I was intrigued to see this great project by Emma Jackson and a collaborator on Kickstarter. It’s fantastic that it seems to have been so successful for them. Is this likely to become more widespread? I find this quite exciting in some respects but also quite worrying, in so far as that it could easily be seized upon as a rationale for intensifying the retrenchment of funding which an academic turn to Kickstarter would (partly) be a response to. Nonetheless, I’ve been wondering for ages whether to try this myself and seeing this project has given me a nudge towards finally doing it.
Lots of Planets have a North is a new project produced by sociologist Emma Jackson and artist Claire Biddles, exploring the North of England as it is lived, remembered and dreamed of. Bored of totalising accounts of a solitary man on a mission to uncover ‘the North’, ours is a communal project, made up of fragments, accounts, stories, poems and pictures collected from an open call for contributions early in 2014.
Our project is a showcase for the stuff that gets missed out of the bricks and smoke, brass band, Hovis advert-style North of popular representation (although we have nothing against red brick, or smoke, or brass bands). The Glam North, Queer North, Missed North, Uneasy North, Dreamed of North, and lots of other Norths that aren’t explored often enough.
Here’s a few selections from the project – you can see more on our project blog, too.
Mark Carrigan 