On Monday I returned from
the Secret Garden Party, based near Abbots Ripon, Cambridgeshire….
Festivals can offer an incredible amount to the pyschogeographer’s
palette; especially a festival such as SGP – a world of fantasy and wonder that
allows it’s participants to shed their inhibitions. From the word go the Garden
takes you in, as you dance (or squelch in the viscous mud) across its plains…
As proclaimed by the official programme, the, rather Utopian, aim of
the festival was the celebration of our “true gifts as humans: social existence.”
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| Urban Fox by Pirate Technics
Although Pirate Technics are famous for their burning art, the Urban Fox will now be a permanent installation in the garden. So next year; please don’t sit on him - or burrow in to him naked, climb to the top and then fall off having to be carried away in a stretcher – as an incredible amount of time and love has gone in to his creation.
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Through volunteering for the festival, stewarding the Urban Fox
built by Pirate Technics and bought by Secret Arts for the Secret Garden, I had
the great pleasure to meet a wonderful array of people. Mike in a Ziggy Stardust type costume who had just returned from his
travels, the two ketamine fiends who couldn’t stand up straight, the girl who
had an interview to go to on Tuesday, Mills, Majella and Colin, a group from
Bristol, the gentleman walking past the fox at 9am with a smoking jacket and
bloody mary…
Secret
Garden Party is truly a festival of participation.
Participation in terms of workshops and games yes, but also in terms
of social acts and exploration – indeed there is something inherently
peripatetic about festivals. Although I went with friends, I returned with new
ones; spending my last night with a group of 4 people; 3 of whom I hadn’t met
until a few hours before.
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| Urban Fox by Pirate Technics from afar |
Peripatetic participation is what makes the atmosphere at festivals
so incredible; the revelry that comes with everyone knowing they are in the
same frame of mind…or the same great festival-boat. You are not standing on a
train platform thinking ‘god let me get back to my iPod/book’… you are in a festival, engaging with your fellow
gardeners. Festivals are Utopian in that they are more accepting and friendly microcosms
of the real world, where at every corner a new story can be found and made.
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| The Sanctuary |
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| View of the lake, upon which Secret Garden Party is centred around |
A massive thank you to the guys a Pirate Technics (some of whom I
had the pleasure to meet), everyone at Secret Arts and Secret Garden for making
the 10th anniversary so outstanding. And also to my friend Georgina Bolton, Arts Curation Assistant for Secret Productions, for inviting me to be a
foxy steward and thus allowing me to explore the Garden.
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| Figureheads of the Ages by Pirate Technics |