Final film screening cancelled

Posted on by
Reply

Sadly due to a number of issues – I’ve had to cancel the screening of ‘Jeremy Deller’s The Battle of Orgreave’ at Whirled Cinema - pencilled in for 18 June. I might attempt to do another one later in the year but unfortunately not in June. It would have been great because it would have been the anniversary but hopefully if/when I do get to do it – it’ll be even better!

If you are interested in coming along to that screening – particularly if you were a member of the audience at the performance of the re-enactment – please do get in touch – I’m keeping a list of interested people together for it. Email me and you’ll be updated of any news about this screening.

The silent walk along the route of Graeme Miller’s Linked will be going ahead though on Saturday 22 June. Again if you’re interested – please do get in touch. Its a very limited group but someone’s just dropped out so there are a couple of spaces.

 

 

Night walk pilgrimage of Graeme Miller’s Linked artwork

Reply

On Saturday 22 June I will be taking a small group of people on a night walk of the Graeme Miller Linked walk – this will be a sort of pilgrimage.  It will be conducted wholly in silence.  I’m anticipating that this group should be no more than 15.

We will meet outside Leyton station after the last train – so around 1am. We will then walk onwards to take in all the receivers between Leyton and Wanstead through the night, hopefully arriving at the last one, on the bridge over the road as the sun comes up. The whole walk will take place in silence.  Please do not bring cameras or any other way of documenting the event.  I want to ensure all participants are focussed on the experience.

I can only manage a small group of people with the receivers for this event without help.  I will be collating a list with instructions nearer the time. This is part of my larger research so if you take part in the walk – you’re also signing up for the post-talk discussion – to be had at the nearest open cafe when we finish!

Not only is it a long walk (around 4-5 hours) – remember you’re going to need to know you can be silent for five hours – not… a… whisper!!

I have set aside 6 places for people who were living in the area at the time – so if you were a protestor, an ACME artist or a resident of the area, please get in touch to reserve a place. If you weren’t from one of these groups, but would still like to attend – please email me and I’ll see what I can do!

 

Final screening of the Figgis film of Deller’s Orgreave in London on 18 June 2013

Reply

Image © Iain Aitch 2013 – (taken at the reenactment of Orgreave in 2001)

I’ve been trying for the last year to try and screen the film in London.  My original remit for screening Orgreave was to see how it actually affected a more potentially affected audiences, i.e – local audiences to Sheffield.  As time went on – as I worked out not just what was happening when people watched this work, but also what it was – I started wanting to find people to watch these screenings, who had been there on the day.  The surprise was that Artangel hadn’t seem to publicise this much locally, so a great proportion of the accessible audience (by which I mean accessible to me) had been bussed up from London. Artangel hadn’t kept records, and despite a number of attempts in different directions to deal with the issues around data protection that affected me using their mailing lists, they weren’t supportive of me sending info about what I was doing out to the people in their files. So, using mostly social media, I did some detective work – but inevitably – the people who were on social media tended to be the art audiences. These people all came from links to the arts, they were either people on those buses, or people local to the area who worked in the arts in some way (Leeds Art College, the Arts council, journalists etc). As a result it seemed therefore necessary to screen the film in London.

After some unsuccessful meetings with a couple of universities to see if we couldn’t put a screening on in Central London, I needed a rethink. Contacts at all four spaces were enthusiastic but most wanted understandably to tie the screening in with some relevant teaching: and therefore most wanted a long lead time.  I’m still hopeful I’ll get to do a talk about it at Chelsea with David Cross in the New Year, but I am also hopeful my PhD will be wrapped up by then!

So luckily I’ve just got a wonderful new job which apart from other great things – means I can pay to screen this myself at Whirled Cinema in Brixton.

So this next and last screening will take place on 18 June 2013. This is the also the day of the anniversary of the original clash at Orgreave so I’m really lucky to be able to get the cinema on this date. I hope you’ll be there to join me because once again I am on the look for original audiences – were you there at Orgreave as an audience member? Were you bussed up? Were you not one of the art crowd travelling in – were you from the local community? Were you in the production crew? Were you there as a participant?  I really want to get as many people there who were in that audience as I can – so will prioritise anyone that was! This is a small cinema so this will be by invite only – but if you were there – you will get priority! You don’t have to live in London – if you want to travel down – you are very welcome to attend.

Please drop me a line as before I open up the list to a larger audience – because I’ll put some seats aside for you. If you’ve any questions, please just email me and I’ll get back to you.

This event will be free for everyone and following the event – we will have the last post-screening discussion which hopefully will feed some really interesting things into my research as it draws to a close.

Here Be Monsters

Reply

After a hiatus created by my interval in Leeds, I am eager to start the search for more locations in London for my geographies of fear project. More outings with Nicholas Middleton’s large format camera which is brilliant. Nick and Anthony have all their photographs ready to go – I just need to get back into the walking practice to find spaces. I’ve some ideas. In the interim, I’ve got a few images up on to spur me onwards. Its a good project and we need to finish it off.

Participants at Orgreave

Reply

I’ve been lucky enough to be able to find a few people who attended The Battle of Orgreave as audience members, but now have a new questionnaire specifically for participants either from the re-enactment societies or from the miners attending from the original event.  If you know anyone who attended the day in any capacity, there’s still time to feed into my attempts to find out what happened during the performance of the re-enactment.

Maureen Measure’s photos

Reply

Whilst promoting one of my group walks for Graeme Miller’s ‘Linked’ – I was contacted by Maureen Measure, who is from Leytonstone, is the secretary of the Leyton and Leytonstone Historical Society and was involved as a local protestor in the M11 protests.  She was hugely generous and has allowed me to scan a number of her photos from the time, mostly of the inhabitation of the different spaces by protestors.  I have been able to upload this onto Flickr and make them available as an archive for Maureen.  If you are interested in using the images, or finding out more about Maureen’s involvement, please email her.

 

Relational art

Reply

I seem to have done more talking about my research in the last 18 months than at any other point in its development. This seems apt as conversation is now such a key component of the work. In theory terms, I have most recently been working on dialogical practice, just at the point when more conversations seem to be taking place about and around the work than ever before.

The ruling on Hillsborough has brought about a fresh discussion on Orgreave and in the resulting conversations about whether a new investigation should occur, I begin conversations with Sheffield University face-to-face tomorrow about holding a screening there.  There’s a conference about DIY politics and workers education in Leeds linked to the TUC and the Workers Education Association in February and I’ve been asked to screen the film there.   I have begun conversations with the Institute of Education about having a London screening – which considering that much of the original audience of the reenactment came from London – is apt.  So there are currently  great possibilities for dialogues about Deller’s Orgreave between a wide range of people. I am excited about where all these discussions are going to take me and the work.

As my time with the focus groups on Orgreave feels like it might drawing to a close, I am equally excited to be delving more practically into conversations on the second of my case studies Graeme Miller’s ‘Linked‘. Next year is the tenth anniversary of the work so that also seems like a opportune moment to start talking about it in-depth.

At the end of September, I did two days of group walks on the Linked route.  One day was bright and beautiful, the other day poured with rain.  Each focus group was very different and it was clear that finding my way to conversations about Graeme Miller’s piece is harder.  For starters by asking people to walk for five hours rather than sit and watch a film just over an hour long, I am asking much more of these groups.  Sometimes the work is hard to access; it is literally at times hard to hear.  And the conditions you come to the work affects how you hear it, for example it rained and rained on the second day – so hard that we had to abandon the walk half way around.  But despite this the conversations we had about the walk have moved my research on significantly.

I have listened to more archives, heard more voices talking about Graeme’s work.  There are more voices in my head from all that listening.  Some are directed specifically at me and have inspired me in a different direction. I am looking for ways in which to respond to the work, not only in my PhD but in making my own art work that speaks back.  Someone said to me ‘You have to think about your role in all this’ and his directive too has kept ringing around my head.  I am thinking on how to answer.

Amalia

Reply

Back in November I was so excited to find out that my friend Amalia Pica was one of the receivers of a Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award.  In typical Amalia fashion, she hadn’t even mentioned it to our old mutual flatmate, artist Nick Middleton, who at the time was still living with her.  I found out by Twitter as it was happening in real time in London.

I’m fascinated by the way that we sometimes fall in with people that we fall in love with.  Amalia and I initially only spent a very short time together, but were inextricably drawn to each other.  In reading about her art, I realised we share more than a love of smoking on the back door step gossiping in the dropping sun, and a comparable personal life.

I visited London at the beginning of July this year to listen to her speak about her work at the Chisenhale Gallery. I’d helped her when she was making the bunting in that image on the Guardian’s website, and standing in the empty gallery, as another of her installations, the Fiesta tune played somewhere else, somewhere outside, looking at it, I was moved.  I was also struck once again with how funny it was that we had spent so much time together talking about heartache, and no time talking about our respective artwork and research.

For she is remarkably confident talking about her work.  During her talk about her work at the Chisenhale that day, I realised that being accustomed to British artists being vague about the reasoning for why they do what they do, it was wonderful to hear her discuss the thinking behind the work. Although it was clearly challenging to some as well.  An audience member, asked her in a long roundabout manner – whether her art could exist in a world where she could not speak. Amalia paused, and asked ‘in what world would I not be able to speak?’ The feeling that an artist (particularly perhaps a woman artist) should not speak about their work, is at once a reflection of a British discomfort with conceptual art, and an echo of the conditions from Argentina’s history that brought about some of Amalia’s work.  In her article on Amalia in Frieze magazine, Sally O’Reilly describes a piece of Amalia’s work born out of the conditions of suppression. In Amalia’s installation in the main exhibition at the 54th Venice Biennale, she created ‘a large Venn diagram projected by coloured theatre lamps, accompanied by a caption that outlines the logical relations of inclusion and exclusion; in the 1970s in Argentina, Venn diagrams were banned from primary school curricula as they were considered to encourage subversive thought’. In the face of attempts to ban things that provoke thought – the call for silence in response to artwork is to be resisted.

There are conversations to be had, and I look forward to her words feeding mine.

Was it just luck that Amalia’s orbit, passed through mine? Or that I was bound to be enthusiastic when she arrived at our house, because I understood she was a kindred person.

Was it fate or Italian art?

Revered Beebe: It’s not coincidental that you’re here now, when one comes to reflect on it.
George Emerson: I *have* reflected. It’s fate. Everything is fate.
Revered Beebe: You’ve not reflected at all. Let me cross-examine you. Where did you meet Mr. Vyse, who will marry Miss Honeychurch?
George Emerson: The National Gallery.
Revered Beebe: Looking at Italian art! You see, you talk of coincidence and fate. You’re naturally drawn to things Italian, as are we and all our friends, aren’t we Freddy? That narrows the field immeasurably.
George Emerson: It is fate. But call it Italy if pleases you Vicar.

From a Room with A View by E. M. Forster