Thought piece from Mary Swan, Artistic Director and CEO of Proteus
Basingstoke is an onion.
But it’s also a weathervane…
And it’s also a great big nest filled with artists.
And it’s undefinable.
Basingstoke has long wrestled with defining its identity as a place.
There’s history here – sure – we’re mentioned in the doomsday book, Henry VIII built an early version of a service station in the shape of Basing House – a stop off on his way from Greenwich to Portsmouth, Thomas Burberry started a business that would spawn a million knock offs and Jane Austen wafted about here - although there’s a few other places that also claim her. The town was re-invented via the London overspill and the town endured the obligatory 60’s re-build creating housing estates meant for a utopian vision of the future that has always remained out of reach. It’s where Sheila Grant in Brookside moved to start a new life, Rodney from ‘Only Fools and Horses’ attended Art College here, where Tess of the D’Urbervilles lived in Hardy’s novel and the ideal spot to drop off a bug eyed monster according to ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’.
But it is its present and its future that is the most interesting.
I’ve worked here for 20 years, the longest I’ve stayed anywhere as an artist, and it is the mercurial nature of Basingstoke itself that has kept me making stories about, and with, the inhabitants of the town, taking these tales to audiences across the UK and internationally.
Artists love to make work here – that is a fact – and they particularly love to try out new stuff here. There’s a very good reason for that, and it is what makes Basingstoke an ideal candidate for town of culture.
Basingstoke is atypical of the rest of England home to a richly diverse population both culturally and economically. It has pockets of deprivation and concreted urban areas rubbing shoulders with rural idyls and chocolate box villages.
Over the past 20 years we at Proteus have enabled artists from all over the world, from every conceivable art form, to come to Basingstoke to make new work and collaborate with us. They find a place rich with possibility, with open minded audiences and participants – a place they often return to time and again.
And yet, we struggle to define the ‘elevator pitch’ for the borough’s identity…
But that, is exactly the point – at a moment when the definition of British identity is being redefined, when we are struggling to understand who we are in the 21st Century - what ‘Britishness’ really means now - Basingstoke is truly embodying that struggle and therefore is an ideal place to conduct that discussion with artists and makers.
Artists are all storytellers in the end – the method may be different – but the impulse to create common ground, to enable empathy for the ‘other’, the unknown, the ‘stranger’ is shared by all of us. Being ‘Town of Culture’ would give Basingstoke the opportunity to host and have these discussions – bringing our ‘ordinariness’ into the light and showing it to be ‘extraordinary’ – just that – extra ordinary – atypical of Britain today – a Chaucerian snapshot of a society in flux, deciding who we really want to be and how we want others to see us. It is our ‘ordinariness’ that is our superpower – we are not confined to historical identities and past cultures; we are able to morph and change with those that come here to make lives and raise families.
We’ll own the ‘boring’ comments, the mocking laughter in the House of Commons when our MP announced we were throwing our hat in the ring, the jokes about roundabouts and concrete. But we know that as soon as you scratch the surface you find art and artists everywhere – literally – visual artist Kev Munday’s utopian worlds peer out from street cabinets all over the town centre - the same worlds can be found on murals in Paris and London; Proteus has made work in the town that has been seen across the UK and in New York, our collaborators have taken work begun here to every corner of the world and back again; there are artists making work in empty office blocks, shop units, car parks and sheds. Basingstoke is an incubator, a welcoming nest for artists to make work and encounter Britian as it truly is today, before that fledgling work flies off across the world, carrying our DNA with it.
And that’s why we call it Amazingstoke.
