Home from Home

The Home Correspondence was a huge success at Cambridge Folk Festival. We have nearly 100 recordings of people speaking their letters home- these will be compiled into an online archive in the next week or so (once I have the clever gadget that will convert old-school cassette to wizzy mp3s) and I shall pop the link to that here when its ready. This archive will grow with following contributions to the project in the future (we are already part of Parabola Arts Centre's Autumn Programme). We have hundreds of pins in our maps where people have marked their true home.

As ever, the audience at Cambridge Folk Fest were lovely and receptive to something a bit different in the programme and it was such a supportive environment to start something very exciting.

Thank you to everyone who contributed. Also, massive thanks to Anya Tavkar, Will Emsworth, Helen Preddy and James Owen - The Home Correspondents. I have never enjoyed camping meals and waiting for a kettle to boil more than with this lot. We certainly made a Home from Home.

The Home Correspondence Pics

Off Adventuring...

I've just put the finishing touches on the map of the world we are taking to Cambridge Folk Festival for The Home Correspondence. We leave tomorrow ('we' being the delightful Helen Preddy and the equally smashing James Owen) in a van full of the entire contents of my bedroom which is usefully providing most of the set for the project. Very excited to be premiering a new piece of work in such a lovely, supportive environment. The piece will hopefully draw together some of the strands of my musings on Home over he past year and a half and will hopefully be an opportunity to collect lots of stories of home from the audience at the festival. I am also very excited about wearing a jumpsuit all weekend.

Here are some pics of the signage I've been making in the garden of my new (and relatively permanent) Home...

The Home Frequency

We are creating a new piece for Cambridge Folk Festival. I am the lead creator and Allegra is producing it. It is called The Home Frequency. Sort of an amalgamation of my ponderings about home over the past few months as well as some new bits in a new travelling/instillation format. Helen Preddy, who came with us to Secret Garden Party last year, is coming and someone new -we don’t know who that will be yet but we do know they are lovely and have a vehicle. On the topic of this mysterious new person… is it you?

We need a new member of the Ignore the Forecast’s extended family to be part of the Home Frequency project. You need to be free between Wednesday 27^th July and Monday 1^st August, you need to have a vehicle (preferably a large car or van) and you need to be wonderful. Does this sound like you??? There is a small fee to cover expenses and of course a ticket to the festival. The Piece itself will involve talking to festival goers about home, so you should like people. And you should like getting stuck in, maybe getting wet and muddy, camping, making do and mending and, er, folk music. If this sounds like you (why haven’t we met already???) then contact me at ekirstyh@gmail.com.

ooh and...

Just remembered that we are on the Cambridge Folk Festival pod cast, http://www.cambridgefolkfestival.co.uk/interact/podcast.php. Click on Thursday and we are about 7 minutes in, just after Stornoway (which is a lovely place to be).

Music and Libraries

Just found this whilst browsing around for photos of The Tree of Lost Things on the interweb: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjuosRo-LeE. Nice to know we've inspired at least one creative soul. If anyone else has written a song about the Tree then send us a tape and we'll start an official chart of Lost Music.

In other news, Allegra and I have been plotting exciting next steps for the Tree, we want to turn it into a Library of Lost Things. We've been thinking about libraries, databases, due dates and all things involving logical order (this has been particularly challenging for me as I have a interesting skill of creating chaos if left unattended in any area for more than 3 minuets). Allegra loves libraries, I love the idea of libraries. I have always wanted to be one of those people who seek sanctuary amongst the books, the hush and the cataloguing systems. But I am just too loud and too messy. I am terrified of breaking the peace by tripping over my own feet, knocking over a display of 'Recommended Reads' then cackling loudly at my own clod-footedness. This has happened before. But maybe The Library of Lost Things will be a compromise between ordered quiet and chaos. The filing system itself will have to be pretty esoteric given the subject matter. We will be using categories such as 'Love', 'Opportunity', 'Underwear' and 'Time'. How do you file the Opportunities section? From the biggest to the smallest? How about Love? By the name of the loved one? Or by the kind of love? All sorts of interesting and essentially answer-less questions to chew over in the coming weeks.

We have over 5,000 labels and will hopefully have double that when I come to spend some consolidated time sorting them all in the new year. I am actually really looking forward to this process. When running the tree, we don't get the chance to read all the new contributions, only those that are logged in the Ledger of Lost Things. It will be lovely to spend some time getting a feel for overall trends as well as individual losses - at least it will be lovely for the first 1,000 or so, then I will start to go loopy.