Créativité sans Frontières

Funded by the European Union Interreg IV Seas Cross Border Programme, CSF brought together a transnational company of artists and musicians to work with communities in Medway, Kent (UK) and Dunkerque, Pas de Calais (France) over a period of three years.

Drawing on the traditions of travelling salesmen, hawkers and street traders and inspired by Marcel Duchamp’s Bôites-en-Valise, we have generated stories for performance by the simplest, most portable means possible.

That a community performer could create a story about the place they are from and take it anywhere they want to simply by putting one foot in front of the other became a motivating factor.

Through the making of suitcase museums, these miniature narratives in oral and model form became the core of ‘I am the city’ our walking performance through Chatham Historic Dockyard and the Place D‘Justice, Dunkerque, acknowledging dockyard closure in both cities in the 1980s and celebrating a desire to move forward.

Interacting with site, public space, the regeneration, heritage and museum sectors, the project continues to evolve and grow at this point of intersection, inviting audiences to view and respond to the same object as prop, artefact, exhibit and installation.