Book Tickets

LOCATION: 2 ROYAL AVENUE
DATE: 1 MAY, 2026
TIME: 10:00 – 16:00

‘The Other Place’ will return at the Hit the North Street Art Festival 2026. Once again we’ll be hosting a day-long conference in the heart of Belfast. Discover how anti-establishment artists, especially street artists, are transforming cities through creativity and resilience. Explore the intersection of art, urban planning, and community as we discuss how artists can drive positive change in our cities, and how we can support them. This event brings together place-makers, planners, and artists to challenge conventions and foster meaningful, beautiful change.

GOOD CITIES HAVE SOMETHING THAT DEFIES EXPLANATION, A FEELING... A VIBE. AN ORGANIC, MESSY SENSE OF FUN AND EXCITEMENT, ROUGH EDGES THAT AREN’T LIKE ANYWHERE ELSE.

MAGIC EMANATING FROM AN OTHER PLACE.

SPEAKERS

(more to be added)

  • Rosie Lynch is the Creative Director of Workhouse Union. Workhouse Union connects people through creative processes to support inclusive, place-based engagement, decision-making and change. Their work bridges the gap between communities and decision-makers. Rosie brings extensive experience leading national and local engagement programmes focused on co-creation, inclusive dialogue, and creative civic participation. She has managed complex public-sector and cultural projects with a strong emphasis on care, access, and place-based storytelling. Rosie has a BA in Fine Art, NCAD (2005) and an MA in Visual Arts Practice, IADT (2011). Rosie is a board member of Trasna Productions and Kunstervain Projects.

  • Gemma is a freelance creative facilitator who is endlessly curious about places and people. The stories we tell about ourselves and each other, our relationship to the land and how we shape it and are shaped by it.

    She works as part of two collectives, Daisy Chain Inc and quarto, both interested in how we make and remake place, but operating in distinctive ways. 

    Gemma is deeply connected to Northern Ireland, this place she calls home, in all its conflicted and convivial complexity. With a background in visual arts and museums, she is happiest supporting people in connecting with each other, through rooting around in the past, coming to a more inclusive understanding of the present, and exercising our imaginations for the future. Where we are now was never inevitable, and we all have the power to create a new reality. Creativity and community offer us the solutions we are looking for.

  • Jonny McEwen is an artist and creative consultant. He is one of the Directors of Daisy Chain Inc.  He has a background as a facilitator and trainer with wide experience in Community Relations, Conflict Management Community Engagement and Diversity.

    He has a particular expertise and interest in creative approaches to training and learning, and has developed many innovative techniques and projects in the Community Relations field. He has a long history of public consultation and is a trained and experienced mediator with a specialism in Restorative practices.

    He is a successful artist (abstract landscape drippy stuff) with an artistic practice spanning 30 years, including several solo shows and residencies.

    He enjoys encouraging creativity and has way too many ideas.

  • Emma Bearman is Chief of Play Galaxy Division. Playful Anywhere is the earthly vehicle for playful place shaping and provocation.

    PlayfulAnywhere’s work embodies the civic and cultural potential of play. Shipping container Playboxes become pop-up labs, grey plazas become festivals of colour and conversation. Their interventions create public, intergenerational infrastructures of imagination, where children, young people, and adults encounter each other not through hierarchy but through playful equity. Their practice demonstrates a deep understanding of civic and cultural systems, and how joy and play can reshape them.

  • Daisy Chain Inc founder Adam Turkington is a freelance irritant. After an early career in the YMCA and Belfast City Council he set up Seedhead arts to do Street Art, meantime use, lates, festivals, magic, cabaret and generally just be a pain in the ass. 

    Throughout his career Adam has been an active participant in the vibrant Belfast Community Arts scene and believes that through arts and events individuals and communities can experience real transformative processes.

PURCHASE TICKETS

Please choose the appropriate option for you — no cheating!

Purchase
Purchase

WHEN WE TALK ABOUT CITIES WE LOVE, WE AREN’T JUST TALKING ABOUT HOW FUNCTIONAL THEY ARE.

Belfast is a city imbued with the spirit of anti-etablishmentism. It’s a city housing the worst funded artists in Europe, and yet, somehow, these artists are transforming their city. Artists who are staunchly ‘other’, in a city where the establishment is defined by two sides, have crafted literal and figurative spaces for coexistence. Street artists in particular, in a city where walls have been weaponised for paramilitaries, have built a scene that is globally revered and locally embraced with entrepreneurship rather than funding. It’s a phenomenon.

So as part of Hit the North Street Art Festival 2026, Daisy Chain Inc is proud to invite you to, ‘The Other Place’.

FAQs

  • That's very deliberate. Daisy Chain Inc, who are behind this event, have between them been to many many conferences and feel that almost without exception they are over-programmed. The best parts of any conferences are when you get to meet people, build networks and talk about what's been said from the stage. We've tasked our speakers with providing you with short provocations which can provide a stimulus for important conversations. There will be no funders talking, no grand standing, no long introductions and we will. RUN. TO. TIME... so that delegates have the time to let the ideas breathe in more informal settings.ere

  • Yes. 'Nothing' was a project we ran across 2024. Our work in this time has influenced how we've curated this conference. We've found that amazing ideas and conversations come out of nothing.

    Sometimes it's just good to give time, for your thinking to percolate.

  • YES.

    We think that Street Art is an amazing lens with which to examine how independent creatives can help shape cities, but we also think that this is true in the broadest sense. We hope that The Other Place can be a space to show how this concept can be applied in a myriad of ways.

  • Hmmm yes, that is a bit wanky isn't it. But we are trying in particular to get a cohort of creatives who sit outside the system — people who don't have the ear of establishment already. So it's not personal but if you're the CEO of an ACNI funded organisation, the 'artist' ticket isn't really for you — you already have the ear of the establishment. To be clear this thinking is not art-form led, but rather about your attitude to your work and how it sits in broader social discourse.

  • We theorise that artists will be paying for their own tickets and artists are usually skint. If the 'Other' tickets are bought by the people that we hope will buy them, they will be paid for by their organisations and £75 is still cheap for a conference. So we're trying to make the conference financially viable while ensuring that the people essential to it's success aren't priced out.

  • YES.

  • We're very aware of this and have some plans to mitigate it — and yes the piano with be locked and under armed guard. 2RA is a phenomenal example of what can be done when a public authority takes a creative risk, being here for this event is deliberate and symbolic.

  • You MUST! It's Hit the North and we've got events on all weekend culminating in our legendary Block Party.