Summer’s over, but festival season is just starting!

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Art, Culture, Festivals, Manchester

As the new academic year begins here at University of Salford the grinding of gears can almost be heard on campus as green areas and buildings are being smartened up in anticipation of new and returning student cohorts.

I’ve just come back to the grey and rainy North from a weekend spent camping at End of the Road festival, which has been one of the last reliably sunny outdoor music festivals of the season for the last ten English summers, but to balance the sadness at the thought of no more nights under canvas until next summer, the season for urban indoor-based events is picking up. In fact, autumn looks set to be the festival highlight of the year!

Right now there’s a national month-long festival of independent and repertory cinema underway, thanks to the organisers of Scalarama, now in its fifth year and still growing.

This year independent screening groups, film clubs and cinema enthusiasts in a number of cities formed festival sub-hubs to collectively co-ordinate their programme contributions.

This has been a brilliant and (in Leeds) unprecedented way to bring a disparate group of film exhibitors with very different aims and practices around a table regularly to meet each other, start a dialogue and share knowledge. New partnerships and future plans have emerged from this process and as we look forward to Leeds International Film Festival in November, there is a sense that this year, when the festival closes, there will still be plenty going on in the city to sustain a truly independent film culture year-round.

I’ve contributed two documentary films to the Scalarama programme this year. On Wednesday 16th September there’s another screening of the 2013 documantary Manakamana to raise money to send to a Nepal rebuilding project. The documentary, directed by Stephanie Spray, Pacho Velez, was made in the Manakamana temple area by a group of ethnographic filmmakers who are part of the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard University. The work of this practice-as-research centre is characteristically immersive and this film is no exception: a 16mm camera was placed in a cable car that transports worshippers up and down a mountain to a remote temple. It is a journey that prior to the development of the cable car service took many days and the people caught in the intense gaze of the film reflect on this and other things during their journeys.

The film makers set up a crowd funding campaign earlier this year to send assistance to the village where they were based during filming after the terrible earthquakes and with the help of the film’s UK distributor Dogwoof, some colleagues and I have been able to screen this film several times this year to send the door money to the film’s participant community via that fund.

Then on Thursday 24^th September I’m joining in with a simultaneous screening across 6 UK venues with two films that look closely at protest, direct action and freedom of speech in the UK. One is a short documentary by Nick Broomfield about six Greenpeace protesters who in 2008 were tried and acquitted for shutting down Kingsnorth power station in the UK, the other is Franny Armstrong’s film McLibel which is rarely screened but is a remarkable story about two protestors who were charged with libel by McDonalds after leafletting outside one of their shops, with surprising consequences. 

This second film is also part of the #directedbywomen strand within Scalarama this year, drawing attention to the achievements of women in film, while women are still under-represented in most areas of film making practice.

The Radical Film Network have facilitated this second event and this group have been an important discovery during my PhD research that has helped me to put a critical frame of reference around a set cultural activities which I attempt to describe in my thesis as constitutive of a discursive public sphere. This is a lightweight, international network of film makers, exhibitors and academics which emerged from the Bristol Radical Film Festival (BRFF), it is the festival’s 4^th edition this year, with all screenings taking place at the Arnolfini in October.

The 2015 festival is formally very different to the last one.
Last year the BRFF festival organisers set up some of their political film screenings in community centres, taking their message to areas beyond city’s usual centre of cultural consumption. This year the festival celebrates the 40th anniversary of The First Festival of British Independent Cinema, a landmark event in the history of alternative film in Britain, which was organised by the filmmaker, writer, curator and dramatist, David Hopkins (1940-2004) at the Arnolfini. The 1975 festival screened overtly political film alongside avant-garde and experimental work on 35mm and super-8mm formats. In true radical film tradition, a speaker from the festival will be at the screening to lead the discussions afterwards.

Inspired by the work I have encountered in my research, I have been able to bring many events from the BRFF and other festivals to Leeds through my own events series and my connections with the Leeds International Film Festival (LIFF). This year there will be a programme exchange between LIFF and BRFF, they have suggested a rarely screened, collectively-made film from 1974 which puts into practice the tenets of feminist film theory, however the title can’t be revealed yet! The LIFF programme launch is on Light Night, Friday 9th October at Leeds Town Hall.

A film festival event in November that I can announce is a collaboration with Dr. Emily Zobel Marshall, a researcher at Leeds Beckett University. We have placed a film screening simultaneously in both LIFF and the national Being Human festival of the humanities, all Being Human events are between12 and 22 November 2015.

La Rue Cases-Nègres (Black Shack Alley) is the title of a book by well-known Martinican writer Joseph Zobel, the story was made into a film in 1983, directed by Euzhan Palcy. In the year of its release the film was awarded Silver Lion award at the 1983 Venice Film Festival and the director won a César Award for Best First Feature Film, making 25 year old Euzhan Palcy the first black female director of a Hollywood film.

The film transports viewers to 1930s Martinique, an island under French colonial rule, when poor rural black children can hope for little more than a life of back-breaking working in the sugar cane fields, working for the wealthy white béké, or boss. Young Jose escapes this fate and gains an education through the many sacrifices of his extraordinary Grandmother.

The film will be introduced by Joseph Zobel’s daughter, Jenny Zobel, and granddaughter, Emily Marshall, a researcher in literature and post-colonial studies who suggested the title to me.

The screening and its contextualisation through the introduction and discussion will hopefully start a conversation about colonialism, oppression, resistance and the importance of education. The Being Human festival is one of a number of festivals organised by universities which I’ve become aware of through my research that are committed to showing the strength of humanities research and teaching at a time when the study of humanities subjects is being politically undermined.

Manchester Metropolitan University’s Helen Malarky and Professor Berthold Schoene manage a ‘festival of the humanities’, held in Manchester, called Humanities in Public, which started in 2013 as a year-long public engagement initiative aiming to reach people with no experience of higher education but who may be interested in what higher education can offer. In this guest blog for the Being Human festival, they explain: “we didn’t want our public engagement efforts to be seen as a way of ‘saving’ the humanities. As far as we were concerned, the humanities did not need saving. They already had what it took.” They celebrate the work being done at MMU and want their staff to share it with the public.

The HiP festival is made up of themes, each of which involves a short series of events ranging from evening talks, exhibitions and interdisciplinary seminars to off-campus activities such as city walks or tours of buildings, pub quizzes and film screenings. The university has developed many new cultural partnerships through this festival and researchers at Faculty of Humanities, Languages and Social Science have produced vast amounts of original work. The faculty recently took on the former Cornerhouse facilities nearby, where some of the events will be happening and it all kicks off next month.

So with such a range of events I’m going to have plenty to keep me busy in the evenings, my days are now filled with writing writing writing as the three years of PhD are nearly up! I hope this post has given a flavour of the sorts of cultural events I’ve been studying and why they matter, now to make sense of everything I’ve encountered along the way.

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Artistic and Institutional Alliances

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Art, Cultural Intermediation, Culture, Festivals

A gallery-based practice I always find fascinating is the public talk. A couple of weeks ago I went to a great talk given by Glyn Thompson at the Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery at University of Leeds called IN FOCUS: The Herbert Read Collection. It was right at the end of their recent exhibition ‘Sir Herbert Read’s Artistic Alliances‘ which ran from 1 September – 20 October 2014.

Contemplating the role of Universities as intermediaries in the cultural economy has become increasingly bound up, for me lately, with theories of institutional power and social influence. Exhibitions can be interpreted as a specific form of cultural production that Bennett (1998) understands as as sites of top-down flows of hegemonic power, something similar to Foucault’s strategies of micro power in his notion of governmentality. Institutions in the public cultural campus or ‘culture complex’ operate, in Bennett’s view, as ‘working surfaces on the social’ through which a kind of public organisation is sustained through the assemblage of objects and discourses within.

Many universities in the UK have a gallery space on their campus and in previous posts on this blog and my own I have mentioned other events at similar university spaces, for example at Lakeside Gallery at University of Nottingham and the Barber Institute at University of Birmingham. Although originally established in the 1970s, the S&AB gallery underwent major programmes of expansion in 1998 and again in 2008, funded first by HEFCE and then with private funds from long-standing friend and benefactor of the University, Mrs Audrey Burton, to become the welcoming and versatile art gallery and display space it is now.

Last year University of Leeds launched an art prize and special exhibition for recent graduates from its undergraduate Fine Art and Design programmes, supported by the Friends of University Art and Music-Leeds (FUAM) of which Mrs Burton had also been an Honorary President. This competition is one of the gallery’s current exhibitions. In the Education room at the other end of the long space is an exhibition of letters and greetings cards sent by Sir Herbert Read in the years after the Second World War, many of which belong to the University’s Special Collections, which houses Read’s archive. This IN FOCUS talk has been organised in conjunction with Special Collections, which are housed in Brotherton Library, the same building as the gallery.

The legacy of Sir Herbert Read (1893-1968), art historian, critic, knight (“services to literature”), anarchist, is currently experiencing some favourable attention. A new film, an immersive study of his life and work has been made by Manchester-based film maker Huw Wahl, supported by the Arts Council. The film is called To Hell With Culture, its provocative title comes from an essay by Herbert Read, originally published in 1941. The son of a farmer in the North Riding of Yorkshire, as a young man Read served in the First World War, rising to the rank of captain and receiving the Military Cross. Later he became known as a poet, an influential art critic, curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum and a committed anarchist. He wrote extensively on art history, theories of art and their importance to society. He co-founded the ICA in London in 1946 and also controversially accepted a knighthood in 1953. He was a modernist, championing the affective and symbolic qualities of art, from ‘primitive’ forms and cave paintings to abstraction and surrealism. The University of Leeds acquired Read’s library, including many rare and personal items, with the help of a Heritage Lottery Fund grant in 1996.

In 1912 he had enrolled at University of Leeds to study Law and economics, but he went to the front and returned profoundly affected by his experiences. According to Glyn Thompson, for a time in the 1920s, Read was Britain’s best recognised war poet.

Of the items made available for handling or at least taking a closer look at during the IN FOCUS session are two that are of particular interest to the speaker Glyn, who completed his PhD at the University in 2008 on Marcel Duchamp’s ‘art’ practice, or perhaps it is rather more accurate to say his way of articulating meaning.

Read had in his collection a ‘Green Box’ (edition of 320 copies) from 1934 and an exhibition catalogue ‘Le Surréalisme en 1947′ that accompanied the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme, organised by Duchamp and André Breton at the Maeght Gallery in Paris, July–August 1947. The exhibition catalogue has a false breast on the front cover, mounted on a piece of velvet (we are told that the last one sold for $254,000).

The Green Box (pictured left, also known as The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors Even) contains 94 individual items mostly supposed ‘facsimiles’.

Glyn talks about an outpost of surrealism that existed in London in the late 1930s, on Cork Street, particularly the Guggenheim gallery. This was where the elite of modernism from Britain and France exhibited and ‘hung out’. Herbert Read was part of this set, he was friends with Peggy Guggenheim and Roland Penrose. With the latter he co-founded the ICA in the centre of London, which opened in 1947, to showcase and champion contemporary culture across a wide range of art forms. Details of their first exhibitions can be found here.

Read used his influence to champion the work of Yorkshire artists Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth. Perhaps he was a cultural intermediary of his time, framing what was available through the use of cultural and social capital and leveraging credibility in networks that connected culture and society?

That would be a good topic for a future talk, but let me return to the one I was here for. Glyn’s talk aims to ‘disrupt the master narrative of Duchamp’, which he explains is commmonly held to be as the grandfather of modern art and the pioneer of art as ‘interruption of the normal’. This art was made exclusively for members of the elite, as work of allegory and rhetoric. “Articulating esoteric subject matter”.

Duchamp translates information into ‘things’. Glyn says Duchamp’s work is simply a form of embodied meaning. The meanings are encrypted, you have to “do archeology to it” to understand it from the point of view of its circumstances of production. Duchamp’s pieces are “pretexts of erudite discourse”. You have to know the content to appreciate the object, and decoding the elaborate symbolism of a work to receive its message requires interpretative reading.

In Glyn’s analysis of the exhibition catalogue, the square (on the back) and the circle (the false breast) stand for alchemy, while The Green Box is emblematic of The Emerald Tablet, a sacred text of alchemy and hermeticism.

An emblem comprises three forms of simultaneous representation: the visual (superscript) the motto (subscript) and translation (glossing text), so Duchamp’s work is that, rather than an artwork. Sans le saviours. The common herd is not supposed to understand.

Perhaps the multiple readings that are possible of the work of Duchamp and some other surrealists is something that McGuigan’s (2005) work on cognitive and affective communication could be productively applied to, because I although I can’t read their erudite discourse, I nonetheless enjoy the startling and disruptive appearance of readymades and surrealist objects when I encounter them in a gallery. Regardless of this, it is whether the influential circle of Read and his contemporaries gave this art its credibility in London and also in Leeds, via links with the University’s elite community, that is the real issue that I need to keep addressing when it comes to my own work on Universities at cultural intermediaries.

There are couple of opportunities to engage with some of these themes coming up in Leeds this month.

Next Monday, 10th November, the 28th Leeds International Film Festival screens the film To Hell With Culture at 8.30pm and I’m chairing a panel discussion following the screening which will reflect on how Read’s ideas can be applied to contemporary society today. That this takes place at The Hyde Park Picture House, which belongs to the same era as Read (it first opened in 1914), is a happy coincidence!

I have also co-ordinated two additional events taking place at University of Leeds on Wednesday 19th November in conjunction with this screening:

Tour of the Herbert Read Collection, The Brotherton Library, University of Leeds, Weds 19th November, 4-5pm

Richard High leads a guided tour of Herbert Read’s Library and Archive, now housed within the University of Leeds’ Special Collections in the Brotherton Library.

Herbert Read Poetry Reading, University of Leeds, Weds 19th November, 6-7pm

Fiona Becket, Hannah Copley, Jon Glover, Ragini Mohite, Emma Trott and John Whale read from the poems and other writings of Herbert Read, including materials held in the University of Leeds archive.

To book, email gallery@leeds.ac.uk or tel: 0113 3432778

Glyn Thompson has just curated an exhibition called Educating Damien at the Tetley in Leeds, drawing on lecture notes and slides he used when he was teaching History of Art to Damien Hirst on the Foundation Course at Jacob Kramer College in Leeds, during the academic year 1983-84.

These are being shown alongside a series of drawings made during that year by members of Hirst’s cohort and together they form a unique insight into the art education of a major figure of the ‘Young British Artists’ generation.

On Thursday 8th January Glyn Thompson also gives a public talk at the gallery.

___________________________________

Ref:

Bennett (1998) Culture: A Reformer’s Science

McGuigan (2005) The cultural public sphere. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 8:4, 427-443

Birmingham Surrealist Laboratory

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Balsall Heath, Birmingham, Community, Creativity, Cultural Intermediation, Culture, Surrealism

Good news. Just before Christmas, I found out we had successfully been awarded a bid, titled ‘The Birmingham Surrealist Laboratory’ (with Dr Stephen Forcer, Modern Languages, University of Birmingham). Funded by the Communities and Culture Network+, the project builds out of our ongoing Cultural Intermediation work. It represents the first stage of a feasibility study for a heritage space dedicated to the Birmingham Surrealist Movement (1930s-1950s). The seed-funded experimental project aims to investigate the ways in which new digital facilities can help unlock complex issues of cultural heritage and cultural sensitivity in a diverse city. It was inspired by a recent Surrealist House competition staged as part of an art programme for residents in the area of Balsall Heath, south Birmingham (Balsall Heath Biennale 2013; http://www.balsallheathbiennale.com/decorate-your-house-competition).Of particular interest to the project is that Balsall Heath was home to the Birmingham Surrealist Group (Levy 2003; Sidey 2000; Remy 2000), and, indeed, the locale for British Surrealism nationally over the 1940s and 1950s, given Conroy Maddox’s role as a champion of ‘orthodox’ Surrealism (Levy 2003). The Birmingham Group comprised Maddox, Desmond Morris, John Melville and Emmy Bridgwater, and was at the centre of a community of alternative cultural figures including jazz musician George Melly, writers Stuart Gilbert and Henry Green, and poet Henry Reed.

Today, Balsall Heath has been identified as falling within the lowest 5% of neighbourhoods – referred to nationally as ‘Super Output Areas’ – for multiple deprivations (Census 2011). A low take-up from the established, predominantly Pakistani Muslim population in the Surrealist House competition offers productive ground for working through how digital technologies can be used to investigate multiple barriers to mainstream, and more subversive, manifestations of culture and heritage in the city. The project comprises two digital workshops in the Digital Heritage Hub, University of Birmingham, and a roundtable with surrealist experts and community leaders. It also neatly dovetails with the Cultural Intermediation research which will be focusing on communities and the creative economy in Balsall Heath this calendar year.

Kickstarting a model for participation – communities within the crowd

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communities, Culture, Festivals, Participatory

I first started to think about the democratic potential of Kickstarter’s funding model in February 2013 at FutureEverything, Manchester’s annual festival of ideas.

The crowdfunding website was established in 2009 to connect people looking for project funding to people looking to invest, launching in the UK in November 2012 (using £ not $). It is not the only one, but I’ll use it as a generic model just for now. The rewards for investing are negotiated into a number of different options (from a free poster to advance access to products to exclusive one off experiences) and the model appears to work well for the creative industries: films are currently the 2nd most popular category of project funding after music.

(Source: stats – open ‘categories’ under ‘successfully funded projects’)

Stephanie Pereira represented Kickstarter at the Manchester conference, speaking in the ‘Platforms’ session which you can see on Vimeo here (her talk starts at 16.00). She suggests that the company provides a “creative ecosystem” for creators and that the 60 or so Kickstarter staff are themselves a community of “artists, designers… philosophers”. However, it was her suggestion that when creatives like games designers use Kickstarter, they are effectively working directly for their fans, that got me thinking about how ‘pay it ahead’ models have a role in connecting communities in the creative cultural economy. This was something to be explored further – and what better way than to have a go? (This is my usual response to most things!)

I’ve been following campaigns around factory farming issues for some time, so when news of a low budget UK film about an organic dairy farmer in Sussex started appearing in tweets by Compassion in World Farming and WSPA I backed it on Kickstarter to help the film maker fund a professional UK cinema launch.

The distribution system for new and specialist films in the UK is currently one of the sub-themes in my PhD. The US movie industry has had a terrific monopoly for many years over what UK audiences get to see in cinemas, historically this has been a problem almost all European countries and affects the circulation of non-American films and their domestic film industries (for some jaw-dropping history on the US cultural mission in the 20th Century, check out this book). Independent film distribution in the UK is supported through film policy in a number of ways, but cinemas still need people to buy tickets if the screenings are to be viable. If a UK film gets distribution, even if it has done well at festivals – as this one had – being able to provide posters, a press campaign and extras such as special guests to support a booking makes a cinema manager happy. The Moo Man film was trying to raise £5000 for such things, including the travel costs of the guests. When the campaign ended, I was pleased to see that they had exceeded their target!

This is where for me, the sense of community can be found in crowd-funding. It comes from knowing that my small pledge and those of hundreds of anonymous, like-minded people had made something tangible happen. Very tangible, actually, as the film was then booked by my local independent cinema and I was able to host the Q&A with film maker Andy Heathcote and farmer Stephen Hook (sadly no cows were available for the date).

This offered another perspective on the community outcomes of the campaign as on a sunny Bank Holiday afternoon in Leeds, about 50 people came to the cinema to see the single screening of this very specialist film and we had a milk tasting and chat afterwards. Puts a new spin on ‘taste communities’, too, doesn’t it?

I’ll be blogging about these sorts of events and screenings regularly on my own blog now and will be hosting more Q&As at Leeds International Film Festival in November.

Theory, practice and dilemmas

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Birmingham, conference, Creative economies, Culture, Festivals, Salford

The other day I was at a symposium at Leeds Metropolitan University called ‘Protests as events/Events as protests’, listening to the dilemmas of some academics who are or have been activists and how they consolidate these different identities in their jobs and research.

The opening address was a conversation between Dr Ian Lamond of Leeds Met and Dave Webb, Chair of UK CND and they discussed how they first became politicised, how this had affected their careers, up to the point of where they were today. Dave offered a useful insight from his many years of experience at CND: “Sometimes there’s a mis-match between what the public perceive you’re doing and what you think you’re doing” he said, “and you don’t know how much your organisation has achieved because you’re too close to it”.

Over the last few weeks I have also discovered that reading for my PhD is actually more productive when I’m on a train. I’m putting this down to the possibility that when I’m among strangers and in strange places, perhaps I feel more in the world so that I can think about it from the point of view of others. All of this, I hope, will be helpful!

I also recently presented at my first ever conference. I made a Pecha Kucha entitled ‘The Role of the University in the Cultural Economy’ and presented it in Salford at the SPARC post-graduate conference on the subject of Theory, Practice, Impact. I found that the ’20 slides, 20 seconds each’ format was a great way to condense academic waffle into a fast paced and fun performance (I even won a prize for it!)

Starting off with my current sticking point – ‘what is the cultural economy?’ and presenting to a non-specialist audience, I crammed in some basic ideas about whether culture means high art and civilisation or popular culture and commercial products, how the value of cultural goods can change over time and happens within an economy or eco-sytem that combines a mix of cultural and social exchanges with the production and consumption of goods, some of which have intangible and non-market values.

I went on to talk about how an economic system combining state-funded activities with commercial production and international business attracts plenty of debate around value for money and justifying public investment. Then I connected that subject of enquiry up with my other big topic – the role of universities in the cultural sector (and the coming of the REF), before suggesting film screenings as ways to acheive public engagement. 

There was just enough time to mention bringing together different groups of people from on and off campus to exchange knowledge, ideas, culture and experience, and how presenting a series of film screenings could work to generate impact in my own research before my slides ran out!

So with public screenings in mind, I’m still looking around at what’s new in the world of film and I was really chuffed to finally get along to one of the leading documentary festivals Sheffield Doc Fest this year – a festival that has such close links with the Sheffield Hallam University that they run an MA programme together. Two standout films for me were the new documentary about Stuart Hall by John Akomfrah (2013) and From The Land to the Sea Beyond (2012 – a repeat of one of last year’s favourite events). This surprisingly moving film was made mainly from BFI archive clips of the British seaside and coastal industries, directed by Penny Woolcock, produced by Sheffield Doc/Fest and Crossover Labs and screened with a live score by British Sea Power.

The Staurt Hall Project film is brand new, was backed by BFI Film Fund (which is also run in conjunction with Sheff Doc Fest) and is meant to be coming out on general release in September, which will be especially significant for those at Birmingham University I expect. 

Before that, however, for those of you in Birmingham there’s a great opportunity coming up this month to see the classic Murnau silent black and white film Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927) presented by Flatpack Film Festival outdoors at mac arts!

In this film you can really feel the tension in American and European society at the time, perfectly summed up by a single tram ride that crashes two fairy tale worlds into each other – the luxurious, shiny depravity of urban modernity and a sweet, gentle agrarian home. It also had the best action sequences Hollywood could produce at that time, winning an award at the first ever Oscars for unique and artistic production, and I am assured that the screening will go ahead whatever the weather!

6th Annual Experience the Creative Economy Conference, University of Toronto

Tags

Birmingham, cities, Creative economies, Culture, Intermediation, Richard Florida, Toronto

18-21st June 2013

I received some good news recently. I’ve been selected to take part in a highly selective forum for early career scholars who are engaged in research related to the creative economy. The conference hosted by the Martin Prosperity Institute, University of Toronto, brings together 25 individuals from around the world to share and discuss their research. During the four day programme we’ll be looking at opportunities to develop methods and collaborate, as well as exploring the creative scenes and neighbourhoods of Toronto.

For the conference I’ll be presenting a paper entitled:

Local governance, community commissioning and intermediation in the creative economy

Here is my abstract which provides some more detail on the topic:

“Birmingham is at cross-roads in its governance of the creative economy. The second largest city in the UK, Birmingham has high levels of unemployment and inequality, the youngest population in Europe and its ethnic profile is projected to be majority minority by 2020. Contradictions in its cultural policy strategy include ambitions to develop a global city for culture and creativity, with simultaneous cuts in investment from local government and regional arts bodies resulting in a downward trend of arts provision in educational and community spaces.

Tracing processes of cultural intermediation (Bourdieu 1979; Woo 2012), this paper investigates the methods of connecting communities in the creative economy through self-organizing neighborhood arts groups. Balsall Heath, one of Birmingham City Council’s Priority Neighborhoods with multiple social deprivations, is a testing ground for new community-led budgeting and community culture commissioning pilots. Emerging arts infrastructure include Ort, a commercially run café, music and arts space with an ethos of community engagement, and Balsall Heath Biennale, a local partnership, who investigate what the role of artists can be in the 21st century through neighborhood practice.

Policy associated with the ‘Big Society’ (Cameron 2010), with emphasis on localized and distributed forms of governance alongside reductions on public spending, is transforming the role of the state and cultural organizations. Using the case studies of Ort and Balsall Heath Biennale, this paper investigates the increased expectation placed on community-driven initiatives and a climate of major cuts to public services to conceptualize the future of intermediation in the creative economy.”

Once the programme is finalised by Dr Melanie Fasche of University of Toronto I’ll post it here to give further information on discussants et al.

Big Story Interviews

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Art, Birmingham, cities, communities, Creative economies, Culture, Engagement, Intermediation

One of the things I’ve been working on alongside Natasha are films of Big Story interviews with key ‘movers and shakers’ from Birmingham’s creative and cultural economy. The aim of the interviews has been to develop a common understanding of the site-specific and broader contextual stories around the development of the creative and cultural economy in each place. These narratives bridge the historical research by Ian and Natasha and governance research by Beth, Karen and I. Filming in Birmingham has already been done with: Roger Shannon, Film Producer; Derek Bishton, creator of photography magazine Ten.8; Anita Bhalla, Chair of Creative Cities Partnership and Head of Public Space Broadcasting, BBC; and Lara Ratnarajah, digital and business expert.  Overlapping with the Manchester work, Natasha and I also travelled down to London to interview Ben Kelly, the designer of The Hacienda nightclub. The rest of the Manchester Big Story interviews will be conducted by Natasha, Beth and Karen using walking techniques and photographs in an aural and visual mapping of the stories.  We’re hoping to facilitate focus groups in both Manchester and Birmingham at the end to share and refine the stories, building a picture of the distinctiveness of each place. Using the concept of ‘stories’, the Big Story methodology we’ve developed will develop urban narratives about change, transformation and the reconfiguration of places in dialogue with existing creative cities discourse.

 I’ve attached a short 6 minute clip of the first interview which features Roger Shannon, shot by film-makers Aman Alimshand and Karishma Popat from Birmingham City University. Enjoy!

Exhibitioning cultures

Tags

Art, Birmingham, Community, Creative economies, Culture, Engagement, Envision, Intermediation, Project Pigeon, The Drum

It’s been a packed past week visiting organisations and exhibitions, learning more about what work is being done with communities in Birmingham. Beyond the large higher-profile institutions of the city centre (IKON’s Autumn Almanac; BMAG’s new interactive History Galleries), I’ve been off to:

Aston (The Drum; Envision programme launch at Aston Villa Football Club);

Perry Bar (Birmingham City University, with a presentation from Project Pigeon);

Balsall Heath (Ort’s first birthday at Old Print Works);

…And also to Manchester to see research-through-exhibition-making (Sustainable Stories, the CUBE). The Mistra – Urban Futures and SURF Centre / University of Salford exhibition mobilised community researchers to help map the stories of residents in Greater Manchester around the theme of Sustainability in cities. These researchers were also active in the space of the exhibition documenting the stories of visitors and embodying the project’s partnership between grass-roots localism and academia.

Back talking about Birmingham, I wanted to pick up on just a couple of the brilliant intermediary activities happening here:

Meeting with Jonathan Morley from The Drum gave great insights into arts programming in the cultural landscape beyond the city centre. Originally set up with assistance from Probation Services and awarded core funding from the Arts Council and the City Council for the past decade, The Drum acts as a cultural intermediary fostering a sense of place and place-making in the local area of Aston; however for future sustainability it must also attract those audiences who attend city-centre events. With a remit to represent South Asian and Black arts, The Drum needs to connect with local communities and wider communities; to meet commercial targets and deliver artist development aims with a cutting-edge program.  Examples of impressive work with and within communities include Simmer Down Festival (reaching over 8,000 revellers) and the Arts Champion Scheme. The Drum also runs Birmingham’s annual Black History Month in partnership with Birmingham City Council.

Divergently, Project Pigeon revealed more-than-human geographies of cultural intermediation. The arts organisation run by Alexandra Lockett maintains a pigeon loft in Digbeth with 50 birds. Starting with allotments as a form of curating culture, Alexandra’s practice evolved to working with pigeons and pigeon-fanciers using all kinds of platforms and artistic mediums (pigeon stamps and syndicates, writing classes, performances, plays, exhibitions, oral histories). In her talk at BCU, Alexandra documented the under-represented world of pigeon-fancying in Birmingham, drawing its inter-cultural, cross-generational relations. Brummie pigeon fanciers from Chinese communities were shown alongside the white male fancier that has typified representations of the sub-culture. Through funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund, Project Pigeon Achive is in the process of being developed and will be integrated into the Birmingham Library Archive in Autumn 2013.