Hackney WickED

Hackney Wick is brilliant. Usually Hackney Wick is a relatively dull former industrial estate that smells faintly of bagels. This one weekend of the year, though, sees the area’s resident artists fall over each other to expose themselves to the world. It’s both relaxing and awkward; strolling around and taking in the views, only to wind up trapped in a room with a man giving you an intimate display of his sexy flute skills, accompanied by migraine-inducing visuals.

Flute man turned out to be a gentle introduction to the day. After taking in some more pretty pictures we found a woman sitting semi-naked on the floor of an exhibition space. Once a crowd formed, she covered herself in bin bags and started flinging mincemeat around, loudly announcing that she was creating art.

This is exactly what I had been hoping for, but I noticed the older ladies next to me seemed confused and maybe even a little frightened. The festival visitors were as much of an attraction as the exhibits themselves. As we moved on, I noticed that I was surrounded by a great number of my bearded brethren. When a beard is longer than the hair, that’s when we’re talking serious gourmet face wire. There were a bunch of very silly hats, too.

There was plenty of music on the streets, ranging from 8 bit NES throwback tunes to violins and singing.  Pop up bars seem to have erupted like tasty weeds all over the place, generally offering slightly overpriced cocktails to people unable to stomach any more cans of Red Stripe. We bought some cocktails from some lovely ladies who were most definitely chemically altered, sampled some German sausage and watched some canal boat folk burn things for a while. Then my friend bought a taxidermy blowfish for £2. Good, it was.

At one point we ended enduring a slightly forced game of charades in an artist’s flat, all trying to decide whether the Hitler-inspired art was our cup of tea. Some of the pieces we saw were genuinely awesome; others were reminiscent of my own stunted artistic efforts as a teenager. One can only take so many collages. There were quite a few police around, too, occasionally giving out cautions for reckless marijuana abuse. 20 feet away there were rogue traders selling suspiciously attained t-shirts for a pound, murmuring to themselves and looking generally shifty.

Of course, a small army of hipsters was present, as well as young families and individual art enthusiasts. It felt like we had all come together for one weekend of creative frottage, open to experimentation and self-discovery. I came to the conclusion that I am definitely one of the least cool people to live in the area, and that mincemeat is a truly versatile foodstuff.

Image by sludgegulper courtesy of Flickr