Presented through exhibitions, installations, site-specific interventions, performances, food, open studios, talks, workshops and participatory events, Manufactory invites audiences into the hidden spaces of production that shape the city. Unfolding across workshops, warehouses, studios and industrial sites, the festival opens environments rarely accessible to the public, foregrounding Park Royal as a distinctive destination for contemporary interdisciplinary practice.
Manufactory: Day 1 moves across performance, exhibition, installation and making.
Across Friday and Saturday, Berlin-based dance company DANCÆ presents a ballet set to electronic music featuring Dominic Kießling’s life-size installation The Cloud, bringing sculpture, choreography, sound and architecture into direct dialogue within the industrial spaces of 57 Gorst Road. On Friday evening, Vida Vojić interprets the writings and music of Hildegard of Bingen, ceremonially activating the site. Across both festival days, Reflecting Movement, a site-responsive performance installation by Lucy Algar and Chihiro Kawasaki, transforms the atrium of Queensrollahouse through choreography, live drawing, projection and light.
Site Conditions, the festival’s principal exhibition, occupies the industrial spaces of 57 Gorst Road, bringing together works by Donald Baugh, Ocean Baulcombe-Toppin, Jo Chate, Jermaine Francis, Esther Kehinde Ajayi, Henry Krokatsis, Dan Mauz, Fernando M. Romero, Linn Phyllis Seeger and Sharon Walters.
Elsewhere across Park Royal, exhibitions, installations and artist projects unfold within workshops, warehouses and studios: Feral Institute brings John Stezaker into dialogue with the mirror of Emperor Maximilian, the Last Emperor of Mexico; David Samuel presents a new metal installation developed in collaboration with QMetals; and nomadic contemporary art gallery Refusés inaugurates its permanent new space with a solo exhibition by Brighton-based painter Hattie Quigley.
Participatory workshops range from brickmaking with Taipa Lab and foil-blocking with Absolute Beginners and London Centre for Book Arts to drop-in sessions with Rescued Clay and darkroom photograms with Shou-An Chiang.
Day 1 concludes with a late-night live set programmed by festival music partner Meet In The MIDI.
