We Are Here, a new community-led, interactive video art installation by award winning artist studio idontloveyouanymore will launch at the historic Selby Abbey on Saturday 1st June. It runs until Sunday 7^th July. The installation is commissioned and produced by North Yorkshire -based digital arts organisation Mediale. It is supported by North Yorkshire Council and launches Now Then!, a new cultural development programme which creates impactful cultural experiences in Selby, Sherburn and Tadcaster.  

North Yorkshire Council has been awarded £350,000 by Arts Council England’s Place Partnership fund to deliver Now Then! which is also funded by UK Shared Prosperity Fund and North Yorkshire’s Cultural Development Fund.

We Are Here explores our natural desire to contemplate radically different futures, reframe past histories and connect them to the present. Over the past two months, artists idontloveyouanymore have worked with Selby residents in a series of workshops to collect and curate their imagined versions of a future Selby, and the Abbey. 

The creative ideas arising from the workshops have been used as inspiration for interactive digital artworks viewed through a series of ‘portals’, where the viewer’s gaze controls the perspective into the ‘future’. These imagined futures include Selby Abbey entirely immersed underwater and taken over by forests. The work invites viewers to consider all those who have stood within the ancient Abbey walls, and asks; were they also dreaming of the future? Did it look like this?

Anna West, Co-Artistic Director of idontloveyouanymore, says,: “We’re so excited to be working with the brilliant Mediale on our new artwork We Are Here. The work engages with dreams and fantasy, possible (and impossible) futures for Selby and for human life. And where better to engage with these flights of fancy than Selby’s awe inspiring and historical Abbey.”

“We’re delighted to be launching Now Then! with this ambitious new work by the incredibly talented idontloveyouanymore. They’re a (proudly) northern studio, creating groundbreaking and sector leading work, and we’ve been working with them for some time, through our talent development programmes and in other ways. Proper community engagement, technologically innovative, thought provoking, and a healthy dose of good humour – exactly what art can and should be!” 

Tom Higham, Creative Director, Mediale,

Steered and developed by a partnership of community and cultural organisations, Now Then! will create joyful, memorable and authentic experiences, which speak directly to communities’ needs and aspirations. 

“We Are Here looks to the future of the area while inviting people to visit Selby Abbey and experience it in a new way – we want Now Then! to enable local people to see where they live through fresh eyes and this launch exhibition does just that.”

Revd Canon John Weetman of Selby Abbey, a partner in the programme

The installation will run 10.00am-4.00pm daily from Saturday 1st June to Sunday 7th July. (Please check Selby Abbey website for details)