Emelia Kerr Beale, Lucia Coppola, Middleton Maddocks and Despacito Art School

30 + 31 May 2024
10am – 4pm
Open School East

Watch the full film here.

In this two-day performance and set-making workshop, led by OSE Associates Emelia Kerr Beale, Lucia Coppola and Middleton Maddocks, Despacito Art School staged a filmed play, blending straightforward storytelling with absurd performances. The narrative drew inspiration from the real-life theft of Thanet District Council’s Dalmatian print FIDO (a dog waste disposal machine) in 2019, spinning a speculative fiction around its disappearance. 

During the workshop Depacito used cardboard and found objects to make DIY sets, costumes and props. The group also devised characters, including Margate’s landmark Lido structure, the Mayor and an Artist representative of the town’s arts-led regeneration.

The resultant film Wish You Were Here, The Disappearance of Fido was exhibited at the 2024 OSE Summer Exhibition ‘we went outside and it’s the entire world’, curated by Beatriz Lobo Britto.

This peer-to-peer project with Despacito formed part of the Associates Programme Social Practice Module, which explores and unpacks what it means to be working collaboratively with communities, and provides practical, artist-led training in the methods of social practice art.

Workshop Planning, Play Work and Facilitation was supported by Zelda Solomon and workshops were supported by OSE Community Support Facilitator Vlasta Hozova.

Emelia Kerr Beale predominantly works in drawing, sculpture and textile. Using recurring motifs and forms, they create a personal visual language through which to articulate complex individual and collective experiences. Interested in how we communicate ourselves to the world, and how the world communicates back, Emelia is often influenced by stories, slogans, clothing, promotional material- devices which extend outwards. Emelia is also invested in the exchange and building of knowledge through collaboration, and loves working with others.

Lucia Coppola is concerned with leisure, pleasure-seeking, and entertainment culture as sites for considering anthropological and ontological questions. Her upbringing in Brighton has particularly influenced her filmmaking and performance practice. She was the recipient of the Nicholas & Andrei Tooth Travelling Scholarship in 2019. As a result, she created The Last Tender (64 minutes) which was filmed during a month-long cruise at the start of the pandemic. 

Middleton Maddocks is an artist working through various mediums. Middleton’s work is concerned with mapping; language—its failures and tricks—; nonsense making; theatre as a space and performance as a mode for living; autofiction; and personal symbolic histories. Off-beat and out of tune are considered important and technical homes in the creative, neurologically diverse landscape Middleton inhabits.