• Share on Facebook
  • Share on Facebook
  • Share on Linkedin
  • Share by email
  • Share on Facebook
  • Share on Facebook
  • Share on Linkedin
  • Share by email

Mark Hewitt profiles an innovative scheme that encourages writers to respond to their environment.

Writers like residencies. At least in principle. A chance to be paid to write as opposed to teaching or reviewing, or whatever else it is that has to be done on a regular basis to bring in the money. An opportunity to add to the oeuvre in a way that is, perhaps, unforeseen and unexpected ? drawing on stimuli presented on a platter rather than having to dredge it up from the imaginative entrails. Then there?s meeting new people, going somewhere different. And, of course, money in the bank: a few bills paid. So, yes, writers tend to like residencies. But for the writers ? and for the host or commissioning organisation and for the project managers ? you never quite know what you?re going to get. And maybe that?s part of the attraction. Even if all looks straightforward on the surface, it is invariably a journey into the unknown.

Architexts is a project originally set up by Arts Council England, South East, which they have continued to fund as an experiment in bringing together writers and architectural locations to see what emerges when the one begins responding creatively to the other. A first round of nine residencies saw a range of writers and poets compete for the opportunity to nominate an architectural location of their choice, somewhere in the South East, and respond creatively to it ? or to create work in response to a couple of high-profile, pre-selected locations with host organisations that were partners in the project. The residencies led to a range of outcomes during Architecture Week 2002 and the publication of a CD-Rom containing all the writings, plus commissioned photographs and background information on all of the buildings and sites. A second round of residencies during 2004/05 led to new writings inspired by six further locations and the eventual publication of work from all fifteen of the residencies along with a wealth of photographic and archive material during Architecture Week 2005.

For the writers, the brief was simple. Visit your location, produce work in response to it. And what a range of locations: from Bluewater shopping centre to Winchester Cathedral, from the iconic grandeur of thirties modernist buildings such as the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea to a Victorian taxidermist?s shed in Hove. From virtual spaces that are still ideas, like Oxford Children?s Book Centre, to structures brought into being in the shadow of world wars, like St Dunstan?s home for blind ex-servicemen or the Chattri Memorial on the South Downs, a monument to serving Sikh and Hindu soldiers who died in hospitals in Brighton and Hove during World War I. But you never quite know what you?re going to get. And, as the project co-ordinator for twelve of these architexts residencies, I can verify that each residency grew and developed organically, in accordance with its own inscrutable logic, like some strange, exotic vegetable.

Poet and writer Ros Barber (not herself a strange, exotic vegetable) nominated Embassy Court as her structure of choice for Architecture Week 2002, a controversial and tragically dilapidated modernist block of flats on Brighton seafront. This building is loved and loathed in equal measure by local people but occupies a significant place in architectural history (built by Canadian architect Wells Coates ? the designer of the Bakelite wireless cabinet ? in 1935) and is certainly much loved by Ros, who had recently moved into a house very close to the structure. Given the proximity of the writer to the location and given the enthusiastic support of the estate agents representing the property (who happily granted access to restricted areas of the building and offered space in the foyer for exhibiting work-in-progress), this seemed like one of the most straightforward of residencies. And Ros?s elegant sonnet sequence portraying the life of the building in terms of the rise and demise of a beautiful woman, was one of the most ambitious contributions to the project. Yet when she came to exhibit the work during Architecture Week 2003, the freeholders materialised from nowhere to intervene in the intervention, flatly refusing permission to display the poems, claiming that the building was not a fit subject for poetry unless it was ?written on toilet paper". Yet the writer?s appetite for residencies is undaunted: ?Okay, so it was all sorts of trouble trying to get any co-operation from the hosts, and I had to give up my lovely idea of involving all the residents with an interactive display in the foyer. ?But once I had accepted that I was going to have to forge ahead without co-operation or proper access to the building and that all I could really do was concentrate on writing the sonnets, I had a fabulous time.

Residencies shouldn?t be too easy. Easy leads to boring, sanitised writing. I love being ?forced? to write about things I wouldn?t normally write about ? that feeling of really having to come up with something really good because I am being paid ?Proper Money? and the results will be public.?

Models of best practice? Begin with a good idea. Be alert. Be flexible. Try not to be over-prescriptive. Take up regular prayer to your deity.

Mark Hewitt is the Artistic Director of the Lewes Live Literature Festival, a freelance literature development worker and a writer.

w: http://www.architexts.org.uk The site will be maintained as a resource that has the capacity to be extended to include future residencies.