What makes a City I: Cultural Palimpsests
Hosted by Florian Malzacher
Sat 11 October 2025, 2–4pm
Contact, Manchester
Book tickets here
Cities are palimpsestic—constantly rewritten through traditions, conflicts, identities, and ideologies that shape their realities. In recent years, they have increasingly found themselves in competition, with municipal councils tasked with constructing urban identities that function as brands, carefully curated to appear distinctive and attractive on both national and international stages. Arts and culture have become central instruments in these strategies, with major investments in flagship projects designed to promote a city’s ‘official’ identity—often by highlighting past successes or staging large-scale spectacles. Yet what space remains for independent ideas or contemporary cultural practices that resist or fall outside such hegemonic narratives? The 32nd edition of The Art of Assembly explores the kinds of assemblies that arts and culture generate within the urban context – and what they write over.
Playwright Linda Brogan explores the archaeology of a Manchester soul and funk club, the Reno, the theatre and audience for 50s born mixed heritage people in the 1970s. Curator Alistair Hudson advocates for cultural policies that focus on social engagement and collective participation, using art and technological tools to empower local communities. Artist and Lecturer Jenna Ashton explores how heritage, feminist and community-based cultural practices shape urban narratives.
About the speakers
Dr Jenna Ashton is an artist-producer-designer and Senior Lecturer in Heritage Studies at the University of Manchester. Her interdisciplinary research sits across cultural analysis and feminist environmental humanities, with a focus on community and place-based practices, knowledges, and economies. In addition to her creative research outputs, she is the editor of book collections on feminism and museums, and heritage and gender. She is currently writing a monograph on Manchester urban communities and climate justice. Follow-on projects focus on food sovereignty, animal citizenship, and the feminist urban commons.
Linda Brogan is a playwright, performer and visual artist. Recent work include Excavating the Reno (2017), the literal excavation of a 1970s, Moss Side, funk and soul cellar club for the purposes of art; In the Ruins of the Big House (2024) at Factory International, where she used her white mum’s status to declare herself the mistress of her dad’s Jamaican plantation; and MY MUM IS WHITE: Exorcising Half-Caste Ghosts (2025) at HOME, where Brogan, psychologist professor Adam Danquah, and 5 other mixed-race creative and cultural practitioners held a 4-week exorcism mind-mapping the forest of their ghosts.
Alistair Hudson is the Scientific-Artistic Chairman of the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Germany. Hudson is a curator and museum director with broad-ranging international experience. From 2018 to 2022 he served as director of two museums in Manchester: Manchester Art Gallery and The Whitworth. He was also Professor of Useful Art at the University of Manchester. Hudson’s concept of a ‘useful museum’ envisions artistic institutions and cultural institutions as centres of social responsibility and transformation. He believes that they should be run artistically, as works in progress in their own right.
Host Florian Malzacher is a curator, writer, dramaturg, as well as professor of dramaturgy and curatorial practice at the University for Design and Arts in Karlsruhe, Germany (since 2024). He is the host of The Art of Assembly, a series of lectures and talks about the potential of gathering in art, activism, and politics.
About the project
The Art of Assembly is part of The Questions, Quarantine’s three-part project taking place in 2025 in Manchester and Chemnitz, Germany twin cities since 1983.
Through performance, conversation and cultural exchange, Quarantine, in collaboration with ASA-FF e.V. (Chemnitz) will work together to create intergenerational encounters, both locally and internationally. The Questions is part of the programme for Chemnitz 2025: European Capital of Culture.
In collaboration with ASA-FF e.V.
Part of Chemnitz European Capital of Culture 2025
In cooperation with Allianz Foundation
Supported by Cultural Bridge, Manchester City Council and The Skelton Charity
This project is part of the European Capital of Culture Chemnitz 2025. This project is co-financed by tax funds on the basis of the parliamentary budget of the state of Saxony and by federal funds from the Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien (Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media).
Related event
On Wed 15 Oct, 5–7pm and Thu 16 – Sun 19 Oct, 12–4.30pm, Quarantine are hosting Telescope at Manchester Museum, a durational performance that takes the form of a live exhibition of borrowed belongings, and their owners’ thoughts about where they themselves belong.
Images: Courtesy Jenna Ashton, Linda Brogan and Alistair Hudson © ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe. Photo: Marvin Systermans