Birmingham’s city centre is being transformed into an immersive forest of thousands of plants and gigantic architectural trees for a colourful celebration known as PoliNations. Part of a nationwide cultural programme, PoliNations is a vibrant reminder of the multicultural origins of the UK’s people and plants, and offers a variety of audio and visual experiences including live music, spectacular light shows and spoken word events.
powerful trees
PoliNations began in Edinburgh with a grand tree structure. It will move to Birmingham in September where it will expand into a spectacular oasis, free to visit. The experience features real plants and flowers planted with the help of the city’s residents, plus incredible forty-foot [12,2 metres] fabricated trees able to absorb rainwater and create electricity using wind power. The event will culminate in a grand finale, during which the canopies of these trees will explode in a cloud of confetti and colour.
CREATIVITY IN THE UK
PoliNations is just one of ten large-scale projects taking place across the UK between March and October of this year as part of UNBOXED: Creativity in the UK. This £120 million programme was first proposed in 2018 by the then-Prime Minister Theresa May with the aim of uniting the divided nation following the Brexit vote. To find out more, Speak Up met with Angie Bual, artistic director of Trigger, a cross-artform producing organisation, and the creative director of PoliNations. As she explained, the typical English garden is surprisingly multicultural.
Angie Bual (English accent): Here in the UK, 80 per cent of the seeds or plants in a normal British garden are non-native. So, here we’ve got the English rose, and the English rose is actually from China. The apples are from Kazakhstan… So I think the exciting thing about the event is to celebrate multiculturalism, celebrate journeys, migration, travel... And then the whole site ends with a huge explosive party, where the entire canopy will pop with colour, and that’s mimicking a ballistic seed. So, when a flower ends its life, it opens its petals out and the middle of it pops out loads and loads of seeds, like a confetti party, a bit like a dandelion clock that you blow.
PARTICIPATION
And, she says, creating the project brought hundreds of people together.
Angie Bual: Community participation was about five hundred people, who will be growing and sowing and creating the forest. And then you’ve got about two hundred freelance artists, from costume designers to performers... We’re also doing a citizens’ assembly. So the citizens’ assembly is about what are we going to do about nature in the future in cities. So, that will involve another four hundred people. And then we’ve got a live music stage
RECONNECTING PEOPLE
One vital goal of the post-pandemic and post-Brexit era event is to re-establish historic links with a wider world, as Bual explains.
Angie Bual: I think it’s time for people like me to stand up. You know, I’m British-Indian. And so India was obviously part of the British Empire. So, one of the stories we’re telling is about tea, and how tea made its way from China. The British stole the secret of tea and started growing it in India, which was pretty much under slave conditions, and then taxed Indians and took the profit over here. So, I think it’s time that we look at our history and confront it. It’s just healthy to fully understand your history and to celebrate your present.
OUR SHARED EARTH
There is also a powerful environmental message, says Bual.
Angie Bual: I think it’s very rare that we have a project, a proper cultural event of this scale. And I think that if you’re in that forest garden, you have been part of changing a huge urban landscape, because we’re dropping this garden right in the middle of a city. Then it’s going to make you really think and question how you might be able to make a change in the world. And so, I think it will have a huge impact if you’re there. But I also think the optics and seeing an event like that happen, where people are truly integrating and celebrating each other and themselves, will be really powerful. So we’ve got plants, shrubs, and flowers going into hospitals, care homes, schools, and the saplings are going back out into Birmingham to enrich the canopy of the city and to go towards making the city much greener into the future. This project is quite unique in that it’s looking at so many different facets, from climate change to colonialism, and thinking about how we might have a stake in the future, and giving people agency in doing something about it. It sparks the imagination and it celebrates creativity in the UK today.