The Unlonely City, Metal’s programme of gatherings, celebrations and citizen-led initiatives, was born from the belief that we need ways to come together.
So far, it’s involved 20 artists and 70 local people shaping what matters to them, plus nine initiatives to disrupt loneliness across Liverpool, Peterborough and Southend.
Ten years ago, Olivia Laing wrote The Lonely City, an exploration through art of the loneliness they found in New York City. This month, to mark the launch of the book’s tenth-anniversary edition, Olivia Laing will join writer and curator Charlie Porter to discuss art, solitude and the relevance of the book ten years on. You can get tickets here.
“Loneliness is personal, and it is also political. Loneliness is collective; it is a city.” Olivia Laing
The title The Lonely City inspired the name of our programme, and it still resonates. Loneliness isn’t just an individual feeling; it’s shaped by the conditions we live in – housing, work, inequality, technology, public space and the loss of places where people can gather and belong.
We recently read Octavia Butler’s The Book of Martha in our anti-racist book club, where the idea of utopias, and the challenges of creating a universal utopia, sit at the heart of the story. We came away asking: What is your utopia? Could it work? Who would it work for? Who wouldn’t it work for?
An ‘unlonely’ city in Liverpool, Peterborough and Southend, where Metal is based, is one of our utopias. So far, we’ve had fun making scouse with a scouser, uncovering the magic left behind in art lockers, sharing banquets of hope, spinning yarns and watching a photography series develop among strangers. These moments of laughter, connection and unexpected joy, remind us that even small, surprise acts of gathering can begin to disrupt loneliness.
“A sense of lingering like the feeling of those conversations you have by the front door, when one of you is about to leave and you stay there for ages, and it means the most because it wasn’t meant to be a special moment but it really was and now it’s gone and you’ve hugged goodbye and closed the front door and one of you walks away smiling and the other pauses behind the front door savouring the moment.” – Luca Rutherford, The Unlonely City Power and Cultural Democracy Commission
We look forward to more moments like this.
staging
