Lady Pirate & the Social Bandits

Boats are the transport of bliss.   Nomadic, constantly cruising, an example of rootless comopolitarianism.   A boat is a space without a place, a fixed space with infinite mobile possibilities.   Boat life can be a decentralized experiment in living, a way of living on the edge between the legal and non-legal, the rural and the urban, and the new and the old.   The canals are places that occupy a special position in history and a special geographic position.   Boat life is a free & spontaneous (but responsible) culture.   The map may be determined but the zone is open.

Art can actively transform (and be part of) the floating world via regenerating and revolutionizing the canals.   For this project I will be traveling England's Canals on a boat (with a floating garden/allotment attached).   I intend to go along Regents Canal, the River Thames, Oxford Canal, Coventry Canal, and the Grand Union Canal.   At various points along the route I will stop for a day.   (Click here for comprehensive route)

The canal side will be a place to have film screenings and the boat a place to broadcast radio.   The screenings will be of 'Sealand', the story of Sovereign Paddy Roy Bates' micro nation which is located in the North Sea on an island fortress created in WW11.   A pirate radio station will be broadcast from the boat.   There will be a twenty minute broadcast in each evening between 11pm-11.20pm. The radio station will host music, sound art, talks, and readings.   I am in conversation with the art group Temporary services, who have made a radio broadcasting contraption 'Audio Relay'.

Research has included looking at different types of mobile water vehicles, and water homes. Making video interviews with people who live on houseboats, e.g. with a canal 'squatter'. I am Lady Lockett of Sealand. I hope to become an assistant lock keeper at Toddington Lock for three weeks over the summer which will be valuable research.