Image Credit: Madaleine Pearce
The Turl Street Arts Festival (TSAF) is an annual festival held in February, involving and organised by students from the three Turl Street colleges in Oxford: Jesus College, Exeter College, and Lincoln College. It is one of several arts festivals in Oxford, and has been running since 1997. This year, the festival will take place in the fifth week of Hilary, with additional events being run throughout the term—these are open to all students, not just students at Turl Street colleges. The fair of the Turl Street Arts Festival takes place on Brasenose Lane.
This term, TSAF is accompanied by the re-launch of adjacent arts and culture magazine The Turl. I spoke to Manon Hammond and Beatrice Ricketts, members of the Turl Street Arts committee, for an insight into preparations for the festival and updates surrounding the upcoming issue of The Turl.
What are you responsible for within the Turl Street Arts?
Manon: I’m responsible for marketing for the Turl Street Arts Festival and partly The Turl magazine—I designed their logo for example.
Beatrice: I’m the Lincoln representative for the Turl Street Arts Festival and on the creative and editorial team for The Turl magazine.
Could you give me a brief outline of TSAF and The Turl magazine and what they’re trying to promote/what their objectives are?
Manon: The Turl Street Arts Festival is an annual event that happens in Hilary. The Turl Street Arts as a team also aim to organise events throughout the term to promote the festival, but also to get people involved at various times. Generally what they’re trying to promote is exciting things for people to get involved with, such as painting and drinking, there’s design workshops; different kinds of workshops, but also there’s lots of room for college student participation. There [are] some poetry competitions, student performances at the fair etc., so it’s just an opportunity to promote arts within Oxford, but particularly within Lincoln, Jesus, and Exeter.
Beatrice: The Turl magazine is a magazine done termly by the three Turl Street colleges, it takes submissions from such and is focused on the arts. This includes poetry and creative writing, but also photography, paintings as well as non-fiction: think art reviews, anything you want really.
Could you give us an insight into your plans for events so far—both in terms of throughout the term and during the festival itself?
Manon: Throughout term we have two confirmed events thus far: one, which is really exciting, is in third week. The Isis and Cambridge’s The Mays Anthology (which are both arts related magazines) are doing a collaboration with The Turl magazine, hopefully at the Jesus College Bar, which will be a spoken-word/poetry promotion for people to send in submissions to those magazines…
Beatrice: There will be jazz music…
Manon: And there’ll be jazz music as well, so that’s an earlier event we’re doing. Then in seventh week we’re hoping to do a spoken-word event at Common Ground.
And during the festival?
Beatrice: The festival takes place in fifth week, and a lot of events will be taking place throughout that week, both in the daytime and the evenings. So there’s the actual street fair on Saturday the 18th February which will have lots of stalls: one from The Turl, ones raising money for charity etc. At the start of the week there will be the Jazz Ball, with details coming soon, as well as life-drawing, collaging, film screenings, jewellery workshops etc. On Sunday the 19th there will then be a closing ceremony.
So the theme this year is ‘House’. Would you be able to explain what this means to you and how you envision it?
Manon: It was a collaborative decision, with submissions sent in by members of the team before being taken to a vote—‘House’ was a clear winner. From a Marketing perspective, ‘House’ is super cool because it brings together all the things relevant to the Turl Street Arts Festival—house music, fashion houses, and design, and then it has so much potential for poetry and literature with ideas of home and living. We’re trying to extend that theme to be as inclusive to other ideas of house and home as possible. The same goes for art, I think the theme of house, home, and belonging [are ones that] we see a lot, so it was a really cool way to integrate all these integral components that the Turl Street Arts stands for all together.
Talking of things that are important to the Turl Street Arts – do you have any ethical or moral initiatives behind the festival?
Beatrice: We’re aiming to raise money throughout the term and the festival for charities, and with the theme of ‘House’ we’re considering homeless charities for such. Primarily, on a base level, it’s about giving students a variety of opportunities to get involved with the arts, whether that’s a continuing interaction or their first time trying something. It’s the chance to contribute, have their work published, and especially participate in workshops that may otherwise not be accessible to them.
If we go onto the magazine; I believe The Turl has recently been revived after a prolonged period of inactivity. Could you tell us some more about what it is and what it contains?
Beatrice: Yes! It’s been inactive for the past few terms so we decided to bring it back with a bang. We will be covering some of the Turl Street Arts Festival within it to ease it back into life, but essentially it’ll be open-submission (to Turl Street college students) and an issue with no real heavy theme. We have a whole new team dedicated to it which is really exciting.
What sort of pieces can be written for The Turl?
Beatrice: Absolutely anything to do with the arts really! If you have short stories, poetry, but also we’ve received reviews of opera shows and films—the range of high-brow to low-brow culture is wide, as are the mediums that you can use. So anything you’ve been wanting to write, produce, criticise, create; paintings, drawings. Anything.
How do people get involved?
Beatrice: It’s published termly and the call for submissions (which will be open to Turl Street college students) will go out by the end of this week [first week of Hilary Term 2023].
How can people find out more about the magazine and the festival?
Beatrice: The Instagram and Facebook for the magazine is @theturlmagazine.
Manon: The Instagram for the festival is @turlstreetarts