Let Your Ideas Come Back As Children
The Bluecoat, Liverpool
Images by Brian Roberts and Roger Sinek
Let Your Ideas Come Back As Children
The Bluecoat, School Lane, Liverpool
21st July- 3rd November 2024
First Institutional solo show in the UK.
Let Your Ideas Come Back As Children, is an exhibition by artistic duo Roxy Topia and Paddy Gould in collaboration with writer and musician Cormac Gould and children from Bluecoat's Out of the Blue after school clubs in Anfield and Norris Green.
The artists have transformed the Bluecoat's Groundfloor galleries into the headquarters of Connexus, a futuristic creative industry. Over the past 6 months, the artists have worked with children aged 7-11 to imagine how the world of work and creativity will look in the future. Connexus has been split into four distinct rooms, a Meditation Room, Creative Ops, a heavily restricted Server Room, and a 'Boredroom'.
The imagination, hopes, and fears of both child collaborators and adult artists have been combined to create a space in which both adults and children can think about the future. You are invited to pick up a specially designed map of the headquarters and take on the role of Connexus staff. Workers can follow a series of workday tasks in the gallery, with assistance available from the Bluecoat's invigilators who take on the role of Connexus Insight Guardians.
By speculating on the future, the artists and their collaborators also reveal truths about the present day. The children's ideas of what the future holds ranges from optimistic idealism to macabre realisations. Happy Volcano on Mars, for example, is an interactive sculpture that invites you to audition for a job on Mars; this is reflective of the hope that technology will propel us to interplanetary opportunities. However, in Future Foods, a prediction of what children think we'll eat in the future, we have to face the reality that our diets may change as a result of climate catastrophe.
Two audio works have been produced in collaboration with writer and musician Cormac Gould. The first takes place in the Meditation Room, in which a siren calls workers to take part in a "mandatory creative decompression." A calm voice reads out meditative statements that a future workplace might use for staff wellbeing. We are told to relax and reminded that we 'are an important cog in a valuable machine.' Affirmations, questions, jokes and a mellow soundscape all help put our mind at ease while reclining on brain shaped bean bags. Perhaps the employers of the future will take great care of their employees, or maybe enforced meditations are just a means to extract more productivity.
A second audio work can be heard coming from the Server Room. Gentle electronic beeps, clicks and the hum of electronics can be heard spilling out from three dark and mysterious sculptures. The Server Room is the heart of Connexus, and yet is kept at arm's length from visitors. We are only permitted to peek through ventilation holes in the wall. Much of the technology we currently rely on also remains distant and mysterious; our smartphones are glued shut, and the algorithms and lines of code that fill our lives are kept entirely out of view.
Blueprints inspired by conversations and workshops with children are presented in the Boredroom. One blueprint tells of rebellious youth movements fuelled by the electrical currents of new technology. Another tells us of the disruptive power of future musical genres, causing chaos in the workplace. We read that Connexus bosses struggle with the exuberant new music, unsure whether they can harness and sell rebellious new art forms or whether they will disrupt Connexus's power.
In Let Your Ideas Come Back As Children we are offered a glimpse at the uninhibited imagination of future artists. But the exhibition also leaves us with questions about how art will be valued in the future, and who will decide what we use our creativity for? Will Weirdcore be the soundtrack to our liberation, or will we be toiling away to the sound of Productive Jazz and Crunchtime Rock?
Let Your Ideas Come Back As Children is part of Weird Futures, a season of exhibitions, films, and workshops that asks audiences to think about our place in the future.
Adam Lewis-Smythe
Curator
Read a reflective piece called ‘Welcome to Connexus’ on the themes behind the show by Artist, curator and writer Niki Russell at The Bluecoat website
An interview with us at The Bluecoat
Read a review by Patrick Kirk Smith at Art in Liverpool