MashingUp: Art+Wandering

UWS space @ CCA, 350 Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow

5.30 - 7.30pm, 7 March 2012

an event with

Dr David Pinder, Reader in Geography, Queen Mary, University of London
and
Liza Dimbleby, artist and writer

The diverse ways in which artists, writers, dreamers, drifters and activists inhabit, shape and respond to the city as a space for exploration, imagination and re-creation offer key themes for narratives of urban re-invention and renewal, in literature, politics, the arts, and cultural and critical geography. In this event we bring together two leading figures, both of whom have a fascination with the urban imaginary, to discuss their approach to art, wandering and urban space.

David Pinder: Navigating cities: journeys through the not-yet-set

Liza Dimbleby: Hide and Seek in the City: walking, drawing and displacement

Chaired by Graham Jeffery and Katarzyna Kosmala, UWS

David Pinder is Reader in Geography at Queen Mary, University of London, and the author of numerous articles and books on situationist urbanism and the cultural politics of urban space, including Visions of the City: utopianism, power and politics in 20th Century Urbanism (Edinburgh University Press).

Liza Dimbleby is a writer and artist. Her book I Live Here Now (Firework) is about walking and drawing in Moscow, Glasgow and London. Currently based in Glasgow, she continues to move between these three cities.

[...MASHING-UP...” An Event Series presented by UWS and CCA. This ongoing series stimulates critical, transdisciplinary research communities to discuss advanced knowledge and to build networks of excellence among producer communities. ‘Mashing up’ [definition] "a mashup is a web page or application that combines data or functionality from two or more external sources to create a new service. The term mashup implies easy, fast integration...to produce results that were not the original reason for producing the raw source data" (Wikipedia, 2009). The lecture series exhibits the values of new media culture to explore synergies between institutions, ideas and disciplines. This aspiration originates with the UWS and CCA partnership, which extends to the specific areas of inquiry that we pursue. It advances the core mission of each organization to initiate applied, international research opportunities through experimental, local dialogue to foster collaborative, bottom-up, sustainable practices of development. #mashingup We want attendees to blog, photograph, film, tweet and do all they can to share the content of these talks to democratize access to knowledge....]

GI Festival and Curriculum for Excellence @ Tramway, 28th April

Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art and Curriculum for Excellence: the significance of contemporary art practice in meeting the experiences and outcomes of Curriculum for Excellence

Conference and bus tour
Tramway, 25 Albert Drive, Glasgow, G41 2PE
(bus tour departs Tramway)

£45 Visit the NSEAD website for full details and bookings (ADVANCE BOOKINGS ESSENTIAL)
10.30 - 4pm

In partnership with the National Society for Education in Art and Design (NSEAD) and UWS Artist Teacher Programme, this event is designed for primary and secondary teachers of art and design. Presentations during the event will focus upon the experiences and outcomes of Curriculum for Excellence and will include presentations from HMIe/Education Scotland on Creativity in the art and design curriculum, the staff and young artists of Room 13 from two Fort William primary schools will look at contemporary art and how it helps raise contemporary issues in the classroom. Others in the field of arts education in Scotland and beyond including Paul Dash, (Goldsmiths, University of London), Graham Jeffery, Diarmuid McAuliffe and Katarzyna Kosmala from UWS. The GI-commissioned artist Graham Fagan will also contribute to the event.

The event concludes with a guided tour of selected GI Festival projects led by GI's Creative Learning co-ordinator Lesley Hepburn.

www.nsead.org/cpd/conferences.aspx

My Glasgow Granny from Donegal

Is there a woman from your past who made the journey to Scotland from Ireland?

Why not come along to one of three sessions at the library on Thursday 15th March 2012 to share stories about the tales of your female relatives who came over to Glasgow from Ireland.

These sessions are an opportunity to meet Rachael Flynn, the artist-researcher running this project in a relaxed spaces with tea, coffee and chatter.

Rachael is working as part of the Scottish Centre for Island Studies. Her current research is a response to the narrative of her grandmother who left Donegal in the 1930’s to find work in Glasgow. The work she makes is a response to the written letters between her grandmother and the family she left behind, the fables, anecdotes and memories weaved by family members, and the social histories of the various women who made similar journeys.

My Glasgow Granny from Donegal project will give the public an opportunity to recognize and pay honor to such women who faced vast challenges and obstacles in order to shape their own futures.

There will be 3 sessions on Thursday 15th March:

3pm to 4pm, or 4.15pm to 5.15pm, or 5.30pm to 6.30pm

Spaces are limited but we would love to accommodate everyone so please register your interest so we can plan for this. If you are interested in coming along and taking part please contact us on 0141 248 9969 or fill out a booking form here. You are also most welcome to forward any thoughts or questions to Rachael directly, her email address is Rachael.flynn@uws.ac.uk.

Rachael is also launching a project in which women will be able to add the names of these ancestors to an artist’s book which will start to build up a collection that seeks to move beyond formal data to create a human and embodied document. By adding the names of their Irish mothers, grandmothers, great grandmothers, aunts, cousins… the women who visit the book in the library will have the chance to effectively ‘light a candle’ in memory of these relatives.

In creating this work she is hoping to raise awareness of such women, but also to open up the opportunity for people to share the stories that are part of their personal histories. By acknowledging these accounts there is the opportunity to become empowered by the perseverance, strength and spirit of our female ancestors.

All of the activities and experiences of this process will culminate and build towards a developed exhibition of this material which reflects the subject matter of the women who originally made such a brave journey. Hopefully weaved through this will be the ‘journeys’ made by the women involved in this project as we share stories and pass these books between each other.

Rachael Flynn is an artist and PhD Research student currently working as part of the Scottish Centre for Island Studies, University of the West of Scotland. Rachael completed her Undergraduate degree from the School of Fine Art, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, and went on to study and be awarded her MA at Goldsmiths, University of London.

During her time studying Rachael received various opportunities through awards from The Scottish Sculpture Workshops (Residency award 2006), The Angus Memorial Sculpture Prize, The Hunting Art Prize Competition (Young Artist of the Year runner up, Royal College of Art 2004), Carnegie Undergraduate traveling Scholarship (Australia 2004), and Outstanding Film Achievement Award by Honorable Goldsmiths Society, Creation II (London).

Within the creative industries Rachael has worked with independent film-makers, artists, research groups and production companies. These include Paul Watson (Bafta Lifetime Achievement winner), Juniper Television (productions – The Indian Miracle? [Channel 4] & Battle for the Holy Land, Love Thy Neighbor [Channel 4]), Generator Projects (artist-run space), Wendy Ramshaw OBE, Professor David Watkins (RCA), and BBC London (Watchdog, BBC Politics Show)

Remaking Society

Graham Jeffery, Reader in Music and Performance has been awarded a grant from the AHRC, as part of the Connected Communities 'pilot demonstrator' follow-on funding scheme, jointly with Dr Tom Wakeford of the University of Edinburgh and Dr Kerrie Schaefer of the University of Exeter. A brief summary of the project is below, and a project blog will be set up in due course. Partners for this project include Mission Models Money, Cadispa Trust, NHSGGC, Theatre Modo, Bradford Community Broadcasting, Swingbridge Media, Love Milton, www.poverty.ac.uk, and Professor Jon Hawkes from the Community Cultural Development Network, Victoria, Australia. 

Remaking Society

Realising the potential of cultural activities in contexts of deprivation

Remaking Society will exemplify the central themes of the Connected Communities Programme via three inter-dependent routes:

i) Working with local partners in demonstrating and assessing participatory cultural
activities in four contrasting contexts of deprivation – Bradford, Glasgow,
Fraserburgh and Newcastle.
ii) Using these four pilots to generate new forms of evidence about the lived
experience of poverty and exclusion.
iii) Creating opportunities for marginalised and less visible sections of society to
communicate with wider audiences, including policy-makers.

Cultural dimensions of regeneration – making, creating, performing and celebrating – are often neglected. Yet these aspects can be vital to the sense of shared wellbeing, belonging and aspiration for community members. Hawkes calls the integration of a cultural perspective into the planning of change the "fourth pillar" of sustainability, alongside economic, social and environmental dimensions. He suggests that cultural projects provide "avenues for the expression of community values..[that can]...directly affect the directions society takes" (Hawkes 2001).

Recent Government-commissioned research has added to a growing body of evidence suggesting that participatory arts and media processes can act as portals to wider processes of social development, by offering for example access to further learning, training or social networks (Scottish Government 2006). Activities which promote imaginative engagement through creative practice can offer additional opportunities to conceive and enact alternatives. Members of a community experience processes allowing them to imagine different possible futures. Collaborative participatory arts have been shown to make a significant contribution to both the confidence of individuals, their trust of others participating the process and in overall quality of life and wellbeing. Remaking Society is to collaborate with four experienced partner organisations that work intensively, through participatory arts and media practices, with communities in four neighbourhoods - Bradford, West Yorkshire (community radio), Milton, North Glasgow (visual arts), Benwell, Newcastle (film) and Fraserburgh, Aberdeenshire (theatre). With much of the population in each area currently experiencing high levels of economic and social deprivation, we will explore the socio-cultural dimensions of 'living with/in poverty'.


The practice of community cultural development (CCD) in North American cities, such as that led in Chicago by John Kretzman and John McKnight from Northwestern University, exemplifies the model demonstrated in Remaking Society. Traditionally the communities that were identified as deprived had been provided with services and programmes designed and delivered by outside experts. The effect of this now discredited cultural deficit model was to position people as passive recipients dependent on service providers (including university researchers) to address their deficiencies and their needs. Yet the model still persists in most deprived areas of the UK. By contrast, our asset-based approach recognises such communities as resourceful and gifted (Goldbard 2006). We draw upon and harness the capacities and creativities of local people to address issues and solve problems. Outside assistance and resources from government agencies, institutions and other organisations are still going to be required to address issues of deprivation. But, in our model, the agenda of such interventions is to be set more by the community of people most directly affected. 


Using performance, visual art and digital media, the Remaking Society research collaboration will this demonstrate ways in which communities conventionally regarded as excluded can negotiate either their own inclusion in - or their continued exclusion from - society. In this project, the concept of community is not restricted to communitarian accounts of 'a group of people in a given place', or as a site of consensus and constructed oneness based on social categories such as race, class, gender or location. Ours is a dynamic model in which community formation is seen as a continual re-negotiation of co-existence and interdependence, not confined by place, as illustrated by the thirty years of pioneering work by Southall Black Sisters (Gupta 2003). 


Questions about how communities conduct these negotiations become particularly important now, at a time of economic crisis, when resources are scarce and stress levels among vulnerable individuals are high. The study will make critical connections between our understanding of community performance and participatory process across academic fields - including conflict resolution, cultural geography, public health, social psychology and sociology. It will allow a re-examination of inter-disciplinary concepts of community through arts and media practices. 


Belonging to a community is critical to a sense of wellbeing for individuals and families, particularly significant for those who live on the breadline. The second element of Remaking Society is the generation of narrative evidence of the cultural dimensions of poverty and social exclusion. It will add a unique inter-disciplinary arts and humanities perspective to the ESRC's national study, Poverty and Social Exclusion in the UK (PSE).

Alessandra Campoli: Edges

Mon 5 Dec 2011 - Mon 30 Jan 2012


Mon-Sat: 12 noon - late (Opening night: Mon 5th Dec from 6-8pm) Free // Please join us for the opening night on Monday 5th December from 6-8pm //


Edges is a visual reflection on boundaries and limits, on visible and invisible lines that soundlessly change our subconscious perception of the space around us.


Part of a wider artistic project devoted to the notion of “edges” in different European and Asian urban contexts, this exhibition is the result of a series of physical and visual explorations of Glasgow’s cityscape, combining analogue and digital photography performance, photomontage and GPS Art.


About Alessandra Campoli 


Born in Rome, Alessandra is a visual artist, performer and researcher. She has had her work displayed in collective and solo exhibitions in Europe and Asia including Fahreneith 451, Rome; White Space Gallery, Bangkok and Area Privata Gallery, Perugia.


She is currently completing a practice-based PhD in Media Arts at the University of the West of Scotland (School of Creative and Cultural Industries).

Sensory Worlds

Samantha Clark, Lecturer in Digital Art, will present a paper at the Sensory Worlds Conference organised by the Institute for the Advanced Study of the Humanities (IASH) at the University of Edinburgh on 7th December entitled "Nothing Really Matters: Sartre, Negation and Nature." Full details of the programme and associated public lectures by Iain Borden and David Abrams can be found here. 

"Sensory Worlds ...[considers].. 'worlds' in a particularly ecological light in order to ask: what contribution can a sensorially-engaged Humanities make to environmental thinking and action? The conference will examine the multi-sensory and will reflect upon the historical, contemporary and possible future relations between the senses (from balance to taste to the haptic and beyond). It will be an interdisciplinary, interrogative and exploratory meeting that will make space for sensorially-engaged scholarship and practice, and will facilitate discursive and constructive meetings between a variety of scholars working on themes related to embodiment, ecology and value. Contributions are invited from those working within the humanities, arts and social sciences. We are interested in contributions that will themselves embody alternatives to the presuppositions common to Western twentieth century engagement with the world such as anthropocentrism, mind-body dualism, and isolated subjectivity".

Markko Maetamm: art in a changing society

Dr Katarzyna Kosmala will introduce the artist and lead a Q & A session: 

Estonian society has undergone very rapid political and economic changes

since the beginning of the 1990s. How does Estonian art reflect these

transformations?

Marko Mäetamm is one of the most fascinating and internationally renowned

young Estonian artists who works with a wide range of media – including

photography, sculpture, animation, painting and text. Mäetamm portrays the

family as a little society, relaying through dark humour the petty moments of

daily life and exploring the way our society manipulates family dynamics

through the macrocosms of economy, consumerism, and “quality-of-life”

standards. Inspired by his own private life and the recurring feeling that he

could fail to preserve the balance of his existence, Mäetamm’s work explores

the grey area where ambiguous feelings of being in control and being

controlled merge.

Tuesday 22nd November, 6pm, University of Edinburgh

Lecture Room 1, Minto House, 20 Chambers St, Edinburgh