To me, it’s about material culture—the connection between Things and the things we do with Things. Belly dancing, for instance, or burlesque, have very thriving make-your-own-costume cultures, and where performers don’t make their own they almost always commission it, buy it direct from the maker, or customize it for their own purposes. A lot of Morris dancing sides make their own uniforms, and it’s a point of pride for them to look really spectacular and individual—for instance, Stone the Crows (@STCBorderMorris). (While that photo shows white people in blackface; it’s believed to be an anonymity & class warfare thing, rather than racial.)

Material culture is a big thing in archaeology, because it’s almost the only thing we have to tell us how people lived & thought. A kylix, with its wide flat bowl, was obviously intended for relatively light drinking—after all, it takes some relatively sober care to drink from something that spills so easily in comparison to a taller vessel. A rhyton, on the other hand, is clearly a cup for getting filthy drunk in company, because you use it to scoop from a much larger container, and you can’t put it down while it’s still full. The ceramics, metalwork, ornamentation, and artistic styles tell us a lot about what sort of tools & technologies they used, what materials they valued, and what animals interested them.

To return specifically to performance: I’ve known a lot of performers, of many different kinds, and never one who didn’t use props, costumes, or tools. Costume, instruments (and so many performers name their instruments, too—it’s one of the most personal relationships you can have with an object), and props are a large part of someone’s stage presence, both as a branding technique for the audience and to prop up the performer’s own mindset & confidence. Part of that, I think, is narrative: armouring yourself with items, each trailing their own history, the story of a sunny afternoon in that tiny seaside town and a back-street shop, or of a long conversation with the dressmaker or corsetier and a series of fittings, always bolsters your own sense of self.

Storyability helps with branding, too—everything you wear or carry on stage tells your audience who you are & what you’re like. It won’t be particularly accurate (it’s horribly reductionist) but a violinist in a red skirt suit & court shoes isn’t giving the same performance as the same violinist in a floaty green dress and seventeen bangles. Even before she starts playing, a violinist with a 300-year-old instrument is perceived entirely differently to one with a £30 Ebay special. None of this is news to anyone, but it’s a good starting point.

There are three basic components to the story-of-self as expressed through the things we choose to own: the story of self as User & Custodian of Things, the story of self as Wise Acquirer of Things, and the story of the Thing In Itself. They overlap & intermingle, but those are the basic three.

As user & custodian of Things, we have an acute sense of our own fitness (or otherwise) to use them to their full potential, and look after them as they deserve. The Dunning-Kruger effect applies, but not too much—performers generally know enough to be able to avoid most of that, or at least the ones who get booked more than once do. Learning to live up to the good-quality tools & instruments (a clarinet, a camera, artist-grade oils, carbon-steel knives…) and realising that you do deserve something that good, and you can look after it properly, is a turning-point for a lot of artists and performers, and a visible badge of (potential) competence to each other.

That overlaps with the second, self as wise acquirer of Things, in being able to recognise the skill of makers and repairers. It takes genuine skill to distinguish the beauty of ornamentation from the beauty of functionality, in any domain. We always think of “acquisition” as buying, but that’s no bad thing when done right; I’m the last person to say makers shouldn’t be recompensed for their work, after all! There’s a justifiable pride in knowing the maker of your Things, and a great many makers (probably most) like to know their customers wherever possible. Even when you make your own Things, there’s still a story to all the raw materials, and it’s been my experience that the most interesting raw materials come from the most interesting sources. Right now, I have knitted brass ribbon from a steampunk fair, a disassembled much-used copy of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, and a pile of bog myrtle I picked inside the ring-dyke in West Ardnamurchan, and they’re all interesting inspiring things.

The last part is the story of the Thing Itself, and this is the one that people will enthusiastically corner you and tell you about once they get the idea you might be interested. Who made it; who owned it; who repaired it; who lost it; who found it; who restored it; how it got to them; what makes it so unusual. These are the Things that cast a reflected light on their owners, and entirely vice versa too; it’s always a pleasure to be surrounded by Interesting Things, and the people who love them.

When we perform, we’re performing ourselves as much as we’re performing the dance, or the music, or the poem, because we can’t perform art without giving the audience our own unique viewpoint, our take on the text. So much of our sense of self is invested in the Things we own & love (or, for a fair few people, in rejecting the culture of ownership—a material statement in itself) that we can’t perform ourselves without some help, and nor should we try. So, then, that’s why I talk about performance, and try to help performers, here!

The largest and most complex pieces were from Herr Döktor, who was displaying a rifle, a Deco jetpack (so often steampunk is conflated with faux-Victoriana, but the biggest aesthetic influences are late-1800s watchmakers and Edwardian futuristic fantasies) and an “eternal teacup” featuring floral china, brass pipes, and dry ice.
Atome Fabrik had a display of beautiful & functional goggles, extraordinarily solidly made with good French optics. No compromises there, which is as it should be.

Scorch’s Pyrography is precisely what you’d expect, designs burned into wood & leather. I actually had to ask whether she did all of the work by hand, some of the pieces were so precise—and yes, she does, including some beautiful Wiccan pentacles and an expanding wooden-covered Book of Shadows.

I picked up some knitted brass ribbon from S&K Metal Fittings & Leathergoods, and even nearly a week later I keep picking it up to play with it. It’s just such incredibly tactile stuff, pouring and rippling. It’ll doubtless turn into something soon—I’m thinking a choker, a bracelet, and a hat band for one of these—but till then I’ll keep it handy to play with.

Also of note before we get to jewellery & costume, towards which I will quite happily admit a bias, were Alchemist Dreams (fine handmade & bespoke liqueurs, and I can vouch quite thoroughly for their quality) and the First Tea Company.

As you’d expect, there were a great many jewellers & costumiers there, with quite a diverse range of work. What I didn’t see, interestingly, were any masks (though I may well have missed some!) or any interesting teas. Really, rather a shame.

Dickens & Rivett, Purveyors of Unusual & Exotic Artifacts—beautiful costumes, too.
Coucou Heart—resin-enclosed text & geeky detailing, and shiny gearwork.
Craftypumpkin—wire-wrap jewels.
Purky Products—polymer clay, ceramics, & jewellery. I remember being rather struck by some ceramic bead pendants.
Templarcraft—trinkets with gears & keys.
Keys to the Kingdom—I honestly don’t remember what I saw at the market, but I adore the Owl-Powered Time Machine choker listed on Etsy.
Kitty’s Curios—keys, coins, & gears.
Enlyl—antique-finish metal, lace, pagan & bestiary motifs.
Prong Jewellery—Posture collars & lace-trimmed gauntlet cuffs.
House of Hirudinea—alternative fashion, “designed for decadence”.
L’Oublié—vintage & antique clothing & textiles.

If you were there too, and I’ve missed you off, leave a comment or drop me a line!

In a lot of senses, it’s an entirely false distinction, but it’s a good practical one when dealing with industries, funding agencies, and career paths. Art is; craft does. Which, as with almost all glib aphorisms, is both entirely meaningless and quite useful once you get down to it.

A great many hands have been waved about trying to explain what art is and why we do it, so I’m not going to recapitulate any of that here. As for what craft is, it’s nearly everything. Anything you use involved craft skills, somewhere. If you’re a purist, you could say that only handcrafted work counts, and if you used a printer or a laser cutter or a CNC milling machine then it’s somehow cheating. I don’t have much patience with that, though I do really admire people who can reliably get that kind of precision entirely by hand.

I’m going to take the opposite tack, and say that “craft” is something you get from the person who made or designed it. There’s something almost indescribably special—and rare these days—in being handed something by the maker. Rationally, we know that things we get in neat plastic packages from High Street shops, or in the post from the Internet, were still touched & packed & designed by human hand, but it’s very hard sometimes to feel that, and we generally have no idea whose it was.

(There’s a whole ‘nother long discussion here, about artists & designers who take the lead or do concept work, farming out the physical design to subordinates, and whose name ends up on what, but it’s probably just easiest if you search for Damien Hirst and read up on it that way.)

I didn’t start this post intending to take a retail-centric approach to the definition, but it seems to fit—partly because it emphasizes doing your thing in public, exposing it to other people. I’m not entirely wedded to it, though, so feel free to argue!

One thing I did want to avoid in this definition is any threshold of skill or education. There’s a strong tendency in all of us to look at the best and ignore the rest, and I don’t think it’s a good one—no matter how good you aren’t, you’ll improve. In fact, you won’t be able to help it, if you keep doing it. And formal education (art degree, apprenticeship, training) is useful, but not necessary. I might be biased against the beaten track, not having walked that way myself, but I’m a big fan of unorthodox approaches and research-led making.

“Maker” is a word I’ve had a lot of doubts about in the past, but I’ve grown to like its raw-edged Anglo-Saxon uncompromisingness, like a wedge driven crosswise into industrialised consumerism. It’s a lot more personal than “producer” or “manufacturer” (and the latter’s entirely lost its original hand-made resonance) and doesn’t have the unfortunate elitist connotations of “artist”. I know, and you know, that it isn’t elitist, but it’s perceived that way, and the media feeds that.

Of course, the vast majority of art is also sold or given directly by the artist, so we need another component to the definition as well. For me, that’s usefulness. Craft objects can be used for something, whether that’s wearing, sitting on, eating with, or stopping your books hitting the floor.

So, there we are: useful, and direct to you. No middlemen, no snake-oil salesmanship, no dustcatchers.

I wanted to reblog this because it’s strongly relevant to what I want to do with Maker Studio. Cleese has five basic points, all of which are really important to us, and which we want to help people with. Space, time, and humour are all amazingly good disruptive technologies, changing our comfort zones (I don’t like “out” of our comfort zone, because it implies that we need discomfort—it can be useful, but it’s not necessary) and giving us new perspectives on familiar things. It’s a kind of self-inflicted process art.

Another point is confidence, and Cleese is right to link that to the fear of failure. Fear doesn’t make us stronger; fear makes us weaker. What does make us stronger, on the other hand… is failure itself.

Failure is good. Failure makes us stronger, because we can’t help but learn from it. By standing up and failing in public, with a sympathetic audience who don’t mind rough edges and nervous twitches, we learn to fail less, and we learn that we’re already failing less than we thought.

Maker Studio want to give people space to fail in, because without space to fail we never have space to begin succeeding.

“I don’t know how.”
“I feel alone.”
“So many other people do it better.”
“I don’t have any tools or materials, or anywhere to work.”
“I can’t believe anyone wants my work.”
“I don’t know how to sell my work.”
“I don’t know how to do market research, marketing, branding, or publicity.”
“I can’t afford to do any of this.”
“But this is just my hobby, it’s nothing like the real thing.”

All of these are very real problems, and they stop a lot of people getting involved in crafts, or making the most of their talents. There’s a lot of information out there, but it’s hard to find unless you know what you’re looking for; lots of people, but they often have trouble finding each other; and lots of people who want to collect useful beautiful things, but all too few ways to sell them unless you have a lot of stock and a lot of time & energy to spend on marketing.

The last one, to my mind, is the worst though. There’s nothing intrinsically lesser or trivial about hobbies—in fact, hobbies are where most crafts work has always started. You pick something up, you mess around, you learn from your mother, you get hold of a tool and find something to do with it, you pick up a piece of wood and listen to what it wants to be.

Everyone who makes things—carving, knitting, cooking, smithing, embroidery, and all the other crafts—experiments and researches, learns and improves. It might not always feel like it, but that’s partly because it’s your hands doing the learning as much as your mind. There’s no fundamental difference between the handmade jewellery for sale on market stalls (or on Carnaby Street, or in the V&A gift shop) and the handmade jewellery you made for your girlfriend. If you make a hundred or two hundred using the same techniques, then you’ll inevitably get better at it. If you train your eye and your sense of form & colour, you’ll inevitably get better at it. But there’s no magic potion or academic anointing that will make you into a crafter, because if you pick up tools and use them then you already are.

What you’re making is real, and you don’t have to take it public if you don’t want to. But if you do, you can, and you don’t have to be perfect first.

Welcome to what should be a semi-regular set of Interesting Things we found, to do with art, craftsmanship, making, performance, and similar things. This is mostly What I Have Lying Around in my web browser, so please do add more – leave a comment, email us on info@makerstudio.co.uk, or Tweet us at @MakerStudioUK.

• Weapons of Mass Creation, a set of gorgeous screenprint posters by Angryblue.
• Conscious Elegance, who make wedding dresses & ballgowns in green & sustainable fabrics, have put out their 2012 collection.
• Want to keep your digital goods in a small bottle? Industrial Radical have just the thing for you. It’s simple, straightforward, a decent size (I’ve never understood why so many people doing custom flash drives insist on using 1GB or 2GB hardware, when in a few years you’ll want to be using something bigger anyway), and a really clever idea.
• Sparks Will Fly is a festival for everyone in Essex to celebrate the London 2012 Olympic games. I’m looking forward to meeting Marina Mightier especially.
• Here’s a video for you, too: Exit Strategy, from new album “Little Battles”, by She Makes War. You can get hold of the whole album on Bandcamp.

I went to this conference on Saturday, at Firstsite in Colchester – it was a really good, inspiring day.

Since a lot of you won’t be familiar with the empty shops movement, here’s a short executive summary. There are a lot of disused commercial & retail spaces in the UK, and that’s only set to increase. There are also a great many creative people who don’t have, and can’t get, the capital & guaranteed income stream to make use of them at market rents. (Not to mention: the requirement for that sort of income stream rules out a lot of really good & innovative uses for these sites which just wouldn’t generate enough to pay a market rent, business rates, and running costs.) There are some legal & organisational tools which remove a lot of the barriers, both for landlords and for tenants.

The day opened, of course, with a bit of coffee & networking. As Eva said, artists hate that word but can’t stop doing it. When you reframe it as just chatting to each other about your practice & experiences, swapping useful contacts & tips for getting things done, artists look at you oddly and start wondering whether there are really people who don’t do that instinctively.

Abigail Cheverst, manager of Slack Space, opened the day with a discussion of what it is we do when we take the arts into empty shops, and why, and how. Almost none of these notes are verbatim, and they may get a bit cryptic sometimes. Anything in italics is my own editorial comment; everything else is the speaker’s. If I’ve got something wrong, or left something out, please do comment!

Empty shop work is a response to recession, and is very specifically against waste. There’s a lot of unused resources out there, and there’s always more creative talent looking for outlets. Successful projects almost always arise out of a very local passion.

It’s important to leverage a full range of networks (working with educational groups, health groups, local councils, creative communities, local community groups, national & regional groups, &c.), and to consider creativity in its widest sense, actively avoiding exclusion. [Abby is speaking here specifically from Slack Space's point of view, explaining their very successful practice, but I think it generalises well.]

Having a strong brand & recognisable design aesthetic, consistently applied, is vital.

What we can offer, more than anything else, is a truly accessible space. There are a lot of people who’d never consider going into a gallery or a museum, but they’ll happily walk into an odd-looking shop on the High Street without thinking twice, to see what’s going on and if it’s interesting. Equally, the transient & temporary nature of empty shop work allows us to design disabled accessibility into our projects from the get-go.

As far as marketing goes, we tend to use a lot of social media, partly because it’s cheap and partly because the kind of people who join in these sorts of things are almost all on social media too. (That doesn’t mean to say we don’t want, and can’t get, others – just that it’s an easy win to get that demographic in.)

It’s important to develop a structured programme of volunteering, because you do basically need someone there all the time – someone to open up, someone to keep an eye on the art, someone to make the tea, someone to enthuse about everything & show visitors around. Given that, it’s important to give back to volunteers too – we can offer professional development, contacts, skills, and personal development. Quite a few of the volunteers at Slack Space had gone on to get paid work in the arts sector on the back of that, and one had since founded her own gallery. [Later, we heard some lovely testimonies from artists & workshop leaders who'd been voluntering at Slack Space, on how much it had meant to them and how much confidence & ability they'd discovered in themselves.]

In order to Do Things, you need to be an organization with legal status, but there are a lot of ways to do that: charities, companies limited by guarantee, community interest companies, industrial & provident societies, associations. [I'm reminded of One Click Orgs, a lightweight and effective tool for building associations.] All of them have their pros & cons, and they’re suitable for different purposes & scopes.

If your organisation isn’t a charity itself, try & associate with one – it gives quite a few benefits, including an automatic 80% rate relief. Slack Space is “fostered by” Firstsite – that is, Firstsite provided advice, business mentoring, and some monetary help, and signed their legal agreements (eg. the lease on each shop) when Slack Space couldn’t.

We benefit landlords in several ways, not just vice versa. We take on the liability for rates, which they’ll be paying while the shop stands empty; we relieve them of the need for maintenance & security; we improve the shop & the local area, increasing footfall and helping to attract a tenant when we move out; and we give them good PR.

When contacting landlords, doing it directly is often good, because agents are usually on commission, and when we offer to pay £0.00 as rent that means their commission is £0.00 too, and they’re rarely enthusiastic about that sort of thing. Look for socially responsible landlords (the Slack Space site is owned by the Co-Op) and network with local charities, particularly the “clubbable people” type like the Lions Club, Rotary Club, and so on. Local councils can be helpful, too.

Contact your local rates dept to negotiate. There’s an automatic 80% reduction for charities [which may also count for nonprofits & social enterprises] and the rates dept do have discretionary powers to reduce the rates further but in these recessionary days that’s very unlikely. There are a lot of local variations in policies.

When dealing with the health & safety side of things (absolutely and utterly vital) hse.gov.uk is really useful & easy to read.

If you’re planning on offering music, dance, &c. be aware that those are “regulated entertainment” and must be licensed. [This is due to change, because the Licensing Act is being amended. Most music at least will no longer be regulated. Note also that morris dancing and similar activities are explicitly exempted from regulation. You can dance the morris anywhere.] If you don’t want to serve alcohol, the license is a lot cheaper & easier to get; if you do want to serve alcohol, you can get a Temporary Event Notice or ask a friendly publican to run an outside bar. [Which can be inside - it's just that it's outside its "home" licensed premises.] If you’re going to play or distribute recorded music, you need a PRS (Performing Rights Society) license; Slack Space pays £40/year for theirs.

Michaela Freeman then talked about Artside, and curating in the public space. One of the problems she faced, during her time curating art in shop windows & public spaces in Southend-on-Sea, was in explaining the nature of art installations to the venues. Apparently, when you tell them you want to put art in their windows, they expect you to turn up with wooden easels and pretty pictures to put on them, not plinths, 3D art, conceptual pieces, and abstracts.

Working with & around shopfittings is important. All shops have their own arrangement of fixing points, paintwork that mustn’t be scratched, posters that need to stay in the windows, and so on. Venue buy-in & engagement is really important, and not just from the “being invited back” point of view – there are a million & one things recalcitrant managers or staff can do to minimize or subvert the impact of the art, even once you get past the “is this piece of art going to harm our business or make a political statement we don’t like?” problem. [Another eternal artistic issue: censorship vs access. But there's usually somewhere else to put the politically important work, and something else - or something political in another direction - to put in the sensitive space.] It’s also important not to alienate the public, eg. by doing anything too weird or conceptual – but they’re generally smarter and more interested than they’re popularly given credit for.

You have to be able to explain the advantages to the shops: things like positive PR, increased footfall, extra eyeballs.

In Southend, they were able to use the beach as a vast public space – for instance, Natasha Vicars’ piece Flowers for the Sea, where she gave away flowers at a stall on the beach, inviting people to take them down to the water’s edge, make a wish, and throw them in.

Amy McKenny, from TAP in Southend, opened with a beautiful quotation.

Blessed are they who see beautiful things in humble places, where other people see nothing. — Camille Pissarro

She talked about her own experience setting up & running the gallery, in a gorgeous-looking building owned by a water company, and showed a lot of rather lovely-looking and ambitious art projects in the space.

“At what point does gathering become a community?”
“If you build it, they will come.”

When you’re writing a funding application, use the language that makes you passionate. Give details, name names. Adapt the wording to the funder you’re talking to, but remember the passion, the reason you do it. It’s always worth contacting them first, rather than making an application cold and opening the conversation that way. Ideally, you’ll end up in a good ongoing relationship with runding bodies – that’s the best outcome for them, as well as for you.

TAP has been moving away from a formal this-exhibition-then-that-one setup towards a Hub-style co-working, floating, transient model.

(In response to a question from the floor about income streams) Diversity is important – run a cafe, sell prints if you’re somewhere where people buy them (they do in London, but not in Southend), rent out studios to artists, &c.

Something that came up in a lot of sessions was the central idea of failure. One of the most important aspects of the empty shops movement, to most of the speakers, was the idea of being allowed to fail, of trying things and learning from them, and then trying something else. Effort, engagement, activity, is an end in itself.

Kayte Judge, from We Are Bedford, presented a detailed case study of her work in a struggling retail estate. Bedford has been a pretty economically depressed area for a long time [it certainly was when I was at university nearby in 2002] and she took over seven empty retail units. By the time the project finished, all seven had gone to thriving commercial tenants.

One of the advantages of empty shops work is that we can define this as a roaring success – we’re not planning on being there forever, and a win for the community is a win for us. We’re birch trees, a typical pioneer species that colonises scrubland, and gradually gets ousted by oaks as a mature woodland ecosystem develops.

Kayte talked about “slack resource” (things you can use and re-use) and “slack time” (as in “when are you not using the space? – OK, we can do something then”), emphasising again the way empty shops work fits into liminal spaces and metaphorical corners, the gaps between “traditional” or “official” activities in the public sphere. Another thing she said was that you need a “busking mentality”, the right-let’s-get-out-there-and-give-it-a-try, get-your-game-face-on attitude, to get things going. This was the session I found most helpful myself, but it’s hard to convey that here – mostly, it was from the inspiring and detailed examples, and the “it worked – everyone wins” nature of the project itself.

The last talk before lunch was from Chris Clarke, another Slack Space stalwart, who talked about some of their history & events, all of which had evolved from volunteers’ efforts – lots of crafts workshops, a regular folk club, art exhibitions, a spectacular fundraising day for the tragedy in Japan – and gave a few more useful tips for Getting Stuff Done. When you’re approaching firms, try and deal with their CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) people. Local family firms are almost always keener on helping out, and more engaged with the project, than chains or franchises. Stay flexible, and remember your getout period – always keep in the back of your head “how long would it take us to get all of this out of here?”

Eddie Bridgeman, from the Meanwhile Project, gave us a lot of nuts-and-bolts details of how his organisation operates, how to find & approach landlords (try large property companies, not asset management companies, and remember that agents have a legal obligation to pass on any offer, even £0.00, to the owner), get permissions for what you want to do (be polite, clear, & upfront – this is pretty good advice generally, in fact) & drive local engagement with your project. (One example he gave was a tailor who ended up using photographs of local people for his publicity, which of course brought them & their families in to see everything.)

After the property’s been occupied for six weeks (less one day), the owner gets a rates holiday if it stands empty, so we do them good even after we move out.

Eddie also explained his “three Cs” model: Credibility (network, reassure people you know what you’re doing, have a track record available, get yourself known, prepare a detailed background for other people to see), Collaboration (let other people do what they’re good at, and help them with what you’re good at; find experts when you need them), and Clarity (communicate clearly, make the full truth available, tell people what you want when, make sure everyone involved knows what you want and what you’re going to do).

The meanwhile lease is a recognised legal document, explicitly exempting the tenancy from the provisions of the 1954 Landlord & Tenant Act (less faff for everyone there) and allowing for use without rent until the property finds a permanent tenant. The benefits of having a standard lease for this sort of use are immense.

My notes from Andrew Cribb‘s talk (3space) are much more sparse, partly because I was running out of paper by then! All I have is that he notes a tendency towards exhibition-only uses (ie. a habit amongst arts people to think “aha, a nice space, we shall exhibit some art in it”) and wanted to emphasize that there are a vast number of diverse activities to go in there, such as youth groups, charity HQs, social project offices, and so on and on.

At the closing plenary, someone made a link with alternative/complementary currencies, and there was a short discussion on their strengths (locality, community-building) vs their failure modes (lack of fluidity, can’t pay the rent, tendency to be taken over by crystalwavers). Abigail Cheverst also talked about what was effectively a gift economy at Slack Space, and having noticed that the people who could afford to contribute least at pay-what-you-can events were usually the ones who stayed behind to move chairs afterwards.

Another thing that came up a lot was that this is all wonderfully local & regional. The East of England area has a vast amount of dynamism & creative talent, more apparently than other regions. There’s still quite a fear that rural artists & makers are getting left behind, though – someone raised the example of the Dengie. Essex has always been very village-centric in its cultural life, and even the smallest are still pretty vibrant places, but it’s nevertheless hard for people to see everything centred in the largest towns.

A few more links to close, to other projects & organisations I heard about on the day – they’re all worth looking up.

• CoastNet

• Seasider
• Gatehouse Arts in Harlow
• Stew in Norwich
• Off the Rails in Wivenhoe
• Set Exchange (Freecycle for theatre people)