The Chicago-based artist and activist Theaster Gates has launched his first public art project in the UK, unveiling yesterday, 29 October, a temporary structure sited within the bombed-out remains of the medieval Temple Church in Bristol city centre.
Free public performances ranging from poetry readings to gospel singing and DJ sets will be held 24/7 in the space as part of Gates’s Sanctum project (until 21 November) which moves abroad next year for the Ruhr Triennial in North-Rhine Westphalia, Germany (12 August-25 September 2016).
“The [Bristol] space is like a talent show that you would bring your mum or dad to. I’m excited that there will be these rotating crowds. They will hear something they would normally go to the pub to hear,” said Gates at the launch, describing Bristol “as an amalgam of different narratives”.
“This is an open platform for the voices of Bristol, for the overlooked and the underheard. It reflects the rhythm of the city,” said Claire Doherty, the director of the public art organisation Situations, which produced the project, a key strand of Bristol’s year as European Green Capital. The English Heritage charity looks after the site, which is usually closed to the public, while Arts Council England and the Henry Moore Foundation are among the project funders.
Gates is known for “repurposing” discarded local materials—part of his Dorchester Projects urban regeneration complex in Chicago’s South Side incorporates dark redwood rescued from an old water tower—and the artist has salvaged remnants from across Bristol for Sanctum. These include flooring panels fashioned from doors found in a former chocolate factory in the city’s Greenbank district, and bricks donated by the Salvation Army.
“I imagine that material and spaces have life in them, that they have something extremely sacred inside them,” Gates says in a statement. At the opening, he also discussed his hopes for closer communal interaction throughout the non-stop performance marathon, which is due to last 552 hours (the schedule remains a secret with visitors discovering who is performing on arrival).
“With the transition of one sound to the next, one group of people might get to know the next, be interested in each other, exchange emails and phone numbers,” he said. Sanctum coincides with the publication by Phaidon on 2 November of the first monograph on Gates.