Jonathan Boyle (StateStudio), Despacito Art School + Polly Brannan

Roaming Project

From October 2024 – June 2025 OSE’s Despacito Art School worked with designer and architect Jonathan Boyle (State Studio) and OSE Artistic Director Polly Brannan to co-design and develop the community Mobile Growing Unit. The unit toured Cliftonville West and Margate in the summers of 2025 and 2026, popping-up at Civic Partner venues Age UK Thanet, Ark: Cliftonville Cultural Space, Cliftonville Community Centre, Ethel-Athel Alleyway Community Garden, Roma Drom: Cliftonville Culture Centre and Sunken Garden.

The design of the project, including ideas for the unit itself, the typography and where it travelled were all co-designed with Despacito Art School as part of OSE’s Civic Programme. Older Despacito Art School members supported the delivery of workshops at the unit as part of our wider work to offer training pathways for young people in creative and cultural industries. 

The Mobile Growing Unit stems from the artistic practice of Polly Brannan, who has developed and co-designed mobile roaming platforms with and within public and civic spaces with 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). Typography for the unit was co-designed by Despacito Art School with Polly and OSE’s in-house graphic designer George Harding.

From 2024-26 the Mobile Growing Unit housed DIY poster-making materials co-designed by Despacito Art School with Polly and George.

Next phase: The unit is modular and follows a DIY aesthetic ethos so that it can be adapted and remodelled in future iterations. It was initially designed to host pop-up growing, art and recipe-making workshops as part of the project Home is where the garden is. For our next two year thematic cycle, we will be turning the unit into a roaming communications platform, exploring itinerant forms of broadcasting and information dissemination.

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. 

StateStudio is an architecture and design practice formed in East London by Simon Chadwick & Jonathan Boyle in 2014. StateStudio are committed to producing architecture that is driven by context, respects and responds to architectural heritage, and is communicated with a contemporary vision.

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