Café Culture

Exercise your creative will for the benefit of an unseen public. Throughout the week of Inside Out Festival we invite you to join us in making temporary interventions and artefacts using only the materials readily available on your average café tabletop.

This is a call for the festival audience and café go-ers to pay close attention; imagining these familiar, everyday items as potential props and materials for play. Turning small unsubstantial objects or details into creative impermanent gestures and presenting them for the enjoyment of others.

We ask for those intervening to share their gestures via twitter and to pass on the invite to their networks. The bigger project here is to inspire short, artistic acts of generosity in public environments. Promoting spontaneous, thoughtful art for all, by anyone, with anything and all for the price of a cup of tea!

For those who want to participate in a collective intervention, on Tuesday 21st October a group of creative thinkers and makers from Middlesex’s School of Art and Design will hold an open meet at the Islington Arts Factory. The plan is to gather with others before invading and intervening in the diverse Café Cultures of Holloway Road.

The afternoon will be spent constructing and documenting the spontaneous actions, miniature drawings, sculpture or interferences; influenced by and as a meditation on the immediate surroundings. Later, they will reconvene, share and discuss these and their experiences of making them.

The images of interventions and artefacts produced on the day will then contribute to the growing collection online. In November this collection will then be printed by Middlesex and culminates with an exhibition and celebration in the Islington Arts Factory’s café itself.

Participate in our exhibition of Café Culture by following us and tweeting your observations or interventions to @cafeculture2014. #cafeculture

With Special thanks to Islington Arts Factory.

Image: Red wine on sugar, cafe gesture © Martha Lyons