This Is My Church

‘This is My Church’ is a research-based audio piece that aims to explore fading countercultures through the spaces that were holy to them, their shrines and proving grounds. These music venues and drinking dens are intrinsically connected to their respective countercultures, as a space to be free, to cultivate alternative ideals and viewpoints, as a breeding ground for often controversial art and music, to meet people who share your way of life and form strange new friendships. This is My Church will attempt to trace the psychogeography of countercultural groups through the nuclei of these shared meeting points, based on oral retellings of stories that define theses spaces.

The audio pieces were created around a collection of audio interviews (2-3 per cultural snapshot) with subjects who share their prime with the space in question, recounting vignettes of memory that encapsulate their emotional connection with the space and time. The focus will be on individual moments, no longer than a single night, to build a picture using a microcosm of shared experience. The result will be an immersive piece – somewhere between art and documentary, a cultural snapshot that watches through an unreliable lens of memory – more concerned with feeling than fact.

Gallery Image Credit:
[1]: Ed Barnes
[2 – 5]: Nina Shen-Poblete

Ed Barnes is a non-binary working-class child of hippies, punks and crusties – “I grew up at music festivals and on pub doorsteps, at social club discos and legally-questionable raves. These places always seemed to me intrinsically connected with freedom, rebellion and individuality – havens from the sneering world outside. They are places where magic things can happen, and that’s exactly what this project hopes to capture.” – Ed Barnes.

Going under the moniker ‘Tell Me About Your Mother’, Barnes produces various solo and collective projects that span from visual and performing arts to music and everything in-between. Though relatively new to the art world, Barnes has been involved in ‘weird’ projects and events throughout his entire life, running his own free music and performing arts festival, ‘Edfest’, for eight years. In early 2021 his piece, ‘The Balloon’, was screened in the window of Folkestone’s Quarterhouse during January as part of their Open Sesame project.⁠

‘TWF’ (This Week In Folkestone) is an archival project charting contemporary countercultures from the margins: experiences and creative expressions of people who have been left outside of the dominant cultural radar. ‘TWF’ is interested in all that is underground, underrated, and absent, putting a spotlight on diverse cultures that are under threat of disappearing due to patterns of urban morphology, economic, social & political structural changes, as well as the developing tastes, behaviours, influences and values of our time.

As part of the project, a series of six mini documentary projects were commissioned by artists with a vision for all that is left behind, invisible and emerging. The other artists who participated in this project are: Charlotte Chapman, Ewan Golder, Ann Morgan, Tomas Poblete and Ernst Fischer.