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FESTIVAL OF WESSEX 2026 • 47 CHLOE MANTRIPP Portland once had a fair. For more than 200 years, every November, the streets of Chiswell filled with rides and music and the particular unreality of a travelling show. It ended in 2001, and the island has felt its absence since. b-side’s 2026 festival doesn't try to rebuild it. Instead, eleven commissioned artists have been asked to conjure something stranger: a parallel Portland where the fair can still be heard, felt, and walked through. That Other Place opens on 9th September, with the festival running 10th to 13th September across public spaces in the Underhill area, free and open to all. It’s the culmination of Common Lands , a six-year project through which b-side has used Portland as a lens for bigger questions. After This Land explored the island's natural and built heritage, and Who Do We Think We Are? took on identity and migration, this final chapter is about island- ness, queerness, and otherness - “not as marginal conditions,” as the programme puts it, “but as creative forces.” The fair strand is where that thinking gets most playful. Buried Giants (Tim Powell and Hannah Price) place visitors inside binaural soundscapes of the ghost train and ferris wheel, layered over the streets where the fair once stood. Deborah Bowness takes local residents’ photo archives of the Fair and pastes those images back into their original positions, glimpses of the past seeping through stone walls and wooden doors. Alexi Marshall works with communities to create a unique Portland Tarot pack. Gavin Morris installs a giant LED heart that only illuminates when two or more people hold hands, and Helen Grant has built a working scale model of a Scotch derrick crane, the kind that worked Portland’s quarries, repurposed as a fairground grabber over a ball pit full of handmade lucky charms. Other commissions reach further into the island's character. Carlos Cortes invites visitors to help him build an ever-growing community ball run that traces the contours of the landscape, echoing the old Merchant’s Railway. Chloe Mantripp leads a guided ramble with three otherworldly performers drawn from the folklore of Portland. Paul Le Keux, a Portland resident, curates an evening in which islanders share stories that might be fact, fiction, memory, or song, without being required to say which. Artist Ella Yollande creates a giant textile portal stitched with foraged island plants giving visibility to the thin spaces between reality and dream worlds, projected shadow processions by Light Space Colour (Dawn Parsonage and Peter Hudson) and animated mythical beasts by Jane C Fox will move across buildings at dusk welcoming visitors into this peculiar new experience. Running alongside the festival are four year-long artist explorations that sit at the stranger edges of the programme. Felix C Bill draws a line between medical transition and rewilding - two processes of transformation that require scientific intervention, and both deemed political by their opponents. Jamal Sterrett, a movement artist, is walking Portland’s terrain and letting its cliffs and quarried edges shape his body’s responses, Liz Lake is mapping a felt knowledge of the island through drawing and conversations. Simon Lee Dicker starts from a geological fact: Portland’s limestone built St Paul’s Cathedral, then asks what it means for a place to be monumental elsewhere while becoming something wilder at home. That Other Place promises less a conventional arts festival than a shared act of imaginative transformation: part fairground, part folklore, part social experiment. On Portland, the strange has always felt close to the surface. This September, b-side invites audiences to step into it. The Other Place: b-side Festival 2026 B-SIDE FESTIVAL 2026 10 - 13 September: Locations throughout the ISLE OF PORTLAND, Dorset. b-side.org.uk ALEXI MARSHALL FELIX C BILL ISLE OF PORTLAND