Polly Brannan, George Harding + Despacito Art School

28 + 29 October 2024
10am-3pm
Open School East

In October 2024 Despacito Art School worked with artist and OSE Artistic Director Polly Brannan to co-design the visual identity of Home is where the garden is. Initial designs developed during the session – using collage, found materials and observational drawing – were then digitised by OSE’s in-house graphic designer George Harding. 

Despacito’s typography and project specific symbols were used to establish the visual identity of the Mobile Growing Unit, which toured Cliftonville West and Margate in the summers of 2025 and 2026. They were also used in the design of the community cookbook Growing Wild: Foraging, Cooking and Pickling from Cliftonville West as well as in the brochure for the 2026 Summer Exhibition For Ways Below. Designs were also used in the creation of posters that were activated through pop-up sessions at the Mobile Growing Unit, and across brochures, flyers and digital comms.

This co-design approach stems from the artistic practice of Polly Brannan, who has developed and co-designed typographies with children, young people and local communities over the last 20 years. This includes as a member of artist and architect collective public works (2005-2011), as co-founder of art collective AvantGardening and as an Education Curator at Serpentine Galleries (2011-2013) and Liverpool Biennial (2012-2018). 

This embedded co-design approach is part of OSE’s new two-year model Building an Art School for the Future.

Despacito Art School (est. 2017) began as a project-based programme for children aged 5-12+ from Cliftonville West, Margate. Today, Despacito Art School operates as a children and young people’s art collective. The programme provides regular opportunities for the collective to take part in hands-on art making with leading artists and designers and showcase their work in public presentations to their families, the local arts community and the broader public. Despacito Art School have worked on projects with artists including Harold Offeh, Camilo Pachón, Samara Scott, Tai Shani, Margate Radio and more. Despacito Art School local partners include Turner Contemporary and Roland Ross gallery. Despacito have also worked on projects with The BBC and shared their work at the Venice Biennale as part of Shenece Oretha’s Iniva x European Cultural Foundation Drift Pavilion.

Polly Brannan is Artistic Director at Open School East. She is a social practice artist and educator who has produced projects at Serpentine Galleries, The Barbican, Tate Britain, Frieze Art Fair, Lisbon Experimenta Festival and Nottingham Contemporary, amongst others. Polly’s work is temporary and live, often staged in transient spaces and engaged in co-development through long-term working with local communities and authorities. To work in these settings and engage non-art audiences she has spent the last 20 years developing and learning from existing roaming and DIY approaches, such as mobile working units, poster making, community-led publishing and more, tools that enable her to build relationships with communities at a hyper-local level. Her work has a continued focus on improving access to green space, protecting spaces for vital services, and supporting the development of advisory groups to enable local residents to lobby for change. 

George Harding is an artist, designer and curator. George is a founding director of Well Projects, a contemporary art gallery and publishers, and Programme Producer at Open School East, an independent art school.

This Civic Programme project is part of OSE’s two-year thematic cycle Home is where the garden is – find more events: openschooleast.org/home-is-civic