Culture

Is your caravan artsy enough to feature in Electric Picnic’s Trailer Park?

The festival is providing up to 10 grants of between €500 and €3,000 for creative caravans

‘The Improbable End of Owly - A Choose Your Own Adventure Game’ from Electric Picnic’s Trailer Park 2017

Fiachradh McDermott
Thu Feb 8 2018 - 13:26

Ireland's most popular music and arts festival, Electric Picnic (EP), will be providing up to ten grants (of between €500 and €3,000) for designing, building and presenting your own art caravan at the festival. For a short window of time, artists and creators are given an opportunity to let their creative hair down.

People are encouraged to turn a caravan (or something with wheels that can come and go) into something wonderful, and it will be given a home at EP in the mobile-tropolis ‘Trailer Park’.

Trailer Park is EP’s haven of hilarious caravans and utilitarian mobile homes that have been re-functioned. Collectively they create a metropolis of tiny venues, fun-clinics and oddball theatres.

Roz Jellett, artistic director, said: “In Trailer Park we really do set out to make people laugh, inspire and engage. Projects that marry creativity, participation and style. This competition loves a good host, so if you have a gang of friends who like to make people around you have fun, simply think of how you might do that in the most unusual way, and either inside or in front of a room on wheels.”

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For the past four years, over 60 creators have been given grants. Organisers are looking for jubilant and bewildering caravan-based ideas to join the Park. Previous submissions have included:

  • To Let – A team of real estate agents trying to sell a decrepit caravan to passers-by
  • Caravan Club Extravanaganza – the front side folds down to become a stage for bands
  • Garda check-point – a police van checking passers-by for inebriation
  • Crappervan – yes one of them
  • Turbante – Brazilian collective who dress people in turbans
  • Narnia – into a caravan and out the back is a snowy kingdom
  • Tow Ho Ho – a caravan full of Christmas cheer, carols, and drunk Santa
  • Trailer Tower – a viewing platform in a caravan that is craned into the sky
  • Caravagina – a rebirthing experience
  • Redneck Wedding – a mobile home with a confederate flag outside and an extended family within

Electric Picnic takes place from August 31st to September 2nd on the 600-acre estate of Stradbally Hall, Co Laois. Now in its 15th year, it often sells out before the line-up is announced.

For the first time, the festival is extending its invite to applications from the United Kingdom.

The deadline for entries is April 15th. Most final decisions will be made by April 22nd, and succesful entrants will be notified by April 29th.

For more information, contact Roz Jellet on trailerparkcaravanchallenge@gmail.com. Terms and conditions for entering can be found here. Electric Picnic's website can be found on https://www.electricpicnic.ie

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