Ante-art awesomeness

Imagine your local community centre, thanks to its manager's admiration for the Situationists, was taken over by all the weirdos, punks and hippies from the surrounding area for an entire weekend to display art, play music, eat food, drink cocktails and generally making a huge mess to celebrate International Workers' Day. Well, that's pretty much Ante-Art which took place at Shipley's Kirkgate Centre last weekend.

The Caged Bird Club participated in this but what was more important to us was all the amazing people we got to meet, hang out with and make stuff with. We had the privilege of sharing a room with posters from the incredible Shape and Situate zine, a celebration of European feminists. Shamefully, we didn't get any photos of their work but you can see a bunch and buy the beautiful zines here.



Knit a bear face, a knitting collective from Leeds, presented "Knit a benefits cut", a beautiful display of everyday things and experiences people faced with benefit cuts will have to manage without. They knitted everything from a camping holiday for a family of four to condoms. The overall effect was so powerful.



Representatives from Print Workshop at the legendary 1 in 12 Club, Bradford's anarchist social centre brought amusing prints and chutney to sell.



They also brought two beautiful tabletop letterpresses and three different typefaces for people to play with.

Together, we made a statement about art, contributing one word each. Bless the adorable soul who chose "hegemony" as their word. That's the stall of Footprint Worker's Coop in the background, who have the laudable policy of giving discounts on printing to people with good politics.

Despite calling itself an Idiot's Lowbrow Print workshop, we think it was a work of frugal genius. Take a piece of an old curtain that was probably once twitched to disapprove of neighbours, stick it in an embroidery hoop and you've got yourself a screen to print through. There was also knitting without needles, just a cardboard tube. Just look at the concentration on those faces.

The poster below sums up the theme of the weekend and both the children and the adults needed no instructions on how to avoid the b-word.



Is it grim up north? Fuck no! Not only was it sunny the whole weekend, we got to hang out with and be inspired by a room full of people who give a shit but also do something creative about it. We also witnessed (probably for the first time ever) an anarchist kitchen with enough volunteers, male and female, to run smoothly and result in no seething resentment. Contrast that to arriving back to a London that re-elected a rich buffoon as mayor and had already started putting up the Jubilee bunting. Perhaps it's time to move.