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Nu Town

Nu Town comprised three public performances and a comic book publication devised by Lloyd as his invited contribution to lead artist and curator Roman Vasseur’s project Let Us Pray for Those Now Residing in the Designated Area (November-December 2008), a series of temporary visual art installations and public panel discussions held in a number of locations in Harlow New Town as part of Harlow Art and the New Town, commissioned by Essex County Council and supported by Commissions East and Harlow Town Council (http:/www.the-edi.co.uk/harlowartandthenewtown.php). In an exploration of the role of public art, partly challenging notions of dialogical art practices advanced by Grant Kester, a body of international artists was charged with producing works which critiqued the utopian, neo-liberalism of Harlow’s master-planner Sir Frederick Gibberd who saw modernist buildings and public art as the reification of the assumed collective beliefs of a community.

In three successive weekends in a town centre venue, Lloyd’s hybrid performances, combining storytelling, acting and illustration, presented translations of three films that depict dystopian stories of the dreams and nightmares of modern society set within and embodied by modernist architectures: A Clockwork Orange (partly filmed in Harlow), Mon Oncle, and The Fountainhead (http://www.romanvasseur.com/pages/single202). An accompanying sixteen page comic book, Nu Town (2008) was also produced. Subsequent papers and publications have discussed Nu Town, further informing debates on the politics of urban design, including: Let Us Pray for Those Now Residing in the Designated Area, Roman Vasseur (2011); A. Philips and F. Eredemici (eds), Social Housing - Housing the Social: Art, Property and Spatial Justice (Amsterdam, 2012). As a result of the Harlow performance, Lloyd was asked to perform A Clockwork Orange at the Milton Keynes Gallery as part of the Community Without Propinquity exhibition (October-November 2011; published catalogue Inheritance Projects: Community Without Propinquity (2011).