Blast

Blast is the City Council's own massive injection of cutting-edge culture every November. Aimed at young people who wouldn't go looking for art it goes on a mission to seek them out in clubs, at gigs and in the street.

Young video makers, photographers, painters and sculptors are commissioned to produce challenging, intriguing visuals, poets are stuck on platforms in nightclubs, musicians given studio time and venues.

Last year's Blast put poems on the pavement, created its own perfume, hung out in bus shelters.

Contemporary African dancers performed a specially-commissioned piece in Liquid night club. At the Guildhall (which was decor'd up for the festival by artist Jon Lockhart) and venues around, a royal flush of performers; King Adora, Queen Adreena, Damage ..a poetry night under the spell of the High Priestess of the Anti-Chav Allegiance..... two frenetic evenings of raw young bands with the Wired project.

At the Guildhall, the museums and in the streets, exhibitions by photographers Andy Moxon, Ralph Colmar and Magali Moreau chronicled secret, hidden or forbidden lives of the city.

All the above photographs were taken by Piers Rawson, reproduced by kind permission of South West Arts Marketing

Magali Moreau worked with a group of sixteen year old mothers-to-be as part of her Secret Histories commission and charted a gorgeous voyage of discovery.

Blast 2003 had teen icons in the leisure centre, sonic prints in the Guildhall and dozens of paper lanterns floating in the Docks.