Read Ellie Beckett’s article on this year’s Festival Who Do We Think We Are?

Ellie recently completed her MA in Contemporary Art Theory at Goldsmiths and is on the b-side Board of Directors. Ellie was asked by b-side to write about her experience of the festival and it’s themes of identity and migration.

Excerpt

“As the first weekend of September arrived once more, so too did the much-anticipated b-side Arts Festival. This year, having immersed myself in the festival’s offerings on the Isle of Portland, I was left not only full with pride, but also brimming with reflections – some of which I attempt to unravel here.

It was midday but somehow it still felt like early morning. Coming back onto the island and soon bumping into all the familiar faces of b-side and friends. As if they’d never stopped running around, organising, facilitating, chatting, laughing, all night (it wouldn’t surprise me if they hadn’t). 

It had stopped raining, finally, and the sun was still burning through the morning cloud. Sally Watkins, a co-founder of b-side and a woman who one rarely, if ever, sees without a quiet sparkle of life in her eye – almost as if she’s always in on a secret that something magical is about to happen – was greeting some visitors on their way to see the exhibition of The Red Dress. 

As we passed she tore off from her conversation to stop me, an excitement and urgency in her tone;

‘Ellie, I must tell you’ she exclaimed, in reference to a conversation we’d had the night before, whilst she was washing up in the tiny kitchen of Portland’s Royal Manor Theatre, where I’d told her my thoughts about The Red Dress.

‘I’ve gone in again this morning and spent some time with it. And I’ve been thinking, it’s all about the economy.’ 

The words spilled out as she explained her ideas for the new Portland dress, which stands beside the intricate detail of The Red Dress as a blank canvas, waiting to be embroiled with the marks of Portlanders. The hope is that it will transform into a vessel of Portland identity to be mirrored back to the visitors of next year’s festival. Sally mused about how it could also become something that feeds back into the local economy. 

The Red Dress made its way to Portland after having been worked on by majority women across 51 countries. Kirsty McLeod conceived of the project in 2009 as an expression of identity without borders, uniting people through embroidery. Throughout the 14-year-evolution into its current form, the dress has become about so much more. It has become a vessel through which voices can be amplified, a vessel of self-expression, of geopolitics. Identities are held together through its material stitches and yet it becomes so much more than its materiality. Sally is, of course, right – it is about the economy. Itself funded by charities, The Red Dress economically supports the artists and communities it interacts with. All 141 commissioned embroiderers were paid for their work and continue to receive a portion of exhibition and merchandise profits, as well as the opportunity to sell their work on The Red Dress etsy shop. 

The concept of the dress is about more than just its stitching; its stitching about more than just the dress; and its journey about more than just its travelling. The dress’ feedback loops, (the artists, the dress, the journey, the economy) perforate each other to create a wider movement of support that quietly disrupts the oppressive and impoverished systems that many of these contributing artists have struggled under. The dress becomes in itself a regenerative economy. 

The theme of this year’s festival, ‘Who Do We Think We Are’, is of course also about the economy, (and much more). We live under a (financialised) structure which has formed subjects of its society (us) into products of binaries and exclusions under its pressure. How do we figure out who we are under these conditions of division? And how do we communicate between these deeply-dug borders? How can we create local, regenerative economies in a time when greed and prejudice is foundational to the global economy? These are the kinds of questions that b-side are, if not answering, asking, and certainly provoking thought upon.”

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