reCyculture has evolved, working with Paul Bryce of Light Fires, for a pilot event at Cyclopark, FireSpring.

Created by reCyculture’s Artistic Director, FireSpring will be a fiery garden of delights including upcycled installations made from bikes, live music & bicycle pyrotechnic performances. FireSpring marks the turning of the clocks and welcomes back the spring.

Event Schedule:

6pm-6.30pm – FireSpring Bike Train gathers in Community Square, Gravesend. Light up your bike or come along to have a few lights put on your ride

6.30pm – The Bike Train heads off with the Strictly Cycling crew

6.30pm – Lighting up starts at Cyclopark

6.50pm – Bike Train arrives

7pm – Pyrotechnic & installation performances start & then every 20 minutes until

9pm – Final performance & close

Location map: http://bit.ly/1S1QkPL

Funded by:

The reCyculture team created an epic installation on the roof of the World’s End pub – Night Bikes – as part of SHINE On London Road. The installation was commissioned by Brighton & Hove City Council and Portas Pilot regeneration scheme as alternative Xmas lights and was in place December 2013 to January 2014, surviving the festive season’s storms and 90mph gale force winds.

The SHINE On bikes were rescued from the gardens of several local people.

Dahlan’s Sister’s Raleigh

Max’s BMX

Foz’s Mountain Bike

Sarah’s Boneshaker

Hot on the heels of the success of Green Horses in Wandsworth Arts Festival, Wandsworth Council and Mayor of London Presents commissioned reCyculture to create an installation for the roof of Putney Leisure Centre, along the root of the London Olympic Cycling Road Race.

In 2012, the project returned to Roehampton, and Wandsworth Arts Festival, to embrace the wonderful notion of Green Horses on the Wall and impossible dreams, with more impossible and improbable recycled bike installations around the estate. Performance poet Chris Paradox was commissioned to create a short spoken word piece about ridiculous ideas and what crazy dreams mean for the local community.

In 2011, Wandsworth Arts Festival approached Creative Producer, Karen Poley, to run a project on the Alton Estate in Roehampton. A number of bikes were painted and installed around the estate as part of a Bicycle Ballet workshop and performance project, during the festival.

Watching the bikes being installed above Roehampton Library, a local resident came up laughing that the installations reminded him of a saying in his country, Romania, ‘Green Horses on the Wall.’ When you see green horses on the wall, you’re dreaming of incredible or impossible ideas, as in ‘a pipe dream’ or ‘when pigs might fly.’

The project started in 2006 as a site decoration installation for the first mass participatory performance Bicycle Ballet, on Brighton seafront and the city’s first Car Free Day event.

It was called Performance Parking – inspired by the lengths you sometimes have to take to securely park your bike – & started as a bit of a joke; a comment on how impossible it was to park your bike, especially overnight, without it getting vandalised or stolen. The solution? Park your bike out of reach in an impossible location, at the top of a wall or post.

At one end of the performance site were two inexplicable and defunct telegraph poles. No one seemed to know how they came to be there or who they belonged to, so no one minded when we asked to use them. At the other end of the space, the cliff wall provided a blank canvas for another, hanging installation.

Scroll around the map to find installation locations

View reCyculture in a larger map

The installations Search the Location Map & click on the images below:

A Kent-wide installation project commissioned by Kent County Council and local partners in response to the Paralympic Road Cycling Races which took place at Brands Hatch in September 2012.

The reCyculture team worked with local people in three creative residencies across Kent, to paint bikes, & collect stories, create poems & stop animation films, to create online, virtual installations, alongside the physical installaions, around the county.

Commissioning partner

Location partners:

Gravesend

& Tri the Bike Shop

Sevenoaks

Tunbridge Wells

& the Number One Community Centre

Whitstable

Margate – Harbour Arm Gallery, Marine Studios & Thanet Cycle Recycle

Ramsgate – Queen Charlotte

Folkestone – Creative Quarter Folkestone & Folkestone Fringe

A HUGE thanks to all

You can still get involved. Tell us your stories, ideas and thoughts about cycling and bikes, and be part of reCyculture on www.facebook.com/reCyculture or Twitter @reCyculture

The reCyculture team ran several workshop sessions across Kent including:

Bike painting at Cyclopark.  People of all ages joined in.

We asked people to tell us their stories. Writing them down, or interviewing them:

And we ran sessions, such as this one in Margate, creating poems about people’s cycling experiences & even made a stop animation film: 30 bikes into one car parking space