Tag Archives: School of Arts

New toolkit and board game to strengthen Indigenous culture and language

A new Teaching and Learning Toolkit was recently launched, based on Kew Gardens’ Richard Spruce collections from the Rio Negro Indigenous Territory in Northwest Amazonia, one of the outputs of Professor Luciana Martins’ research project ‘Digital Repatriation of Biocultural Collections’.  Here, she shares details of the event and its importance for Indigenous communities.

pic of toolkit and boardgame

  • Can you share details of the event and who it was aimed at.

The event was the launch of the teaching and learning toolkit, composed of a book, A Maloca entre Artefatos e Plantas: Guia da Coleção Rio Negro in Londres (São Paulo: ISA – Instituto Socioambiental, 2021) and board game, A’pe Buese – Aprender Brincando (São Paulo: Instituto Socioambiental, 2021); with illustrations by the artist Lindsay Sekulowicz.

The launch coincided with the meeting of knowledgeable elders at the São Pedro community in the upper Tiquié river in the Northwest Amazon on the occasion of the inauguration of their longhouse (maloca), the centre of their cultural life; and was attended mainly by teachers at the Indigenous schools from the neighbouring communities, with the participation of the Indigenous researchers who visited the European collections.

Attendees at toolkit launch

  • What was the rationale for the teaching and learning toolkit?

This project, funded by British Academy Knowledge Frontiers and Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF QR), forms part of a UK-Brazil research programme that aims to reanimate the objects collected by nineteenth-century botanist Richard Spruce in Amazonia (currently housed at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and the British Museum), linking them with the knowledge of Indigenous peoples (partners in Europe include Birkbeck, RBG Kew, the British Museum and Berlin Ethnological Museum; in Brazil: Botanical Garden of Rio de Janeiro, the Socioenvironmental Institute-ISA and the Federation of the Indigenous Organizations of the Rio Negro -FOIRN).

The teaching and learning toolkit, associated with these collections, was co-produced with Dagoberto Lima Azevedo, a Tukano Indigenous researcher and translator. It includes a guide for the collections, with scientific and indigenous information about a selection of artefacts, including a broader historical overview of the Upper Rio Negro region in the nineteenth century, European collectors and their collections, and a lesson plan; and an innovative board game that asks players to combine plants and animals used for creating particular artefacts, going through a path by the different habitats where these raw materials are found.

launch of toolkit

  • How do you envisage it being used?

Targeted principally at secondary-level Indigenous schoolchildren, the toolkit aims to enable pupils to have fun while learning about their biocultural heritage kept in European museums. We aim to ensure that the knowledge and skills associated with traditional craftsmanship are passed on to future generations so that crafts can continue to be produced within their communities, providing livelihoods to their makers and reflecting creativity.

  • How does this directly link to the original research?

In the concluding session of a project research workshop at Kew in June 2019, Indigenous researchers highlighted the need to produce, in addition to a proposed project website, printed pedagogic materials to be used in community schools in remote regions, where WiFi and electricity are scarce and unreliable. Responding directly to this identified need, the project plan was revised to include the production of this teaching and learning toolkit based on the biocultural collections. The production of this toolkit in Portuguese, with all the main terms translated into Ye’pamahsã (Tukano) language, fits within the larger context of current linguistic projects in Northwest Amazonia, which aim to strengthen and enhance Indigenous languages.

The online guide is available here and it is hoped that the project website will be launched by the end of November 2021.

Further details of the research can be found here.

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Life as an Indian scholar in London

MA Journalism student Vimal found studying in London a totally immersive experience, so much so he wrote a book about it. Here, he uncovers his own story and shares perspectives on the differences between the media in the UK and India, with a personal take on the COVID-19 pandemic news coverage. This is his #BBKStory.

Vimal Chander Joshi

In 2020, Vimal published his first book though he refutes any notion of being the main character in the story: “I am not Ajay but our experiences are closely linked and all the places Ajay visits are places I’ve either visited or lived in.”

Gentlemen: Stories from London tells the story of Ajay Vashishth, a young man from Delhi who comes to London and lodges in different parts of London including Bexleyheath, Ilford, Southall and Golders Green. Even with the exclusion of the Bloomsbury location, where Vimal would have spent much of his time while studying at Birkbeck, you’d be forgiven for assuming he and Ajay are one and the same.

However, Vimal insists not and divulges the details of his own upbringing, sharing aspects of life within a middle-class family, having a lawyer for a father and a grandfather hailing from Punjab, with family members keen for him to follow a ‘conventional career path’ in either law or medicine. With gentle resistance and with more creative inclinations, he pursued his undergraduate studies in commerce at the University of Delhi then decided on journalism at postgraduate level.

In 2019, his academic transition took him to Birkbeck and a city he’d never visited before. “It was the first time I’d been to London. I enjoyed the opportunity to visit places. I would see people wearing a coat and tie with office bags and a newspaper in hand.”

He accepts that the pre-pandemic period presented him with his best chances of socialisation saying, “I attended all workshops and events which were either very relevant or marginally relevant. I would go and meet people from other departments and would attend most of the events. I never skipped any classes. I would go out with friends. I went to the library as much as I could, including at Christmas. I even met friends from my country.”

Studying an MA in Journalism was a logical choice. He’d always liked writing and was fascinated by India’s booming television industry and the increasing acceptance of a career in the media. Prior to his studies, Vimal had spent ten years working in the media, primarily in India.

He has noticed subtle differences between the news in the UK and India, “The biggest difference is the way in which newspapers are heavily subsidised in India. I couldn’t imagine spending the two pounds or so on a newspaper in India. Of course, the newspapers in the UK can be found across the world but Indian newspapers are less likely to have that international reach.”

With a pandemic still in effect and with India having faced the brunt of it earlier this year with the Delta variant of the virus, Vimal shares his own personal reflections of how the media has handled the coverage: “I felt really pained watching the Covid-19 news. I was there when Delhi had one of its earliest lockdowns and I watched how the media covered the evolution of the virus and the spread of the variant. The media has an important part to play in exposing the pandemic but there needs to be accountability and the true picture should always be reflected. But we should also balance that because the reality of the situation can also spread panic.”

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London’s architectural history comes alive in Birkbeck Arts Week walking tour series

Covent Garden Piazza and Market (Joseph van Aken) - cc Irina via Flickr

Covent Garden Piazza and Market (Joseph van Aken) – cc Irina via Flickr

Londoners will be able to get up close and personal with their city’s architectural and cultural history in May during Birkbeck, University of London’s Arts Week 2016.

From an exploration of Covent Garden Piazza’s long-gone original structure, to a wander among the West End’s media industry heritage, a series of free walking tours will run as part of the college’s annual showcase of the arts, which this year runs from 16 to 20 May.

Highlights of the walking tour series are:

(Monday 16 May, 5-6pm. Meeting at the south-west corner of Covent Garden piazza by NatWest Bank)
Not much remains of Covent Garden’s physical structure as it was between 1631 and 1830 – but, with the aid of contemporary images, and a lot of imagination, it is possible to recover something of how the piazza was viewed across those first two hundred years. Join Dr Thom Braun for an illustrated walk around Covent Garden piazza.

(Tuesday 17 and Wednesday 18 May, 5-5.50pm. Meeting outside 43 Gordon Square)
Dr Leslie Topp and Nic Sampson of Birkbeck’s Architecture Space and Society Centre will lead two linked but self-standing tours unearthing the hidden and not-so-hidden traces of architectural modernism in Bloomsbury. Behind the demure Georgian facades we’ll find stories of gentle liberation, false starts and fraught battles.

 

(Wednesday 18 May, 2-5pm. Meeting at the southwest corner of Fitzroy Square, W1)
This guided walking tour, led by Birkbeck’s Dr Joel McKim and Dr Scott Rodgers (Birkbeck), explores West End London as a lens into the media in city life and its environments. Join us to visit a range of buildings and neighbourhoods associated with major media industries. We will also observe some of the more unconventional forms of urban media and communication.

 

(Friday 20 May, 4-5.30pm. Meeting outside the National Portrait Gallery main entrance, St Martin’s Place, WC2H 0HE)
Join us for a guided tour of the politics and power plays of the Stuart era (1603 and 1714). Taking portraits as our starting point, we will attempt to reconstruct some of the careers of those at the courts of James I and VI and his son – and the lives of those who fell from favour. Decide whether James I was poisoned, whether Ben Jonson loved his king, and what happened to Arbella Stuart.

Running parallel to these tours will be the Arts Week Competition 2016. Titled “London Relocated”, the competition centres on the ever changing nature of London’s architecture. Members of the public are invited to submit a photo of any artefact or remnant of London’s ever shifting built environment – such as a sign, a map or a monument – along with 150 words about why it’s interesting. Up to two entries per person can be sent to Londonrelocated@bbk.ac.uk before 18 May, for a chance to win a £100 book token.

Birkbeck Arts Week, the College’s annual celebration of arts and culture, will this year feature the widest programme in the festival’s five-year history, with more than 50 free events for the public to attend.

Primarily hosted in and around the School of Arts (43-47 Gordon Square), the 2016 programme includes a packed schedule of lectures, performances, screenings, book launches, workshops and discussions. It features contributions from Birkbeck’s own academics and guest artists and scholars from all over the world.

Professor Hilary Fraser, Dean of Arts, said the walking tours reflect one of Arts Week 2016’s wider themes: ‘exploration’.

She said: “The walking tours at this year’s Arts Week offer a fantastic opportunity for members of the public to explore their everyday surroundings through a new lens, as guided by a team of experts in the history and architecture of the area.

“These events are part of a key thread running through this year’s programme; the theme of ‘exploration’. Whether it is attending one of these local walks, a panel session such as the ‘Writing Arctic Disaster’ event, the special showcase of Colombian filmmaking, or any event across the week, we hope to inspire our community to discover and explore the world around them at the points where the arts and research come together.”

Birkbeck Arts Week 2016 runs from runs from May 16 to 20. To see the full programme of free public events visit www.bbk.ac.uk/artsweek, at facebook.com/BirkbeckArts or on Twitter @birkbeck_arts (being sure to use the hashtag #BBKArtsWeek). While attendance at all events is free, booking is essential.

Listen to the Arts Week 2016 preview episode of Birkbeck Voices:

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About the Arts Week Competition 2016: “London Relocated”

London is a city which is constantly changes. Every day Londoners pass a notice that ‘near this place’ something happened, or find a monument made up of sections of an old wall, or even, like Temple Bar, a whole chunk of the city removed and re-sited. This year Arts Week wants to find out more about bits of London that have been relocated. We are interpreting this widely – notices and signs of events close by count, as well as actual monuments. The prize is £100 book token.

To enter send us ONE image (photograph, map, or something else) of ‘London Relocated’ and up to 150 words telling us what it is and why it is interesting. Not more than TWO entries per person, please. Email your entry to Londonrelocated@bbk.ac.uk.

Closing date 18 May 6pm

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How to be both: An audience with author Ali Smith

This post was contributed by Birkbeck alumnus and staff member, Dr Ben Winyard. Dr Winyard attended the 2015 Man Booker at Birkbeck event, featuring Man Booker 2014 shortlisted author, Ali Smith

Ali Smith in conversation with Prof Russell Celyn Jones

Ali Smith in conversation with Prof Russell Celyn Jones

On 16 November, in a lively, humorous exchange, Birkbeck’s Professor of Creative Writing Russell Celyn Jones and novelist Ali Smith discussed her Booker Prize nominated novel, How To Be Both (2014). This dazzling, rambunctious novel features two self-contained but intertwined stories: one follows the travails of Italian Renaissance fresco painter, Francesco del Cossa, a real-life artist who painted a series of elaborate allegorical frescos in the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara, northern Italy; the other story tells of George, a bereaved twenty-first-century teenager who is remembering a family trip to Italy to view del Cossa’s frescos in the ‘Palace of Not Being Bored’.

With its focus on Renaissance art, and painting in particular, the novel is itself a diptych – or ‘dipstick’, as Smith drolly punned to the audience – presenting two separate but intersecting stories in dialogue with one another. The diptych – which literally means ‘two fold’ in ancient Greek – is, Smith explained, book-like in its construction, with hinges that enable it to be closed and transported, making it an appealingly ‘swivel-able form’. In the UK, the book was published in dual form, with half of the copies opening with the del Cossa narrative and the other half opening with the story of George. Smith recounted with delight how the printers hired ‘muddlers’ to randomise the packing of the books and ensure that shops carried both versions of the novel. For Smith, it is important that readers can ‘upend’ the novel and ‘it still works’.

Confounding binary oppositions

Ali Smith-How to be bothThe novel delights in interrogating, unpicking and confounding the binarised oppositions that organise and delimit human life and relationships: male and female; straight and gay; past and present; and even alive and dead. The complex twisting and interleaving of the two stories typifies the ways in which history, memory, feeling, gender and sexuality elude and shrug off human categorisation. George is a boyish young woman with a man’s name who falls in love with another woman, whereas del Cossa is a woman who uses concealment and disguise to reinvent herself as a male artist. The del Cossa narrative opens poetically and strangely with the forcible resurrection of the long-dead del Cossa, who finds herself standing in the National Gallery in London, observing George – whom she mistakes for a boy – scrutinising del Cossa’s stern portrait of St. Vincent Ferrer, a Dominican friar and missionary. The painting is real and is indeed hanging in the National Gallery.

Interestingly, Smith confessed that George’s gender identity was indeterminate when she started working on the novel; it was only later that George became female. Indeed, Smith described the fictional creation of character as a mode of channelling, in which characters arrive fully formed and the task of the novelist is to give them the necessary attention and time to allow their voices to come through. The voice of del Cossa was the first that Smith heard, forcing her to discard 90 pages of the novel she had written and leaving her only seven months in which to complete and submit the manuscript. George’s voice and syntax came, fully formed, about half-way through this rewrite. Smith offered several helpful tips for budding authors, stressing the importance of ‘editing as writing’ and focusing on repetitions, as ‘they’re the things you’re most interested in’. The novel, like its characters, must be patiently listened to and Smith repeatedly emphasised the importance of voice in writing.

del Cossa, a man in and out of history

Man Booker at Birkbeck 2015 event held at Friends-House

Man Booker at Birkbeck 2015 event held at Friends-House

How To Be Both is concerned with history and memory, with what is remembered and how – and what is lost. As Smith observed, humans need to live in three dimensions, to feel connected to the past and the future simultaneously. Del Cossa was a real artist, although we know very little about him: he was born in Ferrara in 1435 or 1436, the son of a stonemason, and he died aged forty, in Ferrara, possibly of the plague. In later times, Del Cossa’s frescos were plastered over and the room used as a tobacco store until, Smith explained, the plaster flaked off in the 1840s and the frescos were rediscovered. Archival letters, in which del Cossa angrily demands more money from his patron (a request his patron loftily refused), are another scanty source of evidence.

The unknown history of the artist, however, gave Smith licence to re-gender and reimagine the life of del Cossa; as Smith drolly admitted, ‘I got away with it!’ In the 1960s, floods in Italy hastened the temporary removal of the frescos from their walls, which further revealed what Smith called the ‘under-versions’ or original sketches and images that had been painted over. The frescos thus stand as a metaphor for thinking about human life and history as a palimpsest, with layers of accretion and loss shaping what becomes ‘History’ or collective memory. Smith gleefully confessed to her excitement in bringing to light the ‘undertows’ that are wilfully concealed or later forgotten.

Thus, in the novel, George is anxious that all that is forgotten is lost, making history little more than a horrifying charnel house. Her mother, though, has a more mystical understanding, insisting that that which has existed does not simply cease because we can no longer see, experience or remember it. For Smith, it is Art that takes us to a timeless place of fragile ‘lastingness’ within ourselves. She spoke of Walter Benjamin’s notion of ‘jetztzeit’ (‘now-time’), the moment of epiphany instigated by Art, in which we know we are truly alive and time disappears. Smith also spoke of the novelists’ frustration with the form, as it cannot escape the temporal sequence of action and consequence and is incapable of simultaneously representing the simultaneous occurrences of everyday life.

To know George’s future, the reader must journey back into the life of del Cossa, although, if you encounter the del Cossa section first, you will know (but not necessarily fully understand) George’s future before you know her past. Like last year’s Man Booker speaker, Hilary Mantel, Smith has written a historical novel of sorts, although Smith’s is formally inventive and playfully cuts across genres. Smith admitted that her knowledge of the Renaissance was limited and she undertook broad-brush research to immerse herself in the period without being overwhelmed by details. Smith thus urged the creative writing students in the audience to research lightly in order to give themselves ‘imaginative space’.

Under surveillance

A VIP reception was held after the event at the Keynes Library

A VIP reception was held after the event at the Keynes Library

The novel is also concerned with surveillance, observation, witnessing and spectatorship, in all their benevolent and more menacing forms. Indeed, Smith insisted to the audience that ‘surveillance is the story of our times’. George’s mother, whose voice we only hear via George’s recollections, is worried that her past, radical political activities mean she is under state surveillance, while George herself obsessively watches Lisa Goliard, a friend of her mother’s. George angsts about the ethics of watching and is particularly concerned that the pained performer in a pornographic scene she has watched online is stuck in what Smith called a ‘kind of continual present’. George thus obsessively and continually witnesses and memorialises the performer’s suffering. Our contemporary culture of forcible remembrance is, for Smith, ‘lovely and kind of appalling’, as we have lost the old ability to let go of, and simply forget, the past. Similarly, by scrutinising the painting of St. Vincent, George miraculously and unintentionally resurrects the spirit of del Cossa, who silently watches her. To foreground the ethics of watching, the illustrated frontispiece to the del Cossa story, drawn by Smith’s partner Sarah Wood, features del Cossa’s image of the gouged out eyes of Saint Lucy, which he painted not on a platter, as is usual in Renaissance iconography of the saint, but growing from a small sprout.

Although Smith attentively and gamely engaged with the various readings of her novel proffered by the audience, she ultimately reasserted the work’s capaciousness and playfulness of spirit, insisting ‘I’m not going to tell you what to think about the book.’ For Smith, ‘the reading experience is really volatile’ and she expounded how rereading shifts a novel’s meanings and resonances for us.

This was the fifth Man Booker event at Birkbeck – previous speakers include Sarah Waters, Kazuo Ishiguro, Alan Hollinghurst and Hilary Mantel – and this lively exchange further confirmed and extended the success of this rewarding partnership. As David Latchman, the Master of Birkbeck, observed in his opening remarks, the Booker Prize Foundation and Birkbeck both share an ongoing, deep commitment to broadening knowledge, bringing the best of contemporary fiction to the widest possible audience, and belying cramped, utilitarian approaches to education.

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