One of the last exhibitions I attended in person was Autopsy of a Home, an installation by the Iranian-born, Manchester-based artist Omid Asadi at the Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art in Manchester. Asadi’s work was meditative and slow-moving, drawing on his experiences as a migrant and evoking a sense of dislocation between cultures. Opening in October, during a brief easing of the lockdown restrictions to which Greater Manchester was subjected for the best part of a year, the exhibition closed again, prematurely, just weeks later.

As most arts programming in the UK has moved online for the foreseeable future, I was looking forward to ‘LOITER’ (in which Asadi was one of the commissioned artists), a socially distanced event intended to take place simultaneously on the streets of Manchester and Salford as well as online, as an opportunity to reconnect with works of art in a physical context.

Conceived by Proforma, a curatorial platform based at Islington Mill in Salford, ‘LOITER’ was composed of a series of commissions that connected the centre of Manchester with arts venues and public spaces in neighbouring Salford. Focusing on Chapel Street, a historic trade route between the two cities, the commissions were designed to be encountered along the route, bringing together the work of artists local to Greater Manchester with perspectives from international artists and foreign-born artists who have arrived through work or study and made the region their home. While the prolongation and tightening of restrictions at the end of 2020 meant the entire event shifted online, the livestream format created a seamless sense of connection between two cities separated by an indistinct and sometimes arbitrary border.

Viewers experienced both ‘LOITER’ and the commissioned works via a video tour filmed on a walk between the CFCCA, in Manchester’s trendy Northern Quarter, and the Working Class Movement Library, a radical history library in Salford, accompanied by a guidebook and interactive map designed by Manchester-based printmaking collective Shy Bairns. Covering a distance of just over a mile and a half – a walk that would usually take around half an hour – ‘LOITER’ elongated this journey to a period of two hours, slowing down the pace and turning a familiar and well-trodden route into an experience that felt disembodied and sometimes dreamlike. While some of the commissioned pieces acted as an accompaniment and soundtrack to the journey, at other times they forced a pause, proffering an invitation to stop and consider one’s (virtual) surroundings.

‘LOITER’ began with Asadi’s Hansel and Gretel (2021) a performance filmed outside the now-shuttered CFCCA. Leading us on a slow-paced trail around the neighbouring streets, Hansel and Gretel set the tone for the remainder of the walk. Crouched close to the ground, it was unclear at first what the artist was doing. As Asadi gradually moved position, it became apparent that he was holding a paintbrush and creating a trail of brightly coloured dots. These weren’t random: Asadi used his brush to colour in those discarded blobs of chewing gum which stick to the pavement as hardened discs, in the process highlighting and foregrounding the traces left behind by others.

From the Northern Quarter, ‘LOITER’ escorted the viewer through central Manchester’s usually busy entertainment and shopping districts, now almost deserted. We paused at Greengate Square, on the threshold of Manchester and Salford, where a pedestrian bridge crosses the River Irwell: this modest stretch of water forms the boundary between Manchester city centre and the city of Salford (and gives its name to the Irwell Sculpture Trail, a long-distance public art trail running between Chapel Street and the Irwell’s source in Pennine Lancashire). Here, we were invited to linger (metaphorically) on a bench in the company of Tink Flaherty, an artist born on Chapel Street.

Originally intended as a participatory work facilitating conversations with members of the public, Flaherty’s 2021 film Mancunian Whispers was adapted to comprise extracts from pre-recorded interviews with two locals with roots in this traditionally working-class area. The artist’s mother, who was relocated from the outskirts of the city to a tower block in inner-city Salford, spoke of finding a community after arriving as a stranger. Then, the son of a tailor described how cheaper rents and parking on the Salford side of the river gave his father a base from which he spent four decades clothing Manchester’s legal professionals, underscoring the symbiotic relationship between the two cities. At a time when the Chapel Street area is being reinvented as an overspill district of Manchester city centre, with overseas investment driving high-rise, high-density apartment blocks, Flaherty provided time and space to listen to those voices which risk being erased from the cityscape through a process of gentrification and homogenisation.

Continuing onto Chapel Street itself, another opportunity to pause came at Islington Park, a small area of greenery close to Islington Mill, an artist-led complex of creative studios in one of the area’s few remaining textile mills that has not been demolished or converted to residential or commercial use. ‘LOITER’ stopped at one of the (somewhat neglected) artworks on the Irwell Sculpture Trail: a community mosaic commemorating The Secret Garden author Frances Hodgson Burnett, who grew up locally.

The pandemic can feel all-consuming, and it often seems that time has been put on hold but, beginning here, French-born, Manchester-based artist Juliet Davis-Dufayard’s series of film and sound works watching the moon and jets crossing and recrossing the clouds (2021) offered the viewer some perspective. Asking us to step outside our present moment, she invited us to identify with the generations preceding and succeeding us, prompted us to consider our position in a global ecosystem, and reminded us of the suffering of those who have lived through another public health crisis: the HIV/AIDS epidemic. If Asadi and Flaherty’s work grounded the viewer in the context of the city and its people, Davis-Dufayard’s work took us away from our immediate setting on a journey through time and the imagination. It also offered a diversion from the main route, setting off from Islington Park through residential estates and tree-lined public squares and reconnecting with the banks of the River Irwell as it looped around central Salford, emerging at ‘LOITER’s final destination, the Working Class Movement Library.

The German artist Christian Selent’s film Idle Thoughts (2021) was developed during a remote residency at the library, undertaken as part of Proforma’s exchange with Manchester’s twin city, Chemnitz. From the library’s extensive collection of pamphlets and other material relating to labour and trade union history, and working people’s culture and activism, Selent picked out The Right to be Lazy, an 1883 text by the French writer Paul Lafargue, which argued for workers’ rights to leisure and a truncation of the working day. A series of quotations and statements on work and leisure, by various writers and theorists, were projected against a video of the library building, forming not just a history lesson but also a warning and a provocation that felt timely as working rights and conditions – along with freedom of movement – come under threat from both the pandemic and Brexit.

While most of the works in ‘LOITER’ were incorporated smoothly into the route, a trio of animations by the Iranian-born, Manchester-based painter Parham Ghalamdar were more disruptive. Activated outside some of the many fast-food takeaways that line Chapel Street, Ghalamdar’s animations provided brief windows into the area’s now mostly hidden industrial past. Feeling self-consciously analogue, they had the flickering quality of a film projector or slide show. Cycling through repetitive human and machine-made movements, they were inspired in part by the archive, now held at the nearby People’s History Museum in Manchester, of the socially engaged Communist artist Clifford Rowe, whose paintings depicted workers and industrial processes in bold lines and vivid colour. Ghalamdar’s Glitching Yard 2020 (2021) picked out the bright yellow overalls of faceless workers against a black-and-white backdrop; similarly, today’s yellow-jacketed construction workers stood out on screen as ‘LOITER’ made its way down Chapel Street. The drilling of building work was a persistent aural presence throughout ‘LOITER’: even as the pandemic has put most sectors of the economy on hold, the construction industry continues apace.

Although its built environment and demographics are in a state of flux, Chapel Street is an area that is rich in artistic production, architectural landmarks and social and radical history. ‘LOITER’ could have resembled a local history tour, or cherry-picked certain narratives about the city; instead, it presented a much richer reading of a place that was both rooted in and transcended its immediate geographical context. Watching live via Facebook, fellow viewers posted their locations, an act which indicated that those engaging with ‘LOITER’ were not all based in Greater Manchester – many were watching from locations across Europe. Although experienced remotely, at a distance from the artworks and the places that inspired them, this peripatetic online format enabled ‘LOITER’ to provide a communal experience that had much to offer those familiar with Salford as well as those watching from afar.

One of the last exhibitions I attended in person was Autopsy of a Home, an installation by the Iranian-born, Manchester-based artist Omid Asadi at the Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art in Manchester. Asadi’s work was meditative and slow-moving, drawing on his experiences as a migrant and evoking a sense of dislocation between cultures. Opening in October, during a brief easing of the lockdown restrictions to which Greater Manchester was subjected for the best part of a year, the exhibition closed again, prematurely, just weeks later.

As most arts programming in the UK has moved online for the foreseeable future, I was looking forward to ‘LOITER’ (in which Asadi was one of the commissioned artists), a socially distanced event intended to take place simultaneously on the streets of Manchester and Salford as well as online, as an opportunity to reconnect with works of art in a physical context.

Conceived by Proforma, a curatorial platform based at Islington Mill in Salford, ‘LOITER’ was composed of a series of commissions that connected the centre of Manchester with arts venues and public spaces in neighbouring Salford. Focusing on Chapel Street, a historic trade route between the two cities, the commissions were designed to be encountered along the route, bringing together the work of artists local to Greater Manchester with perspectives from international artists and foreign-born artists who have arrived through work or study and made the region their home. While the prolongation and tightening of restrictions at the end of 2020 meant the entire event shifted online, the livestream format created a seamless sense of connection between two cities separated by an indistinct and sometimes arbitrary border.

Viewers experienced both ‘LOITER’ and the commissioned works via a video tour filmed on a walk between the CFCCA, in Manchester’s trendy Northern Quarter, and the Working Class Movement Library, a radical history library in Salford, accompanied by a guidebook and interactive map designed by Manchester-based printmaking collective Shy Bairns. Covering a distance of just over a mile and a half – a walk that would usually take around half an hour – ‘LOITER’ elongated this journey to a period of two hours, slowing down the pace and turning a familiar and well-trodden route into an experience that felt disembodied and sometimes dreamlike. While some of the commissioned pieces acted as an accompaniment and soundtrack to the journey, at other times they forced a pause, proffering an invitation to stop and consider one’s (virtual) surroundings.

‘LOITER’ began with Asadi’s Hansel and Gretel (2021) a performance filmed outside the now-shuttered CFCCA. Leading us on a slow-paced trail around the neighbouring streets, Hansel and Gretel set the tone for the remainder of the walk. Crouched close to the ground, it was unclear at first what the artist was doing. As Asadi gradually moved position, it became apparent that he was holding a paintbrush and creating a trail of brightly coloured dots. These weren’t random: Asadi used his brush to colour in those discarded blobs of chewing gum which stick to the pavement as hardened discs, in the process highlighting and foregrounding the traces left behind by others.

From the Northern Quarter, ‘LOITER’ escorted the viewer through central Manchester’s usually busy entertainment and shopping districts, now almost deserted. We paused at Greengate Square, on the threshold of Manchester and Salford, where a pedestrian bridge crosses the River Irwell: this modest stretch of water forms the boundary between Manchester city centre and the city of Salford (and gives its name to the Irwell Sculpture Trail, a long-distance public art trail running between Chapel Street and the Irwell’s source in Pennine Lancashire). Here, we were invited to linger (metaphorically) on a bench in the company of Tink Flaherty, an artist born on Chapel Street.

Originally intended as a participatory work facilitating conversations with members of the public, Flaherty’s 2021 film Mancunian Whispers was adapted to comprise extracts from pre-recorded interviews with two locals with roots in this traditionally working-class area. The artist’s mother, who was relocated from the outskirts of the city to a tower block in inner-city Salford, spoke of finding a community after arriving as a stranger. Then, the son of a tailor described how cheaper rents and parking on the Salford side of the river gave his father a base from which he spent four decades clothing Manchester’s legal professionals, underscoring the symbiotic relationship between the two cities. At a time when the Chapel Street area is being reinvented as an overspill district of Manchester city centre, with overseas investment driving high-rise, high-density apartment blocks, Flaherty provided time and space to listen to those voices which risk being erased from the cityscape through a process of gentrification and homogenisation.

Continuing onto Chapel Street itself, another opportunity to pause came at Islington Park, a small area of greenery close to Islington Mill, an artist-led complex of creative studios in one of the area’s few remaining textile mills that has not been demolished or converted to residential or commercial use. ‘LOITER’ stopped at one of the (somewhat neglected) artworks on the Irwell Sculpture Trail: a community mosaic commemorating The Secret Garden author Frances Hodgson Burnett, who grew up locally.

The pandemic can feel all-consuming, and it often seems that time has been put on hold but, beginning here, French-born, Manchester-based artist Juliet Davis-Dufayard’s series of film and sound works watching the moon and jets crossing and recrossing the clouds (2021) offered the viewer some perspective. Asking us to step outside our present moment, she invited us to identify with the generations preceding and succeeding us, prompted us to consider our position in a global ecosystem, and reminded us of the suffering of those who have lived through another public health crisis: the HIV/AIDS epidemic. If Asadi and Flaherty’s work grounded the viewer in the context of the city and its people, Davis-Dufayard’s work took us away from our immediate setting on a journey through time and the imagination. It also offered a diversion from the main route, setting off from Islington Park through residential estates and tree-lined public squares and reconnecting with the banks of the River Irwell as it looped around central Salford, emerging at ‘LOITER’s final destination, the Working Class Movement Library.

The German artist Christian Selent’s film Idle Thoughts (2021) was developed during a remote residency at the library, undertaken as part of Proforma’s exchange with Manchester’s twin city, Chemnitz. From the library’s extensive collection of pamphlets and other material relating to labour and trade union history, and working people’s culture and activism, Selent picked out The Right to be Lazy, an 1883 text by the French writer Paul Lafargue, which argued for workers’ rights to leisure and a truncation of the working day. A series of quotations and statements on work and leisure, by various writers and theorists, were projected against a video of the library building, forming not just a history lesson but also a warning and a provocation that felt timely as working rights and conditions – along with freedom of movement – come under threat from both the pandemic and Brexit.

While most of the works in ‘LOITER’ were incorporated smoothly into the route, a trio of animations by the Iranian-born, Manchester-based painter Parham Ghalamdar were more disruptive. Activated outside some of the many fast-food takeaways that line Chapel Street, Ghalamdar’s animations provided brief windows into the area’s now mostly hidden industrial past. Feeling self-consciously analogue, they had the flickering quality of a film projector or slide show. Cycling through repetitive human and machine-made movements, they were inspired in part by the archive, now held at the nearby People’s History Museum in Manchester, of the socially engaged Communist artist Clifford Rowe, whose paintings depicted workers and industrial processes in bold lines and vivid colour. Ghalamdar’s Glitching Yard 2020 (2021) picked out the bright yellow overalls of faceless workers against a black-and-white backdrop; similarly, today’s yellow-jacketed construction workers stood out on screen as ‘LOITER’ made its way down Chapel Street. The drilling of building work was a persistent aural presence throughout ‘LOITER’: even as the pandemic has put most sectors of the economy on hold, the construction industry continues apace.

Although its built environment and demographics are in a state of flux, Chapel Street is an area that is rich in artistic production, architectural landmarks and social and radical history. ‘LOITER’ could have resembled a local history tour, or cherry-picked certain narratives about the city; instead, it presented a much richer reading of a place that was both rooted in and transcended its immediate geographical context. Watching live via Facebook, fellow viewers posted their locations, an act which indicated that those engaging with ‘LOITER’ were not all based in Greater Manchester – many were watching from locations across Europe. Although experienced remotely, at a distance from the artworks and the places that inspired them, this peripatetic online format enabled ‘LOITER’ to provide a communal experience that had much to offer those familiar with Salford as well as those watching from afar.