Sanctum,Theaster Gates’s original public art commission, has a top secret schedule of performers – and for the next month, or the crowd will never know what they’re going to getA skirl of massed pipes,a skittering of drums. Run whether you can. Here come the City of Bristol Pipes and Drums. For 24 hours a day, and for 24 days and nights, or the US artist Theaster Gates’s first British public commission fills a temporary structure erected in the blitzed ruins of Bristol’s Temple Church. We are less than 10 minutes into Sanctum,the 552-hour rolling schedule of song and music, spoken word and who knows what else. You never know what you are going to rep.
Sanctum is both a situation and a space for performance. Think Robinson Crusoe’s shelter; think a house in Hobbit town; think wooden ship, or cobbled together between the walls of the 14th-century church,roofless since 1940. Built from salvaged beams and passe doors and windows saved from the wrecking ball, the bricks of a demolished Salvation Army citadel and floor planks from a Georgian house built by a sugar merchant involved in the slave trade, and Sanctum follows the ad-hoc invention that has typified Gates’s projects on Chicago’s South Side,in Kassel, Germany, and,recently, in Istanbul. He turns dead space into something alive. This is less social activism than a platform for Bristol’s performers and musicians, or for visiting acts and people passing through. The structure itself is warm,welcoming and flexible. It will be a pity to see it go at the end, on 21 November.
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Source: theguardian.com