Conceived by Mary Anne Hobbs and Anna Phoebe as part of this year’s Manchester International Festival What Do You Want? is a project in three parts.
The first was a public artwork, a billboard in the centre of Manchester inviting passers-by to answer the question ‘What do you want’?, either by writing directly onto the billboard or dropping a private message into a postbox. Tellingly, the billboard became a chaotic and messy sprawl of outward-looking messages, while inside the postbox were private, intimate and personal notes.
The second was a live performance, with Hobbs blending music from Manchester’s new underground while Phoebe improvised responses on violin, which then incorporated a spoken word piece assembled from messages on the billboard and in the postbox.
The third was a film, which is premiering exclusively with tQ above, saw young Manchester-based filmmaker Joshua Bridge given an open brief – asked simply to respond to the question ‘What Do You Want?’. Working with the poet Charlie O’Brien, words are set to a low and menacing industrial drone, footage flickering between urban and rural, dark and light, real and artificial.
Said Bridge of the film: “What do we keep when a place is remade? When the places that shape our identity are destroyed or commodified, nostalgia appears as the symptom of an urban amnesia. Destruction creates the loss of a tangible future, where we must then constantly ask ourselves: who are we now? And what do we want?”
Hobbs and Phoebe have also said that beyond What Do You Want? their future artistic process will see them continue to work with, commision and fund young artists, involving them at the heart of their projects going forwards.
