In Liverpool’s long-awaited year as Capital of Culture, Mercy released the last (ever?) Mercy Magazine. The AntiClimax Issue launched at a riotus Late@Tate show, commissioned after the success of the Demolition! exhibition around the corner a few months earlier. Late@Tate: Destruction took place at Tate Liverpool amidst the rubble of the L1 shopping centre regeneration, and featured a lecture, an exploding guitar and more poetry, music and illustation collaborative shockdowns.
We also performed at the £50m Bluecoat re-opening show to a packed out audience, and shortly afterwards completed a couple of commissions for the Bluecoat’s Literature Festival Chapter & Verse – creating special vox-pop and animation films Poetry in Motion and Song to Belong to show on the BBC Big Screen, and hosting a reading by Lemn Sissay. Song to Belong later went on to be shown on every Big Screen in the country.
The Cities on the Edge project Interchange was Mercy’s most ambitious exhibition yet, featuring partnerships with organisations from Naples, Gdansk, Liverpool and Istanbul. Funded in partnership with our new friends Liverpool Culture Company and through commercial enterprise, this exhibition was evidence of Mercy’s ability to manage incredibly complex partnerships and research processes over a long period of time. The exhibition received popular coverage on the BBC and in several local newspapers, and was the start of a partnership process which we hope to pursue in the coming years.
2008 also saw the advent of Wave If You’re Really There, the culmination of all that had come before and the model for Mercy’s activity from that point on. Taking over a neo-classical church with a team of artists, producers, musicians and writers, some truly memorable events were produced.
After more commissions from Liverpool’s major institutions – the Bluecoat, FACT and Everyman Theatre – Mercy topped off the year with a spectacular mess at Tate Liverpool’s Fifth Floor Exhibition. The Making turned the drawing and painting process into a performance in itself and regurgitated it all through a live video feedback-loop project, as a poetry-and-music rehearsal and performance mingled with artists and illustrators on giant canvases.
Having moved into swish new offices in Liverpool's Rodney Street, commercial work continued to stream in – new music commissions from heavyweight labels such as Sony and Universal were backed up by a steady stream of identity and marketing work for small businesses, both local and national. The 3D model we had built for The Wombats' album a few months previous was selected to feature in the amazing The Beat Goes exhibition at the World Museum. Finally, the fashion label Diesel head-hunted us to copy-write for their hugely popular Diesel:U:Music website: a role which by the end of the year Mercy was leading on their behalf.