Making People Up manifested characters through a series of screenings, performances and readings within the exposed industrial space of Tramway 1. Taking an experimental approach to staging, the programme oscillated the audience’s proximity to characters on the screen, stage and page.

This day of characters started from the premise that in the everyday we are continually making each other up and went on to ask what is distinctive and politically significant about fictional characters?

A series of new live works by artists and writers Kate Briggs, Siân Robinson Davies, Sarah Forrest, Aniara Omann and Katrina Palmer saw characters invoked, inhabited, theorised, exorcised, dispersed and collapsed. Accompanying these live works were musicians Karl Blake, Jody Henderson, Kenneth Wilson, John Nicol, the collaborative group Brighton Upton-Trust, the artist Carrie Skinner and Anna McLauchlan.

Throughout the day, moving image works by Jérôme Bel, Boudry & Lorenz, Holly Antrum and Apichatpong Weerasethakul punctuated the programme.