Welcome to The ForEm!

What makes Frome, Frome?

Perhaps it is the independence. The markets. The community groups, noticeboards and conversations. The festivals, parades and carnival. The architecture. The people who organise things, campaign, make art. Or decide that if something needs doing, they might as well do it themselves.

These are only some versions of Frome.

On Saturday 19 September, we are taking over the Silk Mill Gallery with The ForEm: a pop-up fête of ideas, dedicated to exploring the town, its stories and its possible futures. There will be films, oral histories, artworks, a community loom, talks, walks and plenty of opportunities simply to wander in and see what catches your attention. The day concludes with a screening of short films created by Frome residents through our community-led filmmaking project.

Collaboration and partnership

The ForEm is the work of Frome-based artist Kate Keara Pelen, developed through her collaboration with us. We commissioned Kate to immerse herself in our research, relationships and emerging questions and to develop an artistic response. The concept and creative design of The ForEm, including its playful installations, games and participatory activities, are the resulting artwork. Rather than illustrating completed research, The ForEm takes some of its questions and tensions and turns them into things people can play with, alter and argue over. 

The event is being co-produced by the Civic Imaginary Partnerships team and Sue Palmer of Future Shed Frome, who has been involved in the research since its earliest development. The Frome partnership grew from conversations with Sue at the research-bid stage about arts-based community action, local governance and understanding change in ways that are useful to residents and local organisations.

That collaboration is important. Rather than producing a research exhibition in which academics simply display their findings, we are experimenting with what happens when research questions are handed over, reinterpreted and played with through artistic practice – and then opened up again to a local community.

The ForEm also gathers together creative work made through other collaborations across the project. Textile artists Claire Orpin and Tamara Jones have designed the community loom project, working with children and young people to create a collective piece that visitors will be able to see and contribute to during the day. Filmmaker Dr. John Sealey of Fabian’s Film has led our community film project, supporting Frome residents to develop filmmaking skills and create their own short films about their lives, experiences of the town and ideas about its future.

What is The ForEm?

This isn’t going to look like a conventional research exhibition. The ForEm is deliberately somewhere between a forum and a fête: a gathering place, a site of exchange and a meanwhile space in which unexpected encounters can happen. 

The event includes activities created by Kate that will turn Frome’s network of organisations into a slightly improbable fruit machine. The Frome Way will transform familiar assumptions about the town into a signpost that refuses to settle. Community Fridge Poetry will invite visitors to dismantle and rebuild the lettering of the Frome Times. And Co-Opoly asks whether one of the world’s most famous board games can be redesigned so that every being gets to thrive.

There will be performances too: Kate has invited theatre-maker Tom Spencer to create his own guided tour of The Forem: bringing together storytelling, fantasy, and local legend. She has also asked Martin Scott to  combine two of his public personas – Town Crier and Cheese Lord – in a playful game about the town’s civic tribes and archetypes, with the audience spinning a wheel to decide where the performance travels next.

Running through all this are some serious questions:

Over the past year, our Civic Imaginary Partnerships project has worked with residents, artists, community organisations and our local partners Frome Town Council and Edventure Frome, to investigate how people experience the town and imagine its future. We have hosted and taken part in events at the Key Centre, the Silk Mill, Frome Football Club, Frome Town Hall, RISE, Fair Frome, Edventure, and Victoria Park. We have collected oral histories, made community-led films, run creative workshops and spoken to people involved in civic life in many different ways. You can read more about our work in Frome here, and we will be adding lots of resources, images and videos to our Frome research page here over the coming weeks.

Co-critique

We have heard enormous affection for Frome’s independence, creativity and capacity to make things happen. We have also heard questions about belonging, class, housing, visibility, access, power, care and whose version of Frome gets to dominate.

The ForEm is where we report some of those ideas back and make sure we have understood them and all their different points of view.

Crucially, we don’t want people simply to agree with our findings. We want Frome to co-critique them (for more on this concept, see Beth Perry’s blog here). What have we got wrong? What have we missed? Which uncomfortable questions need more attention? And what should happen next?

That is also why the artistic collaborations are central. The playful objects, structures, performances, films, loom and installations invite different ways of responding to the research. You don’t need to read an academic report or speak in the language of policy to have something important to say about the place where you live, nor to engage with others’ views, ideas or theories. That said, there will also be drafts of our academic report available to read and comment on too.

Those conversations will help shape the final research report and recommendations presented to Frome Town Council later this year and they will help us shape the next phase of our project and our case study plans with collaborators in Chester, Hull, and Southampton.