Take Me With You: the Museum of Friendship, Remembrance and Loss

6.00-8.30 pm, Thursday 18 February 2016 at the Chowen Lecture Theatre, Brighton and Sussex Medical School, Falmer Campus BN1 9PX

Museum open from 6.00 pm

Clare Best and Tim Andrews in conversation (+q&a) 6.30-7.30 pm

Drinks reception from 7.30 pm

Museum open until 8.30 pm

From Clare Best’s blog:

‘Here is what I wrote in my journal after Tim and I first met in a café in Brighton in January 2013:

Met Tim Andrews in Brighton 16 Jan. Thought on train on way home about some kind of flexible/low-maintenance start to a collaboration. Thought more overnight.

‘Take me with you’ – this is the phrase that kept coming to me in the night. It has connotations of journey, of packing, of accompaniment, of company, of gathering in, of sharing.

I see it perhaps for now as making ‘swaps’ by email of what each of us would take with us to the next world, if we could, if there is one… Things/ideas we hold dear. Then each of us interprets or responds to each other’s chosen thing. And so on.

The items sent might be very fragmentary and abstract. They could be anything: a line from a song, a particular person’s smile, a food, a mood, a book, a film, a favourite walk, a memory, etc etc – it could be literally anything.

So we’d build up a collage, a narrative. And each time we corresponded we’d know each other better, so we would construct a kind of overlapping journal, or a conversation, through what we’d choose and send each other.

And here we are, three years later, with a robust friendship and about 50,000 words written, quite literally, between us – and all kinds of things we’d like to show you.

It’s been a stimulating journey, full of laughter and tears and adventure and tea and cake, and we look forward to sharing it at BSMS on 18 February.

The event is free, but if you’re coming along please register in advance here.

Tim has produced a trailer and has blogged about the project.’