True stories; true geographies
A city-wide installation
Brighton Festival, 5-27 May 2007
Co-created with William Shaw, who’s idea it was to take true stories onto the streets, this unique project featured 41 pieces of narrative, found, edited, designed and reinstalled into the places they were discovered.
41 Places was a city-wide artwork of 41 true stories, installed in the place where they happened – stories of people who live, work and play in Brighton.
With new printing techniques arriving by the day, you can now put words almost anywhere. 41 Places was a bold experiment at putting stories into the built environment – you could call it site-specific publishing. With 41 Places, a piece of writing became a crafted artefact, part of the landscape and architecture of the town. Changing the context of where you read something can dramatically affect how you read it. These were stories published in their own context.
The result was that in 41 Places, narrative non-fiction miniatures become something between a giant work of art, scattered through the city, and a treasure hunt of stories.
For a free PDF copy of 41 Places: 41 Books please get in touch.
Commissioned by Brighton Festival
Photos by Kenny Laurenson