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Somerset House at 25: A hub of cultural innovation

Marie McPartlin is director of Somerset House Studios where she curates a space in the centre of London which hosts more than sixty resident artists working across disciplines.

Marie McPartlin
6 min read

I wasn’t entirely telling the truth in my job interview when I said I’d been to Somerset House many times. I’d been twice. The first, to see the Norwegian musician Terje Isungset play a horn crafted from a 600-year-old glacier.

The second time in 2014 was through the derelict spaces previously occupied by the Inland Revenue, now ‘Makerversity’, as they threw paint parties to convert parts of the building into one of the largest maker spaces in Europe.

When I returned for a third time, it was to watch PJ Harvey record her album The Ministry of Social Affairs in the tax office’s old gymnasium as part of Artangel’s Recording In Progress when I’d landed the job of designing and developing Somerset House Studios.

I couldn’t believe my luck. All this derelict, unoccupied space, in the belly of one of London’s grandest buildings, in the centre of my home city. And the remit: fill it with artists.

A hub of cultural innovation

During the last 25 years, Somerset House has been transformed from the home of various parts of the civil service to a hub of cultural innovation – with artists at its core.

Unlike neighbouring buildings designed for a specific cultural purpose, we’re made up of small rooms with a complex history that spans monarchy, taxation and the admiralty – some of the key mechanisms that fuelled the UK’s imperialist expansion over centuries.

Somerset House was also a site of clandestine Catholic worship at a time the faith was suppressed by the state. Remnants of the old Catholic chapel can still be seen in the form of seventeenth century headstones built into the walls underneath the courtyard.

This space is now referred to as the ‘deadhouse’ and was the location for performances by artists like Klein, Mueko! Mueko! and Beatrice Dillon in the early days of Somerset House Studios.

Subversion is a key concept

Since we started, this idea of subversion from below has been a key concept, as has curiosity about how the avant garde feeds the mainstream. We’ve drawn from clubs, independents, DIY spaces and collectives – the ecosystems that help the artist reach the point when the institution takes notice – and tried to emulate them.

Key to any ecosystem is sustainability so we work with artists over a long period, through highs and lows in their careers, through loss, breakups and global events – often on more than one project. There are between sixty and seventy resident artists at any one time, each for a period of up to seven years, alongside a number of short-term and international residencies. 

Many of our artists have never had studio space before. We work across disciplines – including dancers and writers – to run programmes and opportunities helping them to connect. The potential of bringing different practices together is huge and the projects we’re developing are becoming bigger, more complex, and harder to define within an artform, reflecting Somerset House’s own shape-shifting identity. I like this mutability, it’s creatively freeing to work in a building which is not bound to a genre.

Our most distinctive work demonstrates this hybridity, like Jenna Sutela’s work with artist-technologist Memo Atken to create a new, computer-generated language. Or Rashaad Newsome’s work with Black queer ASL interpreters, voguers and motion capture technicians to translate his poetry into a movement dataset, fuelling the performance of his protagonist in the film Hands Performance.

Intercultural mix

What we do is very London. I grew up in Brent, one of the most culturally diverse boroughs, going to Irish dancing classes in a hall used for Indian weddings, which we later visited as teens for underage jungle raves. I owe much of what I love most to the intercultural mix of the capital – and the studios are a place where that can be celebrated and protected.

For example, last March, we co-commissioned visual artist Prem Sahib to create Alleus (Suella spelled backwards) – a polyphony of live and pre-recorded voices which disrupts and re-orders a House of Commons speech by the former UK Home Secretary, Suella Braverman. And Imran Perretta’s A Riot In Three Acts – a deconstructed film set evolved from the artist’s experience during the 2011 riots – which questioned how the media interpretation of the events often failed to acknowledge the root causes.

Challenging these narratives is important in the studios’ work; but so is finding solidarity and using our space and platform to seek alternatives. One of the projects I’m most excited about is a courtyard commission with Tai Shani – The Spell or the Dream – a sculpture drawing on the archetypal image of the fairytale sleeping figure – in this context through crises – to which we will invite artists, thinkers, academics, musicians and more to imagine hopeful new ways of being and building together. Tai is brilliant and brave – an artist of exceptional talent and integrity, an artist who inspires others to be braver.

Maintaining a dynamic ecosystem

It’s not possible to meaningfully support this work without thinking about the conditions under which artists make it – their pay, representation and access. We do work with a pay rates system and with access riders, but there’s still much to be done.

Feeling part of the community is the number one reason artists give for wanting to be here, year on year. What does that tell us about what artists want our institutions to be?

As we look to the future, one challenge will be how to maintain this dynamic ecosystem and its creative potential with less funding available. But the cultural landscape is changing rapidly and, with it, the role of artists, their relationship to society and the potential for new models to emerge.

The studios’ refusal to be confined to a single narrative or function, as well as their proximity to the business of making, uniquely positions them to respond to those challenges.