Our Siren Song will be based on the Ards Peninsula coast offering creative programmes that engage local artists, performers and communities in meaningful activities to highlight the beauty, heritage and ecology concerns of our coastline.
Our siren will call people to the coastline, enticing them with beauty, heritage, warning and promise. Her song will be the song of the people who have made their lives on the coast and will represent voices of those whose stories are yet to be told. It will be a love song for our coastline and a call to action, to preserve this precious resource for future generations.
The project will culminate with a community arts event at Millisle Beach on 17th May 2025 during the UK Beach of Dreams Festival.
We aim to build collaborations that will extend Northern Ireland coastline activities from South Down to the North Coast.
Opportunity for coastal artwork with Beat Carnival.
From January to May 2025 there will be an activities programme encompassing artistic and environmental creativity, also walking and outdoors activity. The project will combine those as much as possible: there will be walks and talks and walks with artistic making.
If you would like to work with us on the beach, we would love to hear from you. We have lots of ideas for creative activities we would like to be part of Our Siren Song and we want to hear your ideas and interests. We are especially keen to hear from artists based in Ards and North Down.
Would you like to get creative with carnival arts, music or storytelling?
The arts programme will include:
Beach of Dreams is a national creativity and climate action programme produced by Kinetika working with regional partners in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland who are co-commissioning eight artists to produce new coastal art works.
Organisations and members of the public will be encouraged to produce their own beach activity on their stretch of coastline during the UK-wide Beach of Dreams festival in May 2025.
Kinetika is an internationally renowned female-led company with a 25-year track record of combining world-class bespoke designs on large-scale hand-painted silks with community projects to produce spectacular outdoor events that engage diverse audiences wherever they work.
Founded by artist Ali Pretty in 1997, inspired by her training in carnival arts in Trinidad and India, Kinetika now has an unrivalled reputation for working with local communities on projects that change the way people feel about where they live. Based in Purfleet since 2014, Kinetika delivers activity both at ‘home’ in Thurrock and ‘away’ across the UK and abroad.
Since 2012 Ali’s practice has been to develop transformational walking arts projects with diverse communities, these bring people together by walking, talking and making and painting large-scale silk creations. Ali has led walking projects in Wiltshire, Isle of Wight, Lincolnshire, Essex and Thurrock, where she has developed an annual walking, talking and making festival T100. This pioneering place-making model has been replicated internationally in various forms in Ethiopia, Chile and India. Beach of Dreams is a development of this model, Ali first delivered the pilot in 2021 walking 500 miles from Lowestoft to Tilbury and has been working on scaling it up to a national festival ever since.
Beat Carnival is committed to protecting the environment. We try to produce carnival events and run artistic activities with as little impact on the environment as possible.
Beat Carnival Centre
11-47 Boyd Street
Belfast BT13 2GU
Beat Carnival is a company limited by guarantee (NI27789)
registered in Northern Ireland and is a registered charity (NIC103347)
Beat Trading Ltd is a social enterprise (NI064328)
© Beat Carnival All Rights Reserved
