You’re Invited
The City Art Gallery is reopening, and you’re invited. This is one of many invitations you will receive from the many people who reside inside its archives.
Robert Chipperfield, whose generosity made the blueprint for an ever-evolving art gallery.
Arthur Jeffress, who helped rebuild after the destruction of war; his flamboyant gifts continuing a legacy.
Lucy Ash, who made loud the voices of the silent in this patchwork glory of a city.
If the city had anything to say, it might sound like a postcard sent to new arrivals on their first day in Southampton:
Dear you,
You were only planning to exist here, but you will live here. This will be your new beginning. You’ve arrived here and it’s not quite as you imagined. I know you feel you don’t belong here.
You came in concrete boats, looking ahead, holding the anxiety of the past in your chest. The sun shifts here as it does everywhere. You understand every word while not understanding any of it.
The force of this place that thrives on imagination moves you forward in time where countless others have docked – for a day, a night, a month, a year, a lifetime.
They called you a concrete boat, impossible. But look how beautifully now you float.
I know you felt you’d never be accepted, but they see you here. Maybe it’s because you’ve come out of hiding, left your shell, and found your feet.
The longer you’re here in this place, the more your shadow develops a pace in this ever-burning light. The more it looks like you.
You give wherever you go, your colours blend, your edges bend until you are a part of everything. You can be who you have been, who you are, or who you wish to be.
You float in knots, the burning wild hoping you make it all the way to possibility, disappear and transmute into light, light, gold, dust, feather, light, floating presence.
You’re a concrete boat, of course you can float.
And you? You’re now watching a reinterpretation of a reinterpretation; an homage to an homage; a reinvention of a reinvention.
That’s Southampton, inviting conversation and interpretation, planting seed from seeds, launching the impossible.
Know we can hold it afloat.
A city constantly reinventing itself:
Through war.
Through destruction.
Through connection.
Through creation.
Through art.
Through people.
Through us.
Through me.
Through you.
‘You’re Invited’ was co-created by Ri Baroche with Southampton’s LGBTQ+ community, Southampton City Council’s Culture & Tourism team and Southampton Forward
