MIXING IT UP Project #3: Queer, Urban Walking Project/Rusholme and Canal Street

Queer, Urban Walk, Rusholme, October 12, 2007

Doorstep Collective (Lisa Beauchamp, Poppy Bowers, and Kate Day)

Doorstep Collective is an interdisciplinary, arts collective focused on promoting more active, personal engagements with urban, creative resources. The organization’s most recent project at Cornerhouse explored the city of Manchester’s cultural networks through a mind map to which visitors were asked to contribute any space they deemed to be creative. The resulting map exhibited a complex web of creative spaces that ranged from the quirky and personal, to bars and clubs, and to more traditional institutional venues.

Building on this project, the Collective will organize directed, “queer, urban walks” in and around the geographical area roughly bound by Canal Street and Curry Mile. The artists elucidate the ways in which Mancunian subjects (re-)write spaces, emphasizing issues as diverse as gender, race, and sexuality, for instance. They also explore "creative" spaces beyond the institutional.

One walk will place on and around Canal Street; another walk will take place on and around Curry Mile.

Queer, Urban Walk, Canal Street, October 2, 2007