Passage

The Wapping Project has always been a rite of passage — from commissioned artists to chefs who worked at Wapping Food in the days at the Wapping Hydraulic Power Station. Nobody who has made the journey of working with us in any capacity could claim being unchanged by the experience. The Wapping Project is never static; it avoided solidifying into something that can be easily defined. We commissioned and produced many works over the years inspired by the dynamics of being, journeys and transformations including Passage, 2013, and Passages, 1996. We are returning to these themes in this volume of new writing at the time of tectonic political shifts. In the aftermath of the European Union membership referendum in 2016, the whole of the UK, its residents and citizens, are in the state of passage. We are on a journey drifting away. The English Channel (or La Manche as the French call it) somehow managed to stretch and is continuing to expand. Will the Channel Tunnel — the narrow submarine passage providing the only physical link with the continent — keep up with the expansive motion of water and politics above? We are bringing to you three pieces of poetry responding to the theme passage — Agnieszka Studzinska’s Passage, Alia Syed’s Eating Grass and Heather Phillipson’s everything SLAPPED and CANDIED and OPENING. We are also sharing our international event series — Kitchen Conversations — that take place from San Francisco through London to Berlin. A text and image work by Shona Illingworth — Topologies of Air — produced in collaboration with law professor and barrister specialising in international law and human rights Nick Grief and Andrew Hoskins, Interdisciplinary Research Professor in the College of Social Sciences at the University of Glasgow, completes the volume.