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Watching the Keep, Walking the Edge: exploring Reading
Join us for an exploration of Reading’s evolving environment through film and art with filmmaker Jane Glennie, historian Chris Impey, and artists Peter Driver and Geoff Sawers. This event brings together alternative perspectives, each a unique lens on the town’s shifting character.
From the central urban landmark of the historic Keep at Brock Barracks to Reading’s rural countryside periphery, we probe the interplay between past and present, permanence and change. Through vivid imagery, intricate detail, and thoughtful reflection, the evening offers a compelling look at the forces that shape the town’s people, environment, architecture, and cultural heritage.
Film Screening & talk – Architecture Washing, a new film by Jane Glennie & Chris Impey. A unique cinematic exploration of the OpenHand OpenSpace building, inspired by the history of the Keep at Brock Barracks before it became the home of OHOS. This 10 minute poetic film projection becomes part of the building itself: contrasting its solidity and fragility, revealing its layers of history.
Book reading & exhibition – Widdershins Walk: Round the Edge of Reading, a new book by artists and writers Peter Driver and Geoff Sawers. This year-long slow art project traces an anti-clockwise journey around Reading’s countryside circumference during the four seasons, and is a series of reflections on the history, natural history and archaeology of the town’s limits and edge spaces, meditations on what the town is and will be.
Both film and book navigate the tensions between past and present, history, culture and commerce. They highlight spaces—whether an urban landmark building or the town’s rural periphery—that are increasingly vulnerable to economic pressures, the demand for housing, and the priority levels given to cultural and environmental capital.
Don’t miss this special event!
Free entry | All are welcome Wednesday 7 May, 7.30pm-9pm.
Location:
five seven one Open Hand Open Space Brock Keep 571 Oxford Road Reading RG30 1HW UK