Rajni Shah and co are in Eldon Square this week - 10th - 13th Oct everyday, 8 til 8, just like the shops! 

They are inviting passers-by to stop for a chat and a cup of tea and to write a letter to a stranger...
Development for their project 'Glorious,' part of the Wunderbar Festival 2011. 

You can't miss the cosy sofas at the top of the escalators between Boots and John Lewis - stop by and say hello. 

Our recent call for Human Books for the Human Library received an overwhelming response and the application process has come to a close. 

Our recent call for Human Books for the Human Library received an overwhelming response and the application process has come to a close. 

We have spent the last few weeks ‘reading' a wide range of books from all walks of life and soon our library catalogue will be bursting with these fascinating stories. We are looking forward to meeting all the Human Books in person this week at Gateshead Central Library to get to know each other and share our stories...

We're live!

Full programme is now online! Let us know what you think....

Our first day at A SCHOOL.

We've dusted, we've mopped, we've washed windows, we've got quite far with 'direct responses' and 'technical points'...

We're at number 69 Westgate Road, getting ready. 

Drop by if you're passing!

Timetable coming soon. As well as Iris And Harriet Have A Chat. Watch this cloudy space...

Culture Lab Radio, hosted by Ko-Le Chen (station manager) is the station-in-residence at this year's Wunderbar Festival.

The Wunderbar radio programme will feature speech, music and sonic memories collected by Ko-Le Chen and all participating artists during the festival.

The collaboration between Wunderbar and Culture Lab Radio also marks the beginning of a shared thinking process between Ilana Mitchell and Ko-Le Chen. Both artists have been "looking for alternatives" whilst complying to the general guidelines and norms in their daily practice. Broadcasting audio content that does not follow the established protocol of radio production is an attempt to publish their thinking process and offering the online radio station as a reflective space for anyone who wish to take part in looking for alternatives.

 A SCHOOL is shaping up...

We are putting in the hours at 69 Westgate Road. There have been a lot of wry jokes from the group, making use of the words 'child' and 'labour'. 

Today, Anna, Christo, Daniel, Matthew and William built some shelves for our provisions. We recycled a wire rack we found in the space, turning it into something on which we can hang our coats and bags. And we did a lot of long, hard thinking about the timetable. You can sneak a hint of it in the banner image above but the real deal will be at your fingertips by the weekend. By the way, the group wanted me to pass on their respects to those brave people who have signed up to class without knowing what they are signing up to. We salute you!

Overs,

Harriet and A SCHOOL

What role does hospitality play in the way we create and engage with art?

Fran made us play by the rules, Toby tried to defy the rules, Carole and Andy shared one cup of tea, Rachel and Kate were otherwise engaged and David stayed in bed (but we don’t blame him, he was between night shifts).

With two weeks to go until the final event the gang at 25sg got together on Sunday to discuss the rules of hospitality that govern all activities in the house. What role does hospitality play in the way we create and engage with art?  This is what we invite you to explore with us, on Sunday 6^th November at midday.  More details coming soon…

A fast paced, sneak preview of the 'Life Without Buildings' route... 

Can you can spot the structural sites of interest or recognise any of the surround buildings? Book a place on the ride to share your own personal thoughts and feelings on the architecture of our city.  

Your own personal festival PA here with your schedule for next week

It's all very simple. We've got your evenings all sorted out next week. And with one different Wunderbar event each day, you get to see everything, no clashes.

Monday 31 Oct:

Festival Launch: Ellie Harrison and Josie Long opening the festival in style

Tuesday 1 Nov:

Glorious - Rajni Shah Projects new musical made specially for us.

Wednesday 2 Nov:

Anniversary - An Act of Memory - Monica Ross and Co-Reciters

Thursday 3 Nov:

Piano Recital - Andy Ingamells - Launch of Action Relay

Friday 4 Nov:

Desk Chair Disco

Saturday 5 Nov:

Frontman and Noise Karaoke

Sunday 6 Nov:

Early evening bicycle ride, Life Without Buildings

And we've got your post-work early evenings sorted out with The 5 O'Clock Show every weekday as a warm up.

Daytimes are sorted too. We've got your days filled with a full SCHOOL timetable, a library, a film making centre, a cafe and not forgetting our world-record breaking attempt Work-A-Thon , our international escapades on Saturday and brunch on Sunday.

Easy. See you there.

P.S. you can do most of this free. But you can do all of it, guaranteed, for £18 / £13 if you buy a festival pass. From here.

We want to raid your closets!

Maybe because the festival includes Halloween and Guy Fawkes, there will be a lot of dressing up in silly costumes - Segueway, Desk Chair Disco, Noise Karaoke. And of course the regulation animal outfits for all staff.

We're on the look out for a few things - if you can help us out with any let us know, and drop them into the HQ at 67 Westgate Road anytime from tomorrow onwards. 

We require:

- Animal skull or antlers

- Military jacket

- Tambourines

- Jedi-style cloak

- Wedding dress/ Victorian dress

- Big Black boots - DM style (largish)

- Hockey mask

- Leather (or faux leather) Jacket

- Interesting hats

- Walking stick

- General uniforms 

- Overcoats, jackets, jumpsuits.

Morgan would like you to come and tell your life story on Thursday morning (not Wednesday!)

For our Thursday Nov 3rd assembly (not Wednesday as we said in the video!), A SCHOOL would like to hear about your life. Whatever has happened in it. You would need to arrive at the schoolhouse at 9.15am. We would have a cup of something together and then at 9.30am you would talk about your life so far for 15 minutes. Whoever attends assembly would then be invited to ask you questions about it for a further 15 minutes or so.

We have decided to do this out of nosiness and a love of talking.

Please reserve a place HERE and email aschool@wunderbarfestival.co.uk if you would like to volunteer.

Thank you! A SCHOOL

Please bring your pets! We don't need any dogs, cats or hamsters though...

On Friday (Nov 4th) morning we are making a zoo. If you would like to bring your pet along, please email aschool@wunderbarfestival.co.uk. Your pet would need to be :
1) in its own home/cage/pen

2) able to fit through the door

3) neither a cat nor a dog nor a hamster (as we have enough hamsters)

Please reserve a place HERE first, however, so that we know how many guests we are receiving. You and your pet would need to arrive by 10am and be ready to leave at 12.30pm.

Thank you! A SCHOOL

Check out some of the highlights from day 1 at Wunderbar 11 

See the mage album. Over here -------->>>>

"What makes Harrison so intriguing as an artist is the melange of serious thought and silliness that goes into her installations."

Special intro to Ellie Harrison's residency by Laurie Penny

We asked Laurie Penny, London-based journalist and feminist activist, to give us her take on Ellie's work as an introduction to Market Forces - at Vane until 17 December.  You get to take home a copy in print of Laurie's great text if you visit the exhibition too. But if you can't wait - or to entice you to visit the show if you haven't yet been - here's what she said:

Introduction to Market Forces, by Laurie Penny

Ellie Harrison is an artist who looks at the numbers. As artist in residence at Wunderbar, her solo exhibition at Vane and collaborative projects during the festival tread the line between the sublime and the ridiculous, between creation and activism. It’s all intended to get visitors to understand how our world is shaped by everyday engagements with the micro-detail of a macro-financial system that is steering humanity over a cliff of crisis - with a healthy dose of self-irony.

What’s the best way to illustrate the succession of stock-market crashes that have given the lie to aggressive free-market finance? With a lot of popcorn machines going off at once. What’s the best way to comment on the alienation of post-Fordist labour? By pushing a lot of office chairs through central Newcastle (Desk Chair Disco, Friday 4 November 2011). How best to help your audience understand the impact of privatisation upon British public services? With some neon lights and lots of vibrating massage chairs and the implicit invitation to sit down, communicate and laugh about the absurdity of it all. What’s the best way to animate the relentlessness of contemporary consumerism? With an old phone that rings every time you buy something, and a Coke can that can dance. Of course.

What makes Harrison so intriguing as an artist is the melange of serious thought and silliness that goes into her installations. For all its playfulness, there is something in Harrison’s body of work that smacks of obsession. From her work Eat 22 in 2001 documenting everything she ate over the course of a year (eat22.com) to this year’s ‘Market Forces’ exhibition, her art is replete with an urgency to get the numbers, to compile facts and figures, to look for patterns and re-create them. There is an anxiety here about art and production, about the weight and process of being a human, and given the focus of Harrison’s work - climate change and the crisis of capitalism, work and alienation, money and consumption - that anxiety is poignantly appropriate. Harrison’s efforts to source all of the materials for her installations sustainably sets her apart from artists who believe that creative production can be separate from capitalist consumption. One wonders, given the not inconceivable possibility of another stock-market crash before this exhibition closes, where she will sustainably source a twelfth popcorn machine at short notice, but by then we’ll probably be too busy clearing up the mess to mind.

And in these nervous times, we need artists like Harrison more than ever - people who live their politics, who combine abstract creativity with focused work outside the studio, like Harrison’s campaign to ‘Bring Back British Rail’: a heartfelt call for an end to private interest in public transport (bringbackbritishrail.org). This is a new kind of installation art, constructed from the detritus of ordinary lives, inclusive and inviting, even where the invitation is to sit in an enormous vibrating massage chair and think about service provision. And if you think that’s silly, bear in mind that there are some people who still believe that deregulated free-market finance is a sensible way to run an economy.

Laurie Penny is an author and journalist who writes regularly for the New Statesman and The Independent. Her first book ‘Meat Market: Female flesh under capitalism’ was published by Zero Books in 2011. pennyred.blogspot.com

Highlights of day 2 at Wunderbar, featuring Glorious, Human Library and the 5 O'Clock Show.

As I'm quietly contemplating a school life relived a small, assertive voice breaks through my daydreaming...

“Excuse me, your name please?”

Two of Burnside College's year 9 pupils sit at the front desk, pens, registers and sticky labels at the ready. Whilst one of the boys writes out a neat name tag for me in blue marker pen another pupil eagerly gathers tea and coffee orders.

When I met Harriet Plewis a couple of weeks earlier to discuss her project A School  at Wunderbar Festival she was full of enthusiasm for a project she described as being as much an exercise of utopian ideals; the creation of “the school you would have wanted to be at” as a student-lead learning experience which would test “how to effectively share ideas without power or lies about power getting in the way”. This equilibrium between students and 'practitioners' was developed right from the projects outset with teachers, students and practitioners working together to develop a curriculum based on what they all wanted to learn and achieve over the duration of the festival.

The emphasis on  A School being essentially a dynamic, empirical experiment in teaching and learning became apparent very immediately as we were introduced to the language of signs and gestures the group had developed for making consensus decisions. As we sat on the gym mats, cross- legged in a large circle, Harriet and the students demonstrate for us new pupils the raised Jazz hands which indicate agreement, lowered jazz hands complete disagreement, and various actions that signal changes in the conversation.

Our first lesson began with a spray of home-made pompoms and an energetic warm up exercise with various leaps, whoops and waving of limbs. Though some of the students hovered at the fringes of the classroom, not quite prepared yet to engage in the ridiculous display the adults  were performing, the collaborative discussion on “What are Utopian concepts?” followed  by the Cheer-leading displays of those concepts cemented their interests with shouts of “Liberty!” “Love!” and “Freedom!” (one of which their head teacher, on a flying visit, took part in with remarkable gusto).

Iris Aspinall Priest©

Highlights of day 4, including a world record at the Work-a-thon, and Andy Ingamells performance as part of Action Relay. 

Lesson Two: 9/11 and The Economic Crisis

One of the interesting, and potentially problematic, aspects of A School is that no one in attendance is an expert. 

The emphasis of the project is not test scores, league tables and the dichotomising scale of success and failure but on collaborative, creative approaches to learning and teaching. Students and practitioners alike are encouraged to admit to not knowing, to ask big questions and to work with failure not as a negative consequence but as a potent means for learning. 

Lesson Two: 9/11 and The Economic Crisis was based on connecting two separate suggestions for lessons (on 9/11 conspiracy theories and Bankruptcy) along the lines that, if it's true we're all connected by 6 degrees of separation, our cumulative knowledge may travel much further than that of any one individual or even the group itself.

After a “pomodoro” break (an interlude which happens after 25 minutes of lesson, the equivalent time scale for cooking the perfect Tomato Pasta Sauce apparently, hence the name) I'm sat on the floor next to another of today's new students. The student, Paul, turns to Christo (one of the creative practitioners on the project) and, describing how he had seen him with the group yesterday testing their home made Go Karts next to the bowling green, asks whether he's a teacher. Christo laughs warmly and explains that he is learning just as much as the students are.

Pasted on one of the classroom walls in large, friendly letters is the school logo “With brains like ours, it's easy to improvise”. Beneath this we work in pairs (selected at random) to brainstorm everything we know about the two lesson topics and any correlations we see between them. I'm paired with one of the year 9 students whose knowledge of fire fighters and conspiracy theories  can only be described as encyclopedic and very quickly we have filled our quota of postit notes. The pooling of knowledge as a means for learning and forming a common consensus on a topic raises a lot of questions about the nature of learning and on the teacher-student relationship. On the one hand it's a very egalitarian and democratic approach to the enrichment of shared knowledge and experience. On the other hand, there is a nagging question of practicality; how can you (or can you?) quantify the learning which takes place through this process?

Once everyone's multifarious, fragmentary knowledge of 9/11 and The economic crisis has been accumulated in a smattering of postits across the classroom walls, we sit in silence for a while pondering the possible connections or correlations between these two events. Christo invites suggestions from the class and  one of the students volunteers 'Freedom' as an issue to discuss here. And then, quite quickly, I find the lesson developing into an unexpectedly sophisticated, metaphysical conversation pondering these decade-defining issues from a position I previously had never considered... 

As we break up for lunch I find myself feeling both excited by the possibilities of an education not limited to the usual hierarchical strictures but also slightly anxious that the tendencies of the classroom dynamics – e.g. of boisterous students to be fidgety and then ostracised, for teachers to be leaders and then superiors etc - not to be allowed to eventually creep into this organic project of learning.

Iris Aspinall Priest©

Browsing the catalogue of the Human Library I am greeted with an array of troubling and lovely possibilities from a remarkable 19 year old with a brain tumour Something Wrong With My Head to a free thinking Muslim born in SunderlandMackem Motor-Mouth Muslim. 

Stood beside the issue desk you cannot see the human library but I can't help but indulge in the image of an old dark wood library shelf stacked with human-sized books which twitter and giggle, telling one another wonderful and secret stories...

The librarian issues me with a Reader's Ticket and a Request Slip which lists all the titles stocked by the Human Library. The tactile quality of it all kicks me with a small pang of nostalgia for the library system before barcode readers and self service check in desks, when the date insert in the front of library books was an indexical history of use and, for those rare or outsized and dusty art books, you had to fill in a Request Slip by hand, invariably incorrectly, provoking the inevitable snorts and stamping of feet of the librarian.

It takes me a long time to choose a book, but eventually I decide to start with German and Proud. The Librarian asks me to make sure I've read and understood 'The Rights Of The Reader' and 'The Rights Of The Book' whilst she goes to collect the book from the bookshelf. I'm silently revelling in this delightful extended metaphor which includes in the 'Rights Of The Human Book': “Human Books have the right to be returned in the same condition in which they were issued” when my book arrives.

How do you start reading a book? That sounds like a ridiculous question, right?... usually you just start from the beginning and follow it through. Pursuing all the narrative twists, turns, denouements and metaphors, to the end. You don't have to introduce yourself, or steer the plot developments, all this unfolds in your own private imagination, who you are and what you think is superfluous to the story itself. But, for the first time in my life, a book asks me, directly

“What do you want to know?”

German and Proud talks keenly about her family history and her German grandmother who suffered from prejudice all her life after moving from Köln to a small north east mining town in England. She tells me about the divide, in her own family, between the German and English branches, not from great cultural difference but simply through a lack of common linguistic ground. I tell her about my faltering German lessons and she says “The way to a man's soul is through the language he speaks.” My book is full of real life fairy tales of her time in a corner of Southern Germany (monsters and all). Part of the way through she asks me if I have any questions and I ask her something I've been desperate to know for a long time...

“Where in the UK can you get REALLY good pretzels?”

With great gusto and animated gestures, she tells me the answer to my question... (If you want to know, I recommend you go and read German and Proud)...

After I return German and Proud to the issue desk all of the other books are on loan so I decide to take a break. 

I wander up to the second floor and have a look at the Day of the Deadexhibition and all those wonderful, garish dancing skeletons. I look around the café and wonder which, if any, of these are human books. And then it dawns on me... They all are. Their titles may not appear in the catalogue of the Human Library but everyone is a book, unread, not to be judged by their covers, but full of stories and subplots, written and still in progress, possessing innumerable possibilities and interpretations depending upon the reader.

For my second title I choose The Dragon And The Monkey. This is a book of euphoric highs and devastating lows. The extended, central metaphors of the dragon and the monkey were a way of making manifest, explicable and (in part) comprehensible the two conflicting influences on the life and story of the book; the symptoms of Bi Polar disorder. My book asks me why I wanted to read his story and what relevance it has to my life and interests. For the second time today a dialogue is taking place between the book I am reading and myself; my motivations for reading are being interrogated. And this is important; that it isn't a one way conversation. The Dragon And The Monkey tells me he questions everything. Twice.

The interior landscapes of The Dragon And The Monkey and his experiences of living with a mental illness are made manifest through elaborate metaphors; “The sleeping Dragon” refers to the dormant (but lethal) manifestations of the illness “...I have to keep him asleep...or he will burn me alive...”. Whilst the monkey is a benevolent character which symbolises the persistent need to keep the dragon, and all other chaos, in check. Containing 65 years of narrative this book is, none the less, tellingly light on details about his life story. The key moments which he refers to - his marriage, his moving back to the North East, his finding and loosing of an important job - parallel the metaphorical “sign posts” which he uses to navigate his way through “the dark city at night”. These similes and allegory’s function as keys into the illness for the reader as well as an insight into a sufferers means of coping with an often debilitating, invisible, illness.

As the story comes towards an end (though not a conclusion) I ask the book why he wanted to take part in the festival. What he tells me, I think, epitomises the purpose and intent of the whole Human Library project: “...to tackle stigmas... because most prejudice is born out of ignorance”. Reading a human book is not the same as reading a bound book of paper and ink; though it may present perspectives and illuminate concepts or possibilities previously unconsidered by a reader, a paper book is always contained within that form; it can be put down, fitted between bedtime and sleep or 5 minutes crammed in to a bus journey. A paper book exists in the finite space of printed text and internalised reading. A human book, however, exists in the real four-dimensional scope of human experience. The reader can't skip bits or neglect their book, a human book requires fixed attention and, through that intimate engagement with another's story, invites empathy through real human engagement.

Iris Aspinall Priest

Here's the film The People Speak and all of their participants made during the festival. Let us know if you spot yourself/someone you know/what you think of it! (And whether Segue or Segeway is a better name!)

The Film