THE EVENT: Village Pump Folk Festival

From Trowbridge, Wiltshire, comes the Village Pump Folk Festival – set in the White Horse Country Park, this annual field configuring event brings together music, craft and food! ‘Pump’ is a localised time-space manifestation of the broader creative economy which, in turn, weaves itself into creative geographies which can be seen through at least 3 different lenses…

Experiencing.

Pine and Gilmore (1999: 2) allude to ‘experiences’ as ‘a fourth economic offering’, which add to, and are separate from, commodities, goods or services. The experience economy can be observed at Pump and geography helps us perceive how people are engaging with it – it is a matter of scale. For example, at Pump 2015, ‘Paint & Go’ gave children the opportunity to do ceramic painting and the resolution of scale is very high – it’s personal; just the child, the paint and the ceramic object.

Ceramic painting.

Then, on a larger scale at Pump, people get an experience through listening to the live music, singing along and dancing in a group. This experience is contingent on the size of space but also, on the configuration of place – how the space is occupied and the relational dynamics at work between the performers, the individuals and the collective crowd work together to create an experience. Watch Show of Hands performing at Pump 2015 to see the experience economy (played out in the form of the audience singing along) in motion!

Clustering.

Clustering is a key driver of the creative economy . For ‘Pump’, this clustering – within distinct time and space – elevates it to being a field configuring event as musicians and craft traders alike can glean ‘network capital’ and ‘symbolic capital’ and benefit from the ‘diffusion of knowledge’ through being there (Power and Jansson, 2008: 424). For example, for musicians this year, there is ‘symbolic capital’ on offer in terms of playing at the same festival as headliners, The Proclaimers – who have already played to a stadium, showing their status – and ‘network capital’ is available as building relationships may lead to future gigs.

The Pump cluster.

 Fixing.

David Harvey (2001: 24) writing about capitalism, states that there is a ‘spatial fix’ and this term has dual meaning – physical fixing of processes in space and by doing that, satisfying a recurring crave for profit. This relates well to the creative economy and I suggest that there is a ‘creative fix’, particularly when thinking about field configuring events; the creative economy, in order to flourish needs to be fixed in space where creatives can gain the benefits of clustering and due to the innate need within the creative economy for innovation, the creative economy will need to keep on ‘fixing’.

Get yourself a ticket here and treat yourself to this local expression of the wider creative economy – it will be fun!

References

Harvey, D. (2001). Globalization and the spatial fix. Geographische revue,2(3), 23-31.

Pine, B. J., & Gilmore, J. H. (1999). The experience economy: work is theatre & every business a stage. Harvard Business Press.

Power, D., & Jansson, J. (2008). Cyclical clusters in global circuits: overlapping spaces in furniture trade fairs. Economic Geography, 84(4), 423-448.

Village Pump Folk Festival website craft quarter page, accessed by me on 19 February 2016, <http://www.villagepumpfolkfestival.co.uk/2015-festival/traders/craft-quarter/&gt;

Village Pump Folk Festival website home page, accessed by me on 19 February 2016, <http://www.villagepumpfolkfestival.co.uk/&gt;

Village Pump Folk Festival website ticket page, accessed by me on 19 February 2016, <http://www.villagepumpfolkfestival.co.uk/2016-festival/book-tickets/&gt;