26 Connections - part of the Bloomsbury Festival 2024
The Building Centre is proud to host this exciting exhibition as part of the esteemed Bloomsbury Festival. The local city arts festival is in its 18th year, starting in 2009.
Each October, for 10 days, various venues across the city such as parks, libraries, laboratories, streets, museums, and public buildings like the Building Centre play host to an array of artistic events.
This year, we welcome 26 Writers back with a collaborative project with Barbican Young Poets.
What happens when you connect one poet to another to think about a theme?
And what then happens when you ask them to create a poem together? Does poetry itself create common ground that rises above differences in background, culture and identity – a shared space that is human and universal?
26 Connections shows the results. Here, the 13 alumni of the Barbican Young Poets programme have paired with 13 from the writers’ group 26 Writers. The theme they were asked to focus on was ‘Human.Kind’ – the theme of the Bloomsbury Festival. The poems will be published daily until 17th October and you can read them on the Bloomsbury Festival website.
What to expect from this exhibition
The poems demonstrate the power of people coming together to explore the potential of creative collaboration.
Each pair has written a poem together, and they have also written an essay to describe the process. We will be posting these essays daily from 30th September in the lead-up to the festival. The poems will be shown at an exhibition at the Building Centre, Store Street, throughout the festival until mid-November. At the exhibition you can also see visual interpretations created by artists from the Lettering Arts Trust.
The future of 26 Connections
The group are also working towards an anthology of the poems with a foreword by Rosemary Richards, festival director:
“To see the collaborative poetic responses from the Barbican Young Poets and 26 writers is to understand how deep this journey can take us, and how the world can be reflected in new forms of writing."
Discover more about the events of the Bloomsbury Festival 2024 here.
