The last Fierce Festival, back in the spring of 2012, paid homage to concrete.
You could lie on your back and be pushed along a track beneath Spaghetti Junction in order to get a mole’s-eye view of one of the defining edifices of modern Birmingham.
This year, the festival has gone autumnal, seasonal, local and natural.
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And, for the launch event at least, that means it’s going to be harvest time at Edible Eastside.
Put the pollen from an ‘electric daisy’ on your tongue and you can make it a real sizzler, too.
Michelin-starred chef Glynn Purnell loves the stuff and it’s just one of the treats in store at the site in Fazeley Street.
With industrial buildings on one side, the Grand Union Canal opposite and a gravel business next door, this is the last place you’d expect to find a place to grow food.
Or to want to celebrate a Blood Moon Feast.
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But as the site is walled and south facing, it’s not as far removed from a classic Victorian kitchen garden as you might think.
The brainchild of Jayne Bradley Ghosh, the project is set to really bear fruit – and veg – this weekend.
Raised beds, made from converted pallets, have been available for hire by the canal-side.
On Friday, a team of radical food designers called Blanch & Shock will be in town for the Fierce Festival launch party, which also features an arts show called The Blind Leading the Blind by Wolf in the Winter (6.30-8.30pm).
Blanch & Shock is a design and catering company which has created artistic feasts for the likes of the V&A and the Wellcome Collection in London, as well as BE Festival and mac Birmingham.
It will be serving a vegetarian platter from food grown in collaboration with the garden’s artist-in-residence, Di Wiltshire.
Meanwhile, Wolf in the Winter will create “an intervention inspired by Bruegel’s Blind Leading the Blind, a painting of six ragged figures stumbling across a rural landscape”.
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Wolf in the Winter is an international collective of six solo performance artists who join forces occasionally to make a “pack”.
They include Aaron Williamson, Anet van de Elzen, Brian Catling, Denys Blacker, Kirsten Norris, Ralph Wendt and “guest wolf” Eloise Fornieles.
Tickets for this launch event are £15 / £12 which includes a free after-party.
“We’re interested in people growing their own food and, with food, you can expand your audience,” says Jayne.
“Blanch & Shock have some very innovative ideas.
“We can take food for granted, so sometimes we need to work with artists to develop the cultural aspects of food.
“That is how we will change our culture.
“To make it more sustainable we have to change our reaction to food and celebrate it more and add more depth to our understanding of the food system.
“Having a partnership with Fierce is about getting people here and we hope to have at least 150 people here on the night of the feast as everyone who has been growing food reaps their harvest.”
Owned by Manchester-based developer ISIS, the site is a former propane gas filling station which took six months to clear out with the help of juvenile offenders on community service.
Because everything grows in raised beds, the food can still be organic, with compost made from Birmingham garden clippings.
“We are also interested in waste,” says Jayne, “which means using everything in the garden.”
Laura McDermott, the co-artistic director of Fierce, is equally enthusiastic about the role that food can play in art.
“There’s something almost primal about the roots of a festival and people gathering together at significant moments in the calendar,” she says.
“With Fierce, we aim to do it in surprising ways and to show off parts of the city that people might not have been to before so they can revel in it.”
Although Fierce was originally devised as a means of highlighting how people often have different interpretations of sexuality, that is not its purpose now.
“We want to widen Fierce out to the widest number of people possible,” says Laura. “At Edible Eastside, people will be gathering around food.”
* Fierce Festival takes place from October 4-6. Visit for further details on tickets and booking.
Fierce Festival highlights
* Sculptor Denis Tricot will be creating a giant sculpture from strips of birch wood next to the Town Hall, inspired by the surrounding architecture.
* Live events include German artist Eva Meyer Keller presenting Sounds Like Catastrophes, a stage work devised with local 10 to 12-year-olds to explore how young people process the news and perceive the dangers of our world (Saturday at 2pm and 5pm, Town Hall).
* Heather Cassils: Becoming an Image (Saturday from 7.30pm at AE Harris, Northwood Street), is a performance designed for the camera, specifically the act of being photographed. Taking place in a blacked out room, the only elements in the space are the audience, a photographer, the performer and a block of clay weighing 2000 pounds.
* Iona Kewney & Joseph Quimby: Knights Of The Invisible (Saturday, 4pm, DanceXchange, Birmingham Hippodrome) combines the Scottish dance-theatre artist with distortion and electronic noise created by Quimby.
* Atlanta Eke: Monster Body (Saturday, 5.30pm, Birmingham Ormiston Academy presented by DanceXchange). A dance-theatre piece described as a “saturation of textures, tones, noises, rhythm and shapes created through a number of imaginative situations which shape the female identity in contemporary culture”. Performance artist, stunt person and body builder Heather Cassils appears, plus there is a contemporary dance double-bill from Iona Kewney and Atlanta Eke.
* Immersive theatre performances from the critically acclaimed Lundahl and Seitl, who will be collaborating with hypnotist Sue Fox, as well as an intense four-hour performance from Action Hero in which two performers will ritualistically insult each other from autocues. (Sunday, Warwick Arts Centre). There will also be a performance piece from festival favourite Franko B, Because of Love, in which he duets with a life-sized animatronic polar bear.
* A month-long exhibition Fun With Cancer Patients ends on Sunday at mac, Birmingham. It documents a project exploring teenagers’ creative responses to the experience of cancer treatment by artist Brian Lobel (who was treated for cancer as a teenager himself), organised in association with the Teenage Cancer Trust at Birmingham’s QE Hospital.