Nothing gentle will remain* is an online publication inviting artists and audiences to speculate on how we gather together, now and in the future. The publication condenses a year-long exchange with the contributing artists and Open School East. The project is online now and will be available in print at a later date.

The project was initially conceived as a series of artist commissions to be presented across Margate this spring. These were to engage with the different timescales, paces and rhythms of a seaside town – from its ancient myths to its daily tides – ultimately inviting audiences to come together and take up space; to explore what might happen if we spill over and ooze out.

In this radically shifting moment, where collective gathering has been called into question and all we have are our speculations on the future, Nothing gentle will remain reimagines this proposition. The project is now presented in the form of a publication, bringing together contributions from local and international artists – some of whom are alumni of OSE – including Josefin Arnell, Pauline Curnier-Jardin, Paul Maheke, Dipesh Pandya and Naïmé Perrette with Sara Giannini and Sam Keogh. The local stories and myths of Margate, as well as the various forms of narration, mediation and exchange that they opened up, remain central to the publication, which serves as both an alternative space to stage the artists’ contributions and as a manual for gathering collectively under these strange and uncertain circumstances.

*The title is derived from CAConrad’s poem with the same name, published in Ecodeviance: (soma)tics for the Future Wilderness (2014).

Nothing gentle will remain is a collaboration between Lydia Antoniou, Caterina Guadagno, Nora Kovacs, Titus Nouwens and William Rees in partnership with Open School East, as part of the MA Curating Contemporary Art Programme Graduate Projects 2020, Royal College of Art, London.