Gdansk Shipyard: insights from the UWS-ASP international summer school

Room GT 25, Ayr Campus

Thursday 12th December 2013, 3 - 5pm

From the beginning of the 19^th century, the Gdansk Shipyard was a source of regional socio-economic power and the largest employer for the local community. Post-war Gdansk became a place of resistance against the Communist regime that led by shipyard workers. In 1980, the Solidarity movement led by Lech Walesa was established in the Gdansk Shipyard as the first independent trade union in the then Soviet Block, commencing the so-called Solidarity Revolution and subsequent systemic changes across Central European countries.  In June 2004, the historical boards with 21 postulates of the protesting shipyard’s workers were added to the UNESCO World Heritage List.  In 1995 the Gdansk Shipyard went bankrupt and in 2004 a new land-use plan has been approved which formally initiated urban regeneration of this post-industrial area. Several artists-activists’ groups have become engaged with researching the unique local specificity of the Gdansk Shipyard and indicating the need for its protection. Artist-run groups in the Gdansk Shipyard have succeeded in radically changing public perception of its heritage values.

UWS MA Creative Media Practice students will discuss experiences of Gdansk shipyard regeneration through working with local students and activists seeking possible solutions aimed to increase the levels of public engagement. In the second half of the session, links back to Scotland will be made through exposure of Govan regeneration experience with a focus on cultural planning and art-led activism presented by Fablevision and SURF,and followed by discussion. A video documentary about the summer school will be shown at the event.

The international summer school August 2013 commenced pedagogic and research based collaboration for staff and students of UWS CCI and ASP Art Academy Gdansk. The main goal of the Summer School was to work collaboratively on projects initiating a social radical planning process for regeneration of the Gdansk shipyard area and aid in creating a new, alternative vision and development for the Gdansk Shipyard’s cultural heritage.

3.00-3.10 Welcome and Introductions Prof Katarzyna Kosmala/Graham Jeffery, UWS

3.10-3.25 Video Screening: Gdansk Shipyard summer school

3.25-3.45 Overview and context: Problems with Gdansk Shipyard regeneration

Roman Sebastyanski, UWS PhD candidate

3.45-3.55 Gdansk Shipyard experience: Extending the context back to Govan.

  Alison McCandlish, UWS

3.55-4.05 Questions

4.05 -4.15 @Waterrow on regeneration   Liz Gardiner Fablevision

4.15-4.25 Govan regeneration strategies and public engagement   

Andy Milne, SURF:  Scotland's Independent Regeneration Network

4.25-4.55 Discussion

How to engage the public? How to improve regeneration through participative strategies with use of new communication technologies?

5.00 End

All welcome

The People's Voice

Lecturer in Commercial Music Jo Collinson-Scott has written a song for the project: "The People's Voice: Celebrating the Janey Buchan Political Song Collection", using a poem taken from the political song archive, housed at the University of Glasgow. The song is  featured on a compilation CD (of the same title).   There is a a concert on the 30th of November in Glasgow University Concert Hall, to launch the recording, at which she will perform.

Details of the project and concert are here:

http://www.gla.ac.uk/schools/cca/research/music/projectsandnetworks/jbpsc/thepeoplesvoice/

and

https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Peoples-Voice-Celebrating-the-Janey-Buchan-Political-Song-Collection/610831685606650

Leave Your Shoes at the Door

BloodWater Theatre presents the collaboratively produced new work

Leave Your Shoes at the Door

CCA Glasgow, Friday 31^st January 2014, 3.00pm and 7.30pm

In October 2011 a group of international artists met for a week’s theatre residency in Glasgow to develop a performance:

Pritam Kapoor originally from Singapore but lives in London now

Lucy Fitzpatrick originally from Scotland but lives in Sydney now

Monika Nawrat from Poland, currently lives in Scotland

Gordon O’Neill from Northern Ireland, currently lives in Scotland

Fatima Rateb, originally from Egypt but lives in London now 

Two years later, they reunite in Glasgow to complete the work.  They return for different reasons, aware of the challenges of working with the diverse artistic practices and varied temperaments of the artists within the group.  They each have a story to tell and must decide whether to share this story.  Leave Your Shoes at the Door raises questions about how theatre is made and whether the process of making can be synonymous to the product of theatre.  Can artists who collaborate own what they collectively create?

Jamie Walker, Gavin Wright, Paul Chaal, Anna Neirobisz, Suzanne Morrison, Martin Smith and Jo Ronan make up BloodWater Theatre.  As part of her PhD research, Jo brought these individuals together in February 2011 to test principles of ownership in theatre-making and in July 2011 BloodWater Theatre was launched.  BloodWater Theatre collaboratively produced Whose Story Is It Anyway, a work in progress staged at the Tron Theatre on the 15th of October 2011.  The company is not funded and experiments with egalitarian ways of making theatre in the hope of discovering the aesthetics of the collective, enabling the making of moving performances that challenge minds.

www.bloodwatertheatre.com

Tickets: £0, £2, £5, £8 and £10 (pay what you can)

In conversation with Phil Harding

Commercial Music Research Group
UWS Paisley Campus
Friday 25th October, 1.30 - 4.00pm

Producer Phil Harding in conversation with Lecturer in Commercial Music Paul McGeechan

Phil Harding is Chair of accrediting body JAMES (Joint Audio Media Education Services) and has a long and distinguished career as a producer and engineer, working with artists of the calibre of Kylie Minogue, The Four Tops, Diana Ross, Donna Summer, Depeche Mode and many more.  2009 saw the release of Phil’s first book – ‘PWL –From The Factory Floor’, a memoir of the famous Pete Waterman / SAW studio in the 1980’s. 

In May 2011 Phil mixed 11 songs in Los Angeles with legendry Motown Songwriter and Producer Lamont Dozier for the new Sir Cliff Richard album ‘Soulicious’, featuring artists ranging from Candi Staton and Deniece Williams through to The Temptations and The Stylistics. 

Blood City and A Taste of Malice

Douglas Skelton in discussion with Michael J Malone

Tuesday October 29th, 6.30pm
The Atrium, University Campus Ayr, KA8 0SX

Douglas Skelton has written 11 true crime and history books, including Blood on the Thistle, Glasgow's Black Heart and Frightener (with Lisa Brownlie), The latter was an investigation into the controversial 'Ice Cream Wars' murder case. 

Now he turns his hand to fiction, with Blood City (Luath Press). 

Michael J Malone has published over 200 poems in literary magazines throughout the UK, including New Writing Scotland, Poety Scotland and Markings. Blood Tears, his debut novel, won the Pitlochry Prize. He has since published a non-fiction work about successful modern-day Scots - Carnegie's Call. His latest novel, A Taste of Malice, is out now. 

Introducing the event is David Manderson, Lecturer in the School of Creative and Cultural Industries, writing teacher, flaneur, organiser and author of the bestseller Lost Bodies. 

To book a place please contact Lesley-Anne Niven: lesley-anne.niven@uws.ac.uk (01292 886358) 

Exhaustion Symposium, University of Kent

Doctoral researcher/artist Chris Dooks is an invited speaker at this Wellcome Trust-supported symposium at the University of Kent, Canterbury on 25th October. 

The M.E.thodologies of the Fragmented Filmmaker

There is a growing academic and artistic interest in first-person research, sensory-based methods and the rise of ‘autoethnography’. More recently, ‘the disability memoir’ or ‘autosomatography’ has arisen out of an increasing need for insider knowledge, which in turn has supported conversations within the medical humanities around issues of inclusivity and dialogue, and also has helped to articulate and analyse personal experiences of illness, paying attention to the cultural and social dimensions of wellbeing.

In this presentation I will speak about some of these methodologies in relation to my own exhaustion, how my career as a broadcast filmmaker fragmented under the illness, and how this has fed into my doctoral research. I will present extracts from works that are informed by the discoveries I made through my research, which have helped me augment and adapt to living under conditions of extreme and unpredictable exhaustion.

The intelligence of art: art practice & research

Professor Nick Higgins is screening We Are Northern Lights at this symposium, to be held at the NUI Galway from 24th - 26th October 2013.

Huston School of Film & Digital Media, NUI Galway, 24- 26 October 2013.

A Practice-based Research Symposium will explore what is specific about the practice of art in relation to an inclusive range of forms: visual, film, writing, music and performance. A range of arts practitioners, including Des Bell, Nick Higgins, Christa Lerm-Hayes, Ian McGuire, Paolo Bartoloni, Mel Mercier, Helen Phelan and Mícheál O Súilleabháin, will discuss What forms of knowledge does art offer? Is there an ‘artistic mode of thought’? What are the conditions of the possibility of knowledge through art - taken to mean? There will be an exhibition, screenings, readings, and performances.

Organised by Burren College of Art, Huston School of Film & Digital Media, Department of English NUI Galway, Irish World Academy of Music and Dance, University of Limerick.