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

MIXING IT UP Project #2: Generosity Cake Project

Produced by artist Paul Stanley & Doorstep Collective’s Lisa Beauchamp

Stanley and Beauchamp appropriate an image of a chicken tikka kekab, heavily associated with "South Asian" communities, for the surfaces of their cakes to confuse what might be the expected bodily sensation of such visual stimuli. The bodily sensation typically evoked by such an image is confounded by that of the sugary sweetness normally expected of the confectionary on which the image is found. The artists draw attention to the connection between visual and socially constructed knowledge embedded in the body, itself, by subverting how urban subjects habitually respond to visual stimuli, for instance, of perceived, “South Asian” or “gay” subjects in the city.

The artists also interrogate larger questions of what makes an image “South Asian” (its author, audience, geographical location, or content) and who can and cannot deploy such images. Further, they explore the centrality of generosity in re-working maligned or marginalized identities (the queer in South Asian and the South Asian in queer).

Cake will be given out around the end of Ramadan, the month of fasting and a Muslim religious holiday that encourages just this kind of generosity. The artist underscores the role of each citizen in creating, or re-shaping collective and individual urban identities.