Garth Gratrix, artist and Founding Director of Abingdon Studios, was commissioned to lead a-n’s first digital Assembly in 2021. The Coast Is Queer was a two-day event inviting artists, artist-led spaces, organisations and institutions who are located on the edges of the UK, to open a discussion on coastal practice and queerness.
The event aimed to address curiosity around the clandestine ways in which LGBTQIA+ artists live, work and cruise materials and spaces alone, apart and together. We questioned; How we work to define or refine a future arts sector that considers ‘queerness’ as a better starting point to ‘new-normal’? How we might collaborate with the coast, as a space for solidarity, new systems of support and respite?
Assembly Blackpool will create space to share lived experiences of being LGBTQIA+ and promenade our future queer potential.
DOWNLOAD THE FULL PROGRAMME document for artists’ listings
