Five Ways to Nowhere: A Walk Between the Worlds

About

Join Andy Howlett, Walkspace co-founder, for a twilight tour of Five Ways on the edge of Birmingham's city centre.

Five Ways is an area in transition: vacant office blocks await demolition or transformation into luxury flats and hotels, while nearby an 'urban village' emerges in the shadows of last century's modernist ruins. It's a place of passing through, of inbetween-ness and becoming: a crossroads on the edge of the city. In many traditions crossroads have significance as places 'between the worlds', sites where spirits may be contacted and other realms accessed.

What sort of spirits might be summoned at a place like Five Ways? What thresholds – supernatural or otherwise – might be crossed? Drawing on folklore, literature and the concept of 'psychetecture', this walk takes you to the edge of worlds and back again.

This event is organised to coincide with Ikon's exhibition Horror in the Modernist Block.

Horror in the Modernist Block is supported by Fluxus Art Projects, Embassy of the Netherlands, Freelands Foundation, Italian Cultural Institute and The Modern Institute.

About the artist

Andy Howlett is an artist and filmmaker interested in collective walking, urban exploration, guerrilla heritage and The Right to the City. He is co-founder of West Midlands based walking-art collective Walkspace and curates short film events with The Magic Cinema. His first feature film Paradise Lost, History in the Unmaking (2021) is a psychogeographical investigation of Birmingham Central Library and the death of Modernism. Howlett frequently collaborates with Flatpack Festival, most recently celebrating Spaghetti Junction's 50th birthday.