-Up's immersive summer show for people with a sense of adventure.
The Dance of the Remediators tells an imaginative story about a future Newcastle where children have risen to the challenge posed by the climate crisis.
In this fictional narrative, the children conspire to dismantle coal infrastructure. The Lock-Up serves as their headquarters, where they can reside and take refuge in cubby house structures.
:We were inspired by the way kids can take existing things and reimagine them," says Hugo Moline, who has created the show with partner Heidi Axelsen. The couple have two children.
"There is a narrative that will be playing that tells a fantastic story of all the children disappearing, going underground and then coming back up in these structures to start reinventing, stealing the coal, reinventing how things are done."
The exhibition strikes a balance between playfulness and contemplation, and showcases a diverse range of tactile and intricately designed structures, photographs and installations.
It will inspire people of all age groups - "from three to 99," Moline says.
"We give thanks and honour to the coal for all it's done, and see that 300 million years work of these tiny plants, drawing in the air and carbon dioxide of the sunshine, turning that into the energy we now have," he says.
The show includes a pile of coal, which visitors are free to take a piece ("Some bags will be stamped 'bury this treasure by order of the Cubby Coal Care Committee,' " Moline says). There are also rotating videos, beautiful ferns and an incredible cubbyhouse structure.
The project began to take shape about six months ago, Moline says.
"We kind of started with thinking about all of Newcastle is built literally and figuratively on coal. And that it was all the mine subsidence. It's kind of been hollowed out. No one knows quite how the spaces work," Moline says.
"That, together with this space [The Lock-Up], which is tunnel-like in itself. We wanted to bring something different to that dark history of the prison and the mine, to kind of rethink them through play and intimacy through the cubby."
The Dance of the Remediators is an archive of a possible future; a materialised dream sequence of people being called into action by coal's humble living relatives.
The press release for the show asks, "By recalling coal's long photosynthetic memory, can we salvage the future?...
"This work prototypes earnest and absurd devices, gentle megastructures and everyday actions, for remaking the world through care, play, wonder and hope."
The Lock-Up director Warwick Heywood says of the show, "I think it will a beautiful show with all the textured elements in it, like the wood (cubbyhouse), flannel sheets, it's very evocative. And then the texture of the coal - a strange rock, and the ferns, it will be quite engaging. A sensual show, as well as quite conceptual. I think it works really well... "
Axelsen and Moline are a collaborative creative duo working between the discursive criticality of arts practice and the applied, spatial and urban scales of architecture and design. The couple are the directors of MAPA Art & Architecture and are part of The Lot collective.
Jess Scully, author of Glimpses Of Utopia: Real Ideas for a Fairer World, who will be opening the show, said on social media:" I think they're creating something special. They're using play to spark the visioning we need to see beyond this moment, to suggest the adaptability we need to cultivate and to prefigure the rituals we need to invent, to help us transition to a future we can actually look forward to."
