Don’t tell everyone or they’ll all be there, but Deptford is hands down rad—and the Deptford X art festival reaffirms it as a veritable cultural hub. This year’s festival takes its theme from the seminal Jonathan Demme-directed Talking Heads concert film Stop Making Sense. According to the festival’s new director Nathalie Boobis, this was chosen to reflect the “surreal, playful and unruly art as a disruption to our current political climate of hostility and division”. Among the twelve major projects on show this year, alongside 100 fringe events drawn from the local community, is a film by Sarah Browne titled The Shambles of Science, which brings together two rather different but equally fascinating (and rather harrowing) historical narratives: the Brown Dog Affair (a case prosecuting scientists for illegal vivisection of a smaller terrier in the early 1900s) and of the force-feeding of suffragettes on hunger strike in HMS Prison Holloway just a few years later. You’ve got just three days left to check out the festival in South London, which celebrates its twenty-first birthday this year with its largest programme to date.
