Success! My website is back online! After a whole week of fiddling with settings I don't fully understand, it is finally working again! For all of 10 minutes I felt like I'd overcome my technical inabilities, until I realised that it was my fault the website had crashed in the first place. I've no idea why I originally thought the nameservers had to be changed, or why it took me so long to work up the courage to change them back again.
While all this has been going on, Beacon have been waiting to hear if the Arts Council will provide funding in time to use for the Venice Biennale Pavilion and the East Midlands Off-Site Project. This means that, after months of hard work, a successful funding application and some fantastic ideas, the two events may not go ahead. It's incredible how far forward you need to plan for these events: the second event is in September but even if the funding comes through in April it will be too late as venues need deposits, artists need commission fees and so on.
After the excitement of helping Beacon at the Brown Mountain Festival in October, I have been really looking forward to helping in Venice. Dan and I will have been working part-time towards the finished project for around 8 months but Nicola and John, the directors, will have put even more into it. We anxiously await the Arts Council's decision with vague talk of Venice sideshow events on severely reduced budgets.
On Thursday, however, Nicola drove us around potential sites for the offsite project. It was a beautiful winter day and the sites were amazing – one was a church on top of a hill that was carved into a cliff by a huge quarry at its base, providing a view over the whole valley. With that in mind, it would be a shame to have to delay the Venice Pavilion but at least we could adjust the East Midlands project so that people could still experience these locations and specially commissioned contemporary art.
