Our Streets by Claire Sosienski Smith

'Our Streets' is an ongoing archive and mapping project created by Christine Pungong and Claire Sosienski Smith which aims to present alternative narratives, histories and geographies of Cambridge by visualizing the experiences of women and non-binary people through a crowdsourced psychogeographical map. Psychogeography is the study of the interrelatedness between people, their emotions and the urban environment. A key concept within the Situationist International’s formulation of unitary urbanism, Guy Debord defined psychogeography as “the study of the precise law and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals”. Thus psychogeography was used as method of better understanding that urban spaces are not “mental, abstract space”, but rather “social, concrete space”. As part of the project we have coordinated several programs and activities with other arts and research organisations including Cambridge Digital Humanities and Doing History in Public. We worked with these groups to deliver ‘Immersive Archive Workshops’ – a series of workshops intending to highlight the radical potential of archive work and how it contributes to the reclaiming of space and untold legacies. This exhibition, held in Kettle’s Yard on International Women’s Day, brings together the work of student artists inspired by the responses from women and non-binary people on where in Cambridge they associate with feminist activism, community and joy. We hope this space invites you to reflect on the moments that are significant to you and how important it is that we continue to celebrate the women and non-binary people in our lives. Christine and Claire Friday 8th March 2019

Huge thank you to all the people without whom this exhibition would not have been possible: Amy Tobin Grace Storey Tom Noblett Andrew Nairne OBE The rest of Kettle’s Yard team Christie Costello And of course all of our amazing artists.

feel free to record your thoughts on the exhibition here, to create your own psychogeographical map of the space

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Anna Curzon Price - 'Lost Spaces’ mixed media

I studied an archive held at the UL of student protests and the Our Streets survey responses. I was struck by the photographs inside cardboard boxes, the traces of stories they revealed, the random details which were not central to the intention of the original recording. Archives are a way of claiming and reimagining space. From found material I made temporary interventions in the built environment in unremarkable places which were typical of the survey responses I found most interesting. I then recorded and memorialised these to highlight how they offered alternative perspectives on the environments I had placed them within. I took these photographic records and transformed them into more personal responses. Finally, I returned my responses to the locations which they originated from. Through this process of translation between the recorded and the real, which blurs the boundary between different spaces and different people’s narratives and memories I sought to demonstrate how archives can be used like building materials in playful and creative ways to rework space. I thought cardboard and the cardboard box provide an interesting link between the materiality of the archives (boxes in which they are stored) and the materials which tend to be used in order to reconfigure space (cardboard protest signs or dens made by children or shelters made by the homeless). I was inspired by hearing about a group of lesbian squatters in the 1970s in Hackney whose direct physical engagement with the built environment through the reclaiming of abandoned terraced houses, allowed them to create alternative worlds for themselves. Nevertheless, no material trace of their presence remains in the neighbourhood today.

Elara Kyffin Shurety - “Untitled”, video

Using fragments of text from the Our Street survey, this piece overlays the voices of multiple women and non-binary people, acting almost like a chorus. It reflects the experiences of women and non-binary people who have studied at Cambridge University, as particularly anchored to space. This video documents the recording being played in various public places, representing an intervention of women and non binary peoples voices on public space. "This entire project is teaching me that I have a history. I recognise myself in the memories of other people, which remind me that people won’t entirely forget me whenever I’m not with them. I learnt a lot inside bedrooms of friends. A worn wooden staircase in Kings the brown leather sofa where I I sat in my college mother’s bedroom and tried not to cry. I have spent so many joyful hours, in comfort of other women who kept me sane. late night drunken conversations, too many to mention – we felt we were doing something positive. Like I was part of something, surrounded. My own space for the first time It was where I learned to shout! In front of Senate House a landscape of protest, defiance, bravery, and and a sea of students making their voices heard."

Taqwa Sadiq - 1001 nights at Cambridge, Do you see me, Such fun, mixed media

"1001 nights at Cambridge" and "Do you see me" explore experiences of hijab-wearing Muslim women of colour moving through the streets of Cambridge. Their presence becomes a performance of being seen and in turn seeing oneself through the eyes of others. Their double conscious experiences lead them to process the perceptions, misconceptions, and assumptions of the White male gaze and its control over visualizations of the Female Muslim body. The act of Muslim WoCs observing themselves being observed whilst actualising their own selfperception intersects with the stories of Agnes and Margret Smith, 19th century residents of Cambridge and explorers of ‘the Orient’, instrumental in discovering the Cairo Geniza. The Geniza papers are now archived in Cambridge University Library and are considered a treasure trove of Arab history spanning 1,000 years. Although the sisters received honorary degrees from four universities, Cambridge was not one of them. These pieces question women’s and women of colour’s experiences in the academy as represented by the streets of Cambridge. Reproduced with permission of Westminster College, "Such fun" is from a collection of lantern slides taken by Agnes and Margret Smith, the ‘Sisters of Sinai’, on their many expeditions to the middle east c.1886-c.1906. It was on one of these expeditions that they contributed to the discovery of the Cairo Geniza now archived in Cambridge University Library. Although the sisters lived and worked in Cambridge as Biblical scholars, they received honorary degrees from four universities but not Cambridge, which did not admit female students to degrees until 1948.

Kate Hiscock - “His college offers him a home, where he lives, works and plays.” video

Inspired by the Our Streets project and Huntley Film archives of Cambridge University, this film explores how women and nonbinary students of Cambridge University locate themselves, their experiences and their emotions within a space traditionally oriented against them. Conjuring images of the responses to the Our Streets survey, surrounding places in Cambridge that helped shape understandings of feminism and places associated with friendship, community and joy, it charts how we are taking up space, blending the political, the emotional and the everyday.

Evelyn Whorrall-Campbell - “The Worth of Women” performance piece

Wherein is Clearly Revealed Their Nobility and Their Superiority to Men was a literary dialogue written by the Venetian noblewoman Moderata Fonte and published after her death in 1600. In her text, a group of ‘outspoken women’ discuss the merits of women compared with the failings of men, imagining a proto-feminist separatist space. This monologue for Our Streets traces the voices of other outspoken women, seeing speech as feminist praxis that permeates inaccessible spaces.

Kitya Mark + Isla Waring - “There is a field on the footpath”, paper, ink, thread, found objects

Isla Waring and Kitya Mark were interested in tracing the anecdotes collected in the Our Streets archive as a way to re-connect with a familiar setting through the layers of unfamiliar memories. They created their own map, loosely based on the River Cam, with locations from the survey as anchors in the landscape. They journeyed through their map, documenting the conversations, the details and the moments that mattered to the people who experienced these spaces. They have curated this collection of memories as a kind of letter to the city, a letter that reclaims space, that delicately engages with memories as well as the act of remembering itself. They worked with printmaking, noticing how the printing press leaves behind a ghostly indexical image on the page, something that feels both tangible and immaterial. This seems symbolic of the imprints we leave on the landscapes we move through. Open the translucent envelopes, run your fingers across the contents found on the banks of the River Cam. The prints on the walls are the textual fabric of these collective memories.

Christine Pungong - “Homegirls and Handgrenades” series of photographs

"And I cried. For myself. For this woman talkin’ about love. For all the women who have ever stretched their bodies out anticipating civilization and finding ruins.” Homegirls and Handgrenades is a photo series depicting women of colour in their favourite spaces of refuge within the archetypically white, male, upper class, oppressive context of Cambridge University. The piece is inspired by a collection of poems by Sonia Sanchez titled “Homegirls and Handgrenades”, which details Sanchez’s struggle as a person of African descent living in America (while not feeling truly connected to either place) and the difficulty she faces in attempting to reconcile these multiplicities in her identity. Much like the rest of the Our Streets project, this piece points to the fact that the social production of physical space is inherently political. It is especially important to contextualise what these spaces mean in relation to variables such as race and gender, in order to truly understand the history that women of colour have had within an institution such as Cambridge. Exclusion from certain social spaces, historically and presently, is a form of political violence, and therefore carving out and reclaiming those spaces, in turn, is a powerful political act. From top left to bottom right: Vera, Sophie, Tanisha, Lina, Alayo and Rashidat.

Claire Sosienski Smith - “Survival”, spray paint on fabric

I am often overwhelmed by the small acts of archiving that exist between the women and non-binary people around me: the warmth of their reminders of who I am, the acknowledgement that things may not always feel like this, the images of past activism that show that we were here. Organising with women and non-binary people mostly feels like an addition rather than a subtraction. Yet, so often, I think about the workings out that aren’t usually presented in the final outcome, whether that’s the end of a campaign or an event or your time at university. There are so many moments I didn’t manage to capture and can hardly pin down to think about, and I try really hard to archive things, led by the impulse to show that we existed in all our queer and distracted glory. I don’t often have control of my narrative and I have found the work that I do misconstrued, either accidentally because I was not open about how much work I do behind the scenes, or willfully so. The archive is a really incredible tool, but it is an incomplete one. Yet, for myself I am a complete archive of everything that has happened, arching back through so many past selves and members of my biological and chosen family that made living truthfully a possibility. A lot of these things will always be more than any archive could ever hold. I also hold it as promise to keep to myself, repeating it over in my head, to be and do more than any archive could ever hold. I left a pronoun out of the piece on purpose. Often, we were more than any archive could ever hold.

Anki Deo - “Caryatid”, wood carving sculpture

Drawing inspiration from columns in the form of women found in many classical and neoclassical structures, Caryatid highlights the fundamental, and all too often forgotten, role of women in institutional frameworks. The organising and activist efforts of women - particularly women of colour - have been continuously sidelined, or even omitted altogether, within the structure of institutional memory. Supporting the edifice of basic rights has often been a thankless task for feminist organisers in Cambridge. It is when we stop to acknowledge those who have preceded us that we are able to appreciate not only how far we have come, but also how far we still need to go. “The truth about the past is not that it is too brief, or too superficial, but only that we, having turned out faces so resolutely away from it, have never demanded from it what it has to give.” - James Baldwin