Near Miss
Posted on 15th November 2009 by Holly Race
You may not have realised this but Air Vag's Starry Nights - the big moons and stars - almost didn't happen. The problem, as is often the case with Artichoke's projects, lay in the scale of the piece.
While erecting four PVC balloons doesn't sound too trying, each one requires two tonnes of ballast to keep them from floating away, and many buildings don't take kindly to holding that amount of weight on their roofs in one place.
Then there's the difference between the way the French and the British do things: we have paperwork, and health and safety. Attempting a structural survey about something that isn't quite a structure is a tricky business: what will the structure do in strong winds? The answer, 'Bend!' isn't acceptable in the UK.
Finally, the people who run the buildings need to be happy with having a huge balloon atop their property. We might convince one department only to have another say no; or the buildings team are happy in principle but their lawyers aren't.
So there's been a lot of negotiating, a lot of charming and a lot of spreading of ballast across a larger area. In the end we managed to get all four pieces up (prevailing winds permitting!). It was a little last minute, but I hope you'll agree that it was worth the trouble. Starry Nights is a very important piece for us - for a start, it's on our posters, guides and leaflets as the starring image (forgive the pun). Quite apart from that, Durham's a very 'vertical' city, with hills, bridges, rivers and spires making you want to look both up and down. We have installations such as Winter Garden for the 'down' parts, but Starry Nights was our 'up', and what a magnificent sight it is.
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