Circus Kinetica
by Ros Barber (Brighton)
I used to think it was a factory and would be amazing to squat. It was all bagged up, being renovated, so we couldn’t get a feel for the place, but there was this huge round living room so we agreed to rent it. The first weekend was absolutely bizarre.
There was a big party in the foyer with some of the residents DJing, and free drinks. A photographer had taken pictures of all the residents, which were projected up on the building. It was the most full-on housewarming you could possibly imagine.
My degree was interior architecture and I decided to document its history for my dissertation. There were loads of mad coincidences. It turned out my great-grandad lived in Embassy Court for 4 years in the 60s so I used my mum’s and grandma’s memories.
I found a series of poems by a local poet describing the building through the decades and I used them as page-breaks. Dissertation in, I made windmills to sell on the beach. It turns out I sold one to the poet whose poems I’d used without her permission!
What Ros Barber says about Circus Kinetica:
James Caldicott grew up in Leominster, Herefordshire, and first visited Brighton when he was 16. He’d stay with a friend’s sister in Haywards Heath and they’d drive in via Hove to come clubbing. He always noticed Embassy Court, which was in a bad state of repair then, and dreamed of squatting it. Years later, when he’d come down to do a course in Interior Architecture at Brighton University, he found himself renting a flat in the building, then writing his dissertation about it. He now also has an art studio in what used to be the former boiler room of the building, making extraordinary windmills and other beautiful things out of scrap metal. See www.circuskinetica.com. James says “I haven’t been able to leave Brighton, and can’t see myself leaving. I could go on forever about Brighton just being giving because the nature of what I do is just find stuff that the city seems to drop, and turn it into a way of living."
