His film ‘Trojan Horse/Rainbow Flag’, which was made in collaboration with members of Friends of the Joiners Arms; about the campaign to save the iconic queer pub in Shoreditch, toured the UK in 2019.
As a New Geographies commissioned artist he recently established Open Ramble East, a free, inclusive and versatile group of people who worked with Ian to organise walks which traced LGBTQ+ histories in East Anglia.
In 2018 Giles produced a film about BUTT magazine collaborating with the magazine’s creators, and sharing transcribed interviews with young gay men living in London today. This act of re-performance highlighted generational shifts in publishing and gay male lives.
The Jerwood New Work Fund will support Ian to carry out a nine-month period of research and development towards an ambitious new performance. Through a collective knowledge gathering exercise Ian will explore queer communal living since the 1970s. He will collaborate with members of squatting communities and performers in a research process which will act as an alternative curriculum. He will develop a ‘performance algorithm’ (a set of unspoken rules) that will enable participants to shift between embodied, scripted and documentary modes of information sharing within the resulting performance.
