PLATFORM biography

PLATFORM was founded in 1984, as a meeting place for imagination, discussion, contemplation and action. Its founders, Dan Gretton and James Marriott, still work for the organisation today.

In its early years, PLATFORM attracted people from a diverse range of disciplines and experiences to create street-based interactive performance work which provoked debate and awareness on a variety of issues - from supporting striking cleaning staff at a local hospital whose services were to be privatised (‘Addenbrookes Blues’, 1983), to working with activists lobbying against the privatisation of a local historic community resource (‘Corny Exchanges’, 1984), to protesting against the abolition of student maintenance grants (1985), to intimate performances exploring notions of personal locatedness, responsibility and belonging (‘Transformation’, 1986/7).

In the late 1980s, London became the central focus of PLATFORM’s work, beginning with the project ‘Tree of Life, City of Life’ (1989), which investigated London as an ‘organism’, diagnosing the state of the city’s biological metabolism.

In 1992 PLATFORM won the Time Out Award for its project ‘Still Waters’, which looked at London as a water city and proposed the recovery of the buried rivers that feed into the Thames.

Growing out of the success of ‘Still Waters’, the ‘Delta’ project (1993-) installed London’s first micro-hydro turbine in London’s river Wandle, using it to light St Joseph’s Primary School in Wandsworth. This practical element of the work was followed up by teaching in the school, and engagement of the local community in their environment and use of energy, through sculpture, music and performance.