The Edgware Road to Marylebone area is an exciting, bustling, energetic place with huge diversity. It has a fascinating social and cultural history and serves questions about migration patterns, as well as state and social citizenship. Many of these issues are reflected in the smaller community of the school, reflections of imposed and peer rules, and the ethnic diversity are within its walls.
Ultra-Red is an artist collective that works within communities using ‘sound’ and ‘listening’ as a starting point to research.
Over the fours years there have been a series of workshops and lessons across many different age groups and subject areas. History and Geography lessons were visited by artists in residence, dance drama and music too. Citizenship was covered by all of the different projects and Art was a tool in which the research could be presented, We have made two films, 80 pieces of clay work, textile hangings, a hymnal book, and a live performance, with two catalogues and a curriculum book.
The Serpentine Gallery chose to use St Marylebone School as a gallery space to exhibit the work; so for three days in Spring 2013, the school opened it’s doors to the art visiting general public. Students created the audio guides that were used to guide the public around the school and church sites, whilst members of the gallery staff took photos and interviewed staff and pupils for their high profile event.
http://www.serpentinegalleries.org/exhibitions-events/edgware-road
http://www.serpentinegalleries.org/exhibitions-events/ultra-reds-reassembly
Leading on from the four year residency, a booklet was made documenting all of the projects that were written for the Edgware Road. This legacy document, made it possible for other departments to create their own projects from these experiences.
The Local Projects Shelf will feature the many projects and publications about the Church Street and Edgware Road area and will exist as a growing archive of the neighbourhood.
The shelf was born out of the need to share the vast amount of materials produced by art organisations, academic institutions, individual practitioners and researchers about the neighbourhood, with the public that constitutes it. The shelf is designed by Bahbak Hashemi-Nezhad, and invites donations of any publications or materials about the area.
Coinciding with the launch of the Local Projects Shelf, the event willlaunch Studies on a Road, a series of pamphlets documenting projects commissioned through the Serpentine Galleries’ Edgware Road Project as well as Action of Street/Action of Room a publication by students from Westminster Academy and artists Febrik.
Publication contributors will discuss their projects and we will share our experiences of living and working in the neighbourhood over food from the market.
Included in the pamphlet series is the Re-Assembly project, the four year collaboration between St Marylebone School, Ultra-Red and the Serpentine Gallery
A much larger selection of outcomes from the Edgware Road Project went to be exhibited in Barcelona. This is from the guide:
Living in-between is proposed as a plan designed to activate the Fabra i Coats Contemporary Art Centre as a creator and catalyst for interaction between artistic practices and social spaces. It aims to offer the means to collate and respond to emerging new approaches to how cultural institutions should be reconceived and reinvented, viewing artistic practices and collective processes as essential tools to activate strategies of change that influence both the cultural ecosystem and the social context. This proposal is based on collectively occupying a space while reflecting the shift from its past as a factory to its current role as an art centre that is also on the way to becoming a cultural institution with a more complex or systemic structure. The programme is aimed at critical questioning using approaches that combine investigation with production, archiving, mediation, participation and debate, as well as expanding on this by activating networks and socialising contents and experiences.
The department went to see the show..
St Marylebone Art & Design 
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