The Wedding Project – Anna Best Archive

Now housed in the Tate Archive The Wedding Project was a commission from Tate Modern just before it opened, to follow on from Joshua Compston’s Tate Fete the year before in 1997. It was a very specific brief: to happen in Borough Market, to involve both Tate staff and ‘local people’. My idea was to take a wedding as a Ready Made, referring to the famous social uncomfortableness of wedding occasions, the unnatural conjoining of two groups of strangers, where two different families are plunged together, almost proposing that the Tate was using an ‘artist’ to marry them to a ‘new audience’. The event was self consciously spectacular, a ‘real’ celebration combined with a critical look at how public and private are blurred through televisual mediation.

There was an intensive research process in Borough in the light of the change and gentrification that was being ushered in by the arrival of the Tate. This research resulted in the making of a documentary video Borough Market’s Double Life over a 24 hour period. The video was given to the Borough Market traders and shown during the wedding. Most of the market activity happened at night and was invisible to everyone who came to the wedding so the video was a way of showing them what happened in the market normally. The wedding itself was real and I looked for the couple whose wedding it would be and I found them, Eliza and Liam, through someone who worked in the Golden Hinde shop — the boat near Borough Market. They were going to get married in Finsbury Town Hall but they agreed to have their wedding paid for and turned into a piece of art. Their families were there plus a lot of people from the locality and a few passers-by. I still meet people who say they went to the wedding.

3000 traditional printed invitations were distributed within a certain radius around the Tate, to their target audience. I liked the strangeness of what would usually be totally private and within the family, becoming very public and random. The event was organised along the lines of a traditional white wedding. There was a civil ceremony done by Southwark registrars on the Golden Hinde. There were stalls where local businesses were selling their wares. Ingredients for the wedding came from local shops, craftspeople and businesses. The contents of the day were formed by conversations with Eliza and Liam. As she had Irish roots there was a ceilidh and Liam had a connection with Spain so there was Spanish tapas. Tate staff were ushers and they wore ‘Tate Modern’ luminous yellow coats. There was a lot going on, musical performances, poetry recitations, dancing, an MC, Valerio… It worked as a public and private event, bringing them together in quite an interesting way.

It was filmed by cameras on scaffolding towers that were positioned around the event. It was done before reality TV and Big Brother and before the whole thing of docu-soaps started to enter the public imagination. It would be very different now, but then it was like watching ourselves on TV. There were monitors on pedestals and it was filmed like a sporting event and mixed live by a professional video editor. The video element magnified the abundance of it all, the spectacular scale and nature of it, and confused the fact and fiction aspect even more. A huge number of people took part in the organising and production.

The video, along with a poster with all the credits, the group photo , a huge wedding album and other paraphernalia, were exhibited in a short exhibition at Bankside Power Station Visitor Centre — the Tate Modern before it was renovated. Neil Chapman wrote a piece about this afterwards that was meant to be performed as a lecture, but this never happened. There was a discussion called Blind Date, chaired by Iwona Blaswick, where Eliza and myself were part of the panel. The video has been shown recently in its own right at Bedford Museum in a show about weddings, and in Faltering Flame in Nottingham, curated by David Thorp.

The year after I finished The Wedding Project, Nina Pope and Karen Guthrie (www.somewhere.org) did the follow up project, which was connected to the Canterbury Tales. A legacy has been that every year since the couple Eliza and Liam have phoned me on their wedding anniversary.

Date

1998

Commissioner and venues

Tate Modern
Borough Market and the Tate Modern Visitor Centre, London

Media

Live event
Video
Photography

Collection

Tate Modern Archive

Publications

Invitation cards
Order of the day

Aknowledgements

Production

George Cochrane, Heather Galbraith, Kasia Balon, Phil Monk

The Wedding

Eliza Girling
Liam Southwood
Guillem Southwood

Contributors

Marie O’Reilly
The Medway Singers
Bloys
Satay
Neals Yard Dairy
Brindisa
Nick Gurney
Konditor & Cook
Valerio Martinez Senior
The Wraggle Taggle Ceilidh Band
Anamelia Mello
Strictly Gordo
Sebastian Lowsley Williams
Southwark College
Mary Evans
Tito Vega
Lucy Wilson
Caro Howell

Art Direction and decorations

Martin O’Carroll, Clare Stent, Sebastian Lowsley Williams

Video

Rupert Carey
Sarah Weatherall

Camera operators

Sarah Weatherall, Owen Oppenheimer, Olly Knight, Chris Connarty, Begona Gania

Live vision mixing

Lennaart Van Oldenborgh

Audio Visual and Lighting

Insight Lighting: Brendan Clark, Matt Davies Konstantinos

Sound

Peter Cusack

Camera Assistants

Damon Mills
David Rees
Students at Southwark College Audio Visual Communications Department

Researchers

Kasia Balon
Rupert Carey
Sarah Weatherall

PA

Richard St Clair (System Sound)

Photography

Nick Gurney
Rod Morris

Print Design

Ella Gibbs