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Festival Hub
Events
9th Annual
ALTERED YESTERDAYS: AN AFTERNOON OF PEOPLE TALKING ABOUT ARCHIVES
CULTURE CLUB
Saturday 28 March | 14:00 - 17:30 | Grand Union | Free
Fun with slime moulds | Saturday 21 March
To complement Grand Union’s current Mat Jenner exhibition (see p.47), this series of talks and discussions explores archival projects from photography and film to music and sound art.
Presented in partnership with BOM Lab and the Arts & Science Festival
I’M LICHEN IT: FIELD LENS PHOTOGRAPHY WALKSHOP 11:00 - 12:30 — Start: The Woodman New Canal St — £8 / £6 – advance booking only
To prepare the ground for The Creeping Garden (below), Ben Waddington leads this field trip through Eastside’s wild meadows, quags, fens and wetlands. A hidden world of lichen plains, mushroom groves and moss forests is revealed through the use of the botanist’s field lens, similar to a jeweller’s loupe, which will be supplied on the trip. In conjunction with your smartphone camera, these hidden vistas can be captured, shared and compared. I’m Lichen It can be enjoyed using the supplied field lenses but is at its best with a camera phone. No real photographic ability is needed.
THE CREEPING GARDEN
The Photography of Janet Mendelsohn 14:00
Richard Dawson: The Glass Trunk 15:30
In the process of researching Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies last year, Kieran Connell (Queens University, Belfast) discovered a large collection of Birmingham photographs taken by CCCS student Janet Mendelsohn in the late 60s, principally taken around Balsall Heath and Highgate (see above). Kieran will show a selection of these amazing images, and talk about a new AHRC project that will culminate in an exhibition at Ikon Gallery in 2016.
Rejecting the folk label in favour of ‘ritual community music’, Richard Dawson’s songwriting forges personal memory, mythology and other people’s stories into exhilarating new shapes. Album-before-last The Glass Trunk was written after a period immersed in the Tyne and Wear archives, and before his performance tonight (p.23) Dawson will be talking about how the past finds its way into his songs.
Mat Jenner 14:45 Mat Jenner will talk about his exhibition Dreams Time Free, currently showing at Grand Union. The exhibition includes Foam, a mass collection of oneoff 12” dub plate records by 115 contemporary artists, which visitors are invited to listen to in the gallery. Mat will discuss some of the ideas behind this archive and how it links with other works in the show.
A New Lease of Life 16:30 Digital technology is bringing to light a wealth of films that were previously hidden away, and offering new ways to share them with people. At the same time, it’s posing difficult questions around fidelity of restoration and sustainability of data. Archivists from some of Europe’s most significant film collections will join us to talk about this brave new world and describe some of the ways in which archives are becoming more accessible.
13:00 - 15:00 — The Electric — £ 8.00 /£ 6.00
Once considered part of the fungi family, the slime mould’s multi-coloured diversity and its ability to move towards food sources both capture the imagination and provoke debate. The Creeping Garden gathers a number of devotees including amateur mycologist Mark Pragnell and artist Heather Barnett (who cheerfully admits to taking slime moulds on holiday with her), underscoring their passion with gorgeous timelapse photography and music by Jim O’Rourke. A delightfully unexpected documentary. Directors Jasper Sharp and Tim Grabham will take part in a discussion after the film along with Heather Barnett.
THE PHYSARUM EXPERIMENTS 15:30 - 17:00 — BOM — Free entry with a Creeping Garden ticket
Heather Barnett, with Physarum polycephalum “[In] trying to understand systems that use relatively simple components to build higher-level intelligence, the slime mould may someday be seen as the equivalent of the finches and tortoises that Darwin observed on the Galápagos Islands” — Steven Johnson, Emergence, 2001 You’ve seen the movie – now here’s a chance to meet the stars up close. Join Heather Barnett to discover the fascinating role the slime mould plays in the cultures of science and art, and participate in a practical experiment to test the abilities of this single-celled organism.
MEDIA/CULTURE 12:00 - 16:00 — BOM — Free
Photographer Dan Burwood will introduce the work he’s developing during his BOM fellowship: an exploration of bacteria and fungal cultures in traditional wet photographic media and process. You will be invited to document the organic disruption of part of a silver gelatine print, to contribute to a composite timelapse dispersed fungi photo film. A range of edible ferments and cultures will also be available to take away...