City of Culture: Observations on Being, A Review By Beth Carrick

After being pushed back a year by Covid, the plans for City of Culture finally came into fruition in Coventry this summer, complete with an immersive art experience, an increasingly popular for for art collectives and curators as a way to fully engage a wide range of audiences. From June to August, the 90 minute immersive art experience took place in London Road Cemetery, an undulating space of greenery and heritage that even Coventry-dwellers are not familiar with. For every 90 minute slot - which was repeated throughout the day - there were 8 spaces to be filled. It is a collaboration by two contemporary art collectives, Marshmallow Laser Feast (MLF) and York Mediale that uses a poetic narrative by Daisy Lafarge through audio and written text and complementary pieces of ambient music form Jon Hopkins, Malibu, James Bulley, Suzanne Ciani, and Jem Finer. MLF is an internationally exhibited immersive art collective that focuses on expanding the perception of their spectators whilst exploring our connection to the natural world through varied tactile technology. York Mediale, who are based in York, are a ‘new media’ art group that is focused on crossing the boundaries of old and new through their practice. At the heart of both is an expansive outlook on the art world which seeks to break down institutional barriers and inspire an embodied experience of art. Coinciding in this two month long repeated experience, the two collectives introduced Coventry to a novel way of understanding our world and the situation of art. My experience: We leave the hubbub of the still-developing city, passing through the city’s university, and walking through the unkept part of the overgrown cemetery with sunken burial grounds. We are given blindfolds, a piece of rope, and told to line up behind one another. We follow the leader as we are guided along the concrete floor that is lit up by the sound of steady tinkling music. The person behind stands on my shoe - I apologise. We reach our destination. Blindfolds are removed. We enter into a wooden hut with a black curtain and take our seats. The curtain closes, an image appears on the back wall and the poetic narrative begins which traces the life of a photon as it travels from the Sun and across space to Earth’s surface, where photosynthesis occurs. As the narrative develops, as does our vision: I slowly realise that the image is a projection of the tree that sits beyond the hut. After a while, a curtain opens and the image is gone. We walk independently to the next destination: a large overhanging tree with multiple curved wooden seats. Music encompasses us and another story begins, now of the first photosynthesizers - the single-celled algae - which first prepared the conditions for animal and human life. The music intensifies and tears fall down my face; I see others wiping their tears away too. In silence but with a new sense of togetherness, we walk up the hill to an Anglican chapel made of bricks. We are told that what is inside will respond to our presence. Mitochondria, an element of the natural environment which now lives inside us, is digitally represented on multiple screens. As we move, they move, whilst impassioned music and walls of poetry exist around us. We are guided down a long and meandering path, now we are connecting more with one another: where have you come from? What has brought you here? Through the trees and chatter we reach our destination: curved wooden stools, seats, and beds are situated in an intimate broken circle. The music starts and the poetry emerges from all around. Some of us lie down and close their eyes whilst others cross their legs and stare upwards towards the moving trees. Walking again. We reach another -but now Non-conformist- chapel affronted with slabs of poetry. As we enter, a huge vertical screen and soft repetitive crackling sound dominates the space. The digital image of a tree, marking the air particles that are invisible to the naked eye but crucially important for our existence, hypnotizes each of us. It is silent as we move away from the chapel. We are now left to our own devices. We are told to move down this path to the final part. Take the time you need, the guide said. The final piece, a piece that will be ongoing and never repeat for 1000 years, is where I collect my thoughts. Alone. Graves surround me, grounding me in the dead and the living. I take my final intake of breath after what feels like hours of being in a meditative state, and release. Reaching beyond the aesthetic, Observations on Being marks a needed cultural and spiritual refresh. Gone are the days of silently walking around a clinical gallery, avoiding eye contact with anyone close by, and perpetuating your own ideas in your own head. The IPCC report has officially confirmed that the climate crisis is indeed real and, unequivocally, we (humans) are the cause of it. The cultural industries have a huge part to play in changing our dreaded fate. They have the ability to awaken a desire to connect with the earth beneath our feet and above our heads, and ultimately highlight how much our existence relies on a healthy earth. Marshmallow Laser Feast and York Mediale successfully turned around the often tiring, greenwashing content that reminds us that we need to take action against malevolent forces which are damaging our planet. The narrative here becomes embodied and refuses to prescribe a moralising essay on what we should and shouldn’t do. It is the role of culture and its institutions to make this worldview infectious and make individuals realise that we are part of a larger mechanical system that, indeed, we owe to nature’s roots.