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 Gillan

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

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

PURCHASE TICKETS

Please choose the appropriate option for you — no cheating!

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 were the establishment 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, how we can make cities less boring and how the establishment can work with anti-establishment artists and art forms to make beautiful change.