Unchartered Collective

TOWARDS A RESTFUL CITY

Raquel was awarded a Bristol City Council Originators Grant 2022/23 to run Towards a Restful City. This project asked Bristol venues to extend a warm welcome to chronically ill communities, by running Horizontal Events that challenge the taboos around ‘resting’ or ‘misbehaving’ bodies in our public spaces. The project also ran a Bristol Cloudspotters’ Bookclub to support the building of local disabled community and created the first iteration of a Restful City Map.

3 wins

• In 2022 Bristol Old Vic created a permanent resting space on the balcony level of their foyer. It is a super comfy spot with a beautiful rug, bean bags, pillows and a written invitation to drop social etiquette and do what you need to do to make yourself comfortable in that space. This is only the second permanent Resting Space at a UK theatre. 

• Arnolfini declared themselves a Rest Friendly venue and now provide bean bags and yoga matts in the galleries, and encourage more ‘restful’ viewings in the gallery between 4-6pm Tuesday - Friday.

• Watershed created Horizontal Cinema in collaboration with Raquel in 2019 to make it possible to lie down to watch any screening of any film. Watershed are also committed to running dedicated Horizontal Cinema events.

Horizontal Events

We ran 3 Horizontal Events during the year of Restful City:

• We met at the Arnolfini on an Autumn evening to experience Forest: Wake this Ground. A closed event – like ‘A Night at the Museum’ – invited the attendees to linger and rest with the art. More info here.

• We ran a Horizontal Cinema screening of Aftersun and of The Five Devils (both links include short blog posts).

We were also invited to run a guided rest as part of the Ways of Knowing workshops at Arnolfini during Bhati Kher’s exhibition The Body is a Place, and we created resting places for the Élaine Radigue live concert at Arnolfini. Raquel will continue to work with Arnolfini to develop different ways for audience to lie down and rest during the galleries live programme.