FLARB (Free, Lazy, Arty, Radical Bookclub)

Event, Exhibitions, Free, Workshops

Saturday 22nd August 2026 11:30am - 1:00pm

God's House Tower, Town Quay Road, Southampton, SO14 2NY

Join us for FLARB this August with ZEST co-director Ellen Gillett as she facilitates a fun, informal conversation around our new contemporary art commission While We Slumber by Kitt – using a newly commissioned text by Daniel Fountain as stimulus for conversation.

FLARB is the Free, Lazy, Arty, Radical Book Club, a book club without the stress of a conventional book club. It reclaims the word ‘lazy’ as a radical approach to inclusion and self-compassion.

FLARB removes traditional access barriers to reading around arts and social justice topics in order to create a sociable, inclusive space to have a read, have a chat and learn something together. It achieves this by having:

– No cost or fees (the texts are freely available online or provided ahead of the session, no joining/participation fee)

– No pressure to contribute or commit (it is ok to turn up just to listen or to turn up only when you feel like it)

– Very short texts (either written, video, or images) that can be digested in 10 minutes ahead of the session, or if you are feeling ‘lazy’, not at all!

– No required knowledge or expertise to join, just curiosity and respect for others.

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About the Exhibition 

While We Slumber by Kitt (A.K.A. Lady Kitt) is an exhibition commissioned by ‘a space’ arts for God’s House Tower.

The exhibition begins with a simple question: what do we really share when we sleep in close proximity? Drawing on the familiar rituals of sleepovers – midnight feasts, whispered conversations, star-gazing, makeshift forts and sleeping bag stair toboggans – Kitt explores how social sleeping can deepen emotional connection and reshape our understanding of care, intimacy and belonging.

Central to Kitt’s research is the idea of ‘emotional heritage’: the way feelings accumulate within buildings, and how they are shaped, shared, and passed on through the communities who inhabit them. At God’s House Tower, this inheritance is layered and complex. Through archival and site-based research, Kitt traces a history of communal slumber within the building – from incarceration in the 1700s and 1800s, to more recent events such as artist residencies and a 24 hour ukulele jam.

While We Slumber invites audiences to consider (and experience) how social sleeping might alter our relationship to shared spaces and to one another. Through this lens, the exhibition becomes a reflective, sensory exploration of how buildings remember, and how those memories are shaped and reshaped through collective acts of being together in vulnerability and rest.

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Access and Quiet Spaces