OverWorlds & UnderWorlds is Yorkshire’s flagship arts project for the London Cultural 2012 Olympiad. Leeds Canvas, the first collaboration between eight of the city’s key arts organisations offered their city of Leeds – its people, landscape, buildings, artists, and cultural institutions – as a canvas to The Brothers Quay, and asked them to respond in memorable and surprising ways.
They have proposed a large scale work, taking place this May, which will explore the flow of people and water through the city. They are interested in how, from out of the anonymous and everyday, myth suddenly erupts and transforms space into another dimension and then subsides, leaving the everyday altered and somehow different.
The Brothers Quay are renowned for stop motion animations which often involve surreal puppetry, (the video above is an excerpt from Street of Crocodiles) and although we don’t know yet what will unfold, this sounds exciting to me. As a lead up, the brothers’ exhibition Dormitorium, miniature scenes and decor from their animations, was shown in Leeds last October.
