Shouting for Bexhill
TOBY BULA-EDGE
Bexhill will come alive on 15 and 16 August for the Bexhill Art Weekender which HIP spotlighted in the last issue. This time, we sat down with Flatland Projects director Ben Urban to discuss the upcoming event.
Originally based in Hastings but moving to Bexhill on Beeching Road in 2021, Flatland Projects co-organises the Art Weekender along with the De La Warr Pavilion. They work in partnership with the Bexhill Cultural Network, a group of 23 arts organisations who contribute to this year’s event.
Bexhill is perhaps seen as a bit ‘sleepy’ in comparison to Hastings, with its known vibrant arts scene. But Urban pushes back. For him, Bexhill is a place of “slow revolution”, a “quietly radical” place.
He continues: “It’s a place of many firsts. The first place of British seaside mixed gender bathing. That’s a really radical thing.” But he points out: “It’s not a very loud thing that Bexhill screams about.”
So, for Flatland and Urban, there’s an element of the definition of Bexhill: “I think one of the things I really enjoy about [any] space, is what you can claim it to be before it’s something. You can go two miles ahead but you then have to work backwards to make that justifiable. I think that’s true of our journey as an organisation. Putting the name above the door and then making that work.”
He compares it to the association of Hastings with the so-called Battle of Hastings – a battle that didn’t take place in Hastings, but the town “shouts loud enough” to claim it as its own and identify itself with (this actually happened in about 1067, but the same applies). For him this proves that the way a town defines itself isn’t fixed, and neither are its boundaries. He sees the South East coast as one large city, where there’s a fluidity of identity and space.
SEASIDE SHOUT
So the Bexhill Art Weekender is shouting for Bexhill. Urban continues: “It’s not about doing new stuff only on that weekend. It’s about highlighting the breadth of cultural activity already, weekend to weekend and week to week.”
The aim of the weekender event also seeks to redefine what people think of as art in a seaside town. Currently, Urban argues, this is defined by people from “the epicentres of the art world” – London, Manchester, Berlin – who capitalised on the economic boom in the early 2000s and set up artistic spaces here, a process that meant the art was London-centric and not conducive to assisting local artists. Flatland was set up to combat this process – all the founders are local and working class.
To redefine what we understand as art, the Art Weekender aims to showcase a wide variety of arts: “The Art Weekender isn’t meant to say that contemporary art is the only way of experiencing culture and place. Music is art. Performance is art. Painting is art. Being in a place is art,” he says.
That variety may mean you can’t see everything in one weekend. But Urban sees that as a positive. It proves Bexhill has something to shout about.
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