Kate Feld talks to the engineer of Cornerhouse’s final event – a performance that is part art and part all-out celebration.
It’s appropriate that the artist in charge of Cornerhouse swan song, The Storming is a proud Mancunian. True, Humberto Vélez may have arrived by way of Panama, Havana, Barcelona and London, but he’s lived here for nearly 20 years.
After starting out as public interest lawyer in his native Panama, Vélez went to film school and made his way toward a kind of art that builds on his past – empowering people marginalised by society.
“The arts are too enclosed in their traditional structure, like a church – we need to open it up for the sake of art’s survival,” Vélez says. “My work is about taking over public spaces and artist spaces in collaboration with the people.” But he’s not interested in box-ticking exercises in ‘community art’. There is real artistic rigour in his approach. The work has to stand on its own.
For The Storming (a reference to the Russian mass action of 1920, The Storming of The Winter Palace), Vélez has invited a cast of collaborators to join him in a takeover of Cornerhouse – not a hostile takeover, but an intentionally unsettling one. Several are local groups representing artists often unfairly sidelined (such as transsexual or disabled artists), the rest are a variety of people Vélez was simply interested in: a Samba band, a cadre of bikers, synchronised swimmers. All have been working with the artist over several months to develop their own ideas for the performance. “I try to empower people and then get out of the way,” he explains.
More like a “happening” than anything else, The Storming will be loosely divided into a performance and a party, and part of Vélez’ intention is to fill the building with artists and audience and then just see what happens. Yes, it’s going to be a grand spectacle, he says, but that in itself can be cunning way of getting under people’s skin; “not provoking openly, but seducing people with something that is challenging.” A challenging party? What better way to send Cornerhouse into history.
The Storming (Parts 1 and 2) take place at Cornerhouse on Saturday 4 April. Tickets for both parts of the event have sold out.