Location: 2 Royal AvEnue
Date: 2 May, 2025
Time: 10:00 – 16:00
Join us for ‘The Other Place’ at the Hit the North Street Art Festival 2025, a day-long conference in the heart of Belfast. Discover how anti-establishment artists, especially street artists, are transforming cities through creativity and resilience. Explore the intersection of art, urban planning, and community as we discuss how artists can drive positive change in our cities, and how we can support them. This event brings together place-makers, planners, and artists to challenge conventions and foster meaningful, beautiful change.
Good cities have something that defies explanation, a feeling... a vibe. An organic, messy sense of fun and excitement, rough edges that aren’t like anywhere else.
Magic emanating from an Other Place.
AGENDA
10am Coffee / Registration
10.30 Welcome — WTF is this??
10.40 Key notes Provocations
Joe Caslin, Katharine Wheeler, Doug Gillen
11.00 ‘Mix zone’ conversations
11.45 Comfort Break Nothing
12.00 ‘Safe zone’ conversations
12.45 Group Feedback WTF was that?
13.00 Lunch / More Nothing
14.00 Urban meditations
14.15 Panel discussion Observed Pub Chat
Asbestos, Rachel O’Grady, Eimear Henry, Ed Hicks
15.00 Close The most important bit…
More Nothing (and beer) at the Brink! Garden
Speakers
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Joe Caslin is an Irish street artist, art teacher and activist. Best known for his beautifully rendered pencil drawings, which manifest as towering pieces of street art. His highly accessible work engages directly with the social issues of modern Ireland, on an unavoidable scale. Caslin confronts the subjects of suicide, drug addiction, economic marginalisation, marriage equality, stigma in mental health, direct provision, institutional power, consent and most recently, the effects of the Covid19 pandemic on young people. The monochrome drawings Caslin creates live with us and against many of us for some time before washing away. They hold a mirror up to the kind of society that we are, whilst asking us individually what kind of society we want to be a part of.
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Asbestos is a multidisciplinary artist whose work spans street art, activism, filmmaking and costume, building shared narratives with the viewer and exploring how we transform and perform constantly.
His works have been displayed worldwide, and he was nominated for “Best International Street Art 2021” for a mural that drew attention to the housing crisis in Ireland. In 2022 he collaborated with the band Idles at Roskilde festival in Denmark on a project called “I Beat Myself Up” where they smashed piñatas off their heads to encourage people to talk about their mental health. More recently he released the feature length documentary “Don’t Forget to Remember”, a collaboration with director Ross Killeen, where he learns to cope with his mother’s falling memories. The film opens an honest conversation about Alzheimer’s through his artist process and the destruction and own work on the streets.
His art delves into tradition, ritual and how our self image changes and morphs according to the performance and roles we play. He utilises masks and costume to become anonymous in his work, becoming more transparent and candid in his creations. Notably, he reveals his own vulnerabilities, providing insight into what it means to be human. By opening up to the public his work starts a conversation with the viewer making their contribution essential to his work and giving them a voice in it.
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Rachel is a founding director of OGU Architects and lectures in architecture at Queen’s University Belfast. OGU is an architecture, research and Urban Design Studio based in Belfast that assists socially conscious clients improve public places and buildings through careful research, material quality and meaningful collaboration with makers and manufacturers. Working at various scales from street installations to citywide strategies, projects include Adelaide Street Belfast, a temporary urban experiment replacing a lane of traffic with public space; DRIFT, a floating pavilion on the River Lagan; and the interior redesign of 2 Royal Avenue.
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Katharine is a creative practitioner, producer and facilitator of grassroots work based in rural southwest Scotland. 20 years of professional practice in the arts has focused her work on the civic role of culture in community-led change, creative placemaking. She trained in visual and community arts, recently completing a post grad in Arts and Social Practice, has been part of shaping The Stove Network in Dumfries since 2015, developing their regional work with communities, and is the independent Chair for Dumfries and Galloway’s newly established Cultural Partnership. She works with practitioners, community groups, and multiple partners, all those who have a stake in our places and often in the spaces between sectors, to build collaborative frameworks that support creative grassroots approaches as part of long-term system change.
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Hicks is a London mural artist working in the tradition of British romanticist painting through the frame of the sublime landscape.
Climbing out of notorious south coast graffiti crew ’54’, hicks moved to London in ’07.
He painted all over the UK and abroad, won the UK art tournament; Secret Walls, Designed custom toys, all in the character based, illustrative mode he had become known for.
Yet, growing unsatisfied, he broke away and took up a weirder direction that lead through tarot, masks, Jungian archetypes, folk saints, and eventually ending up in the recent apocalyptic / transcendent works.
This puts the immortal classic within the ephemeral world of everyday. The symbols of the divine appearing at the trash stratum.
His current mural and studio practice comes from, yet stands in opposition to the pop, market led sensibilities of most London street art. Evoking instead narratives that explore radical theology, cataclysm and personal responsibility.
This and more is gone over in depth in his recent micro-lecture series ‘critical time’ have already gained him a number of speaking gigs, podcasts and lectures.
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Daisy Chain Inc founder Adam Turkington is a freelance irritant. After an early career in the YMCA and Belfast City Council he set up Seedhead arts to do Street Art, meantime use, lates, festivals, magic, cabaret and generally just be a pain in the ass.
Throughout his career Adam has been an active participant in the vibrant Belfast Community Arts scene and believes that through arts and events individuals and communities can experience real transformative processes.
PURCHASE TICKETS
Please choose the appropriate option for you — no cheating
(early bird until 4 April)
When we talk about cities we love, we aren’t just talking about how functional they are.
Belfast is a city imbued with the spirit of anti-etablishmentism. It’s a city housing the worst funded artists in Europe, and yet, somehow, these artists are transforming their city. Artists who are staunchly ‘other’, in a city where the establishment is defined by two sides, have crafted literal and figurative spaces for coexistence. Street artists in particular, in a city where walls have been weaponised for paramilitaries, have built a scene that is globally revered and locally embraced with entrepreneurship rather than funding. It’s a phenomenon.
So as part of Hit the North Street Art Festival 2025, Daisy Chain Inc is proud to present, ‘The Other Place’ — a day long conference in the heart of Belfast about how anti-establishment artists, and in particular street artists, can make our cities better and what we can do to help them. We’ll be inviting place makers, planners and of course artists, to discuss how we can make cities less boring and how the establishment can work with anti-establishment artists and art forms to make beautiful change.
FAQs
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That's very deliberate. Daisy Chain Inc, who are behind this event, have between them been to many many conferences and feel that almost without exception they are over-programmed. The best parts of any conferences are when you get to meet people, build networks and talk about what's been said from the stage. We've tasked our speakers with providing you with short provocations which can provide a stimulus for important conversations. There will be no funders talking, no grand standing, no long introductions and we will. RUN. TO. TIME... so that delegates have the time to let the ideas breathe in more informal settings.
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Yes. 'Nothing' was a project we ran across 2024. Our work in this time has influenced how we've curated this conference. We've found that amazing ideas and conversations come out of nothing.
Sometimes it's just good to give time, for your thinking to percolate.
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YES.
We think that Street Art is an amazing lens with which to examine how independent creatives can help shape cities, but we also think that this is true in the broadest sense. We hope that The Other Place can be a space to show how this concept can be applied in a myriad of ways.
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Hmmm yes, that is a bit wanky isn't it. But we are trying in particular to get a cohort of creatives who sit outside the system — people who don't have the ear of establishment already. So it's not personal but if you're the CEO of an ACNI funded organisation, the 'artist' ticket isn't really for you — you already have the ear of the establishment. To be clear this thinking is not art-form led, but rather about your attitude to your work and how it sits in broader social discourse.
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We theorise that artists will be paying for their own tickets and artists are usually skint. If the 'Other' tickets are bought by the people that we hope will buy them, they will be paid for by their organisations and £75 is still cheap for a conference. So we're trying to make the conference financially viable while ensuring that the people essential to it's success aren't priced out.
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YES.
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We're very aware of this and have some plans to mitigate it — and yes the piano with be locked and under armed guard. 2RA is a phenomenal example of what can be done when a public authority takes a creative risk, being here for this event is deliberate and symbolic.
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You MUST! It's Hit the North and we've got events on all weekend culminating in our legendary Block Party.