Participatory Video Archive and collective art exhibition

A video history of Rectory Gardens

As part of our continuous effort to explore our extensive video archive with communities interested in its content, Spectacle Media has been working on a workshop-led participatory video archive project around the history of Rectory Gardens, a squat-turned-housing-cooperative in Clapham’s Old Town

In collaboration with Studio Voltaire, Spectacle has facilitated a series of online workshops to explore, discuss and select video archive material, collaborating with participants to create a very successful exhibition that was launched at Studio Voltaire on Saturday 20 May 2023. 

“All Good Things: A Video History of Rectory Gardens”, exhibited the results of a 5 months long journey undertaken by former Rectory Gardens residents and new Clapham residents who met online for participatory video archive workshops to watch, research and select content from 10 years of video documentation that Spectacle has produced in collaboration with former Rectory Gardens residents.

Hundreds of visitors joined many members of the dispersed community on a sunny afternoon to explore the incredible history of the once squatted street that hosted artists, musicians and a progressive community from the 70s throughout the early 2000s until it was evicted and dispersed by Lambeth Council for questionable market-led housing policies.  The exhibition, opened from Wednesday 24 May until Sunday 28 May, gave visitors the opportunity to dive into the extensive Rectory Gardens Video Archive and learn about the history of the unconventional community that from the 70s contributed to culture, art and social life in Clapham and beyond. 

Spectacle Media has curated the digitalization and facilitated the access to almost 15 hours of video archive and facilitated 6 online workshops in which the video documentation became catalyst for discussions on the cultural and social changes in Clapham. The workshops resulted in a creative collaboration among participants who contributed to the installation and to collective art making through participatory video archive practice


Installation images, Good Things: A Video History of Rectory Gardens, Studio Voltaire, 2023. Credit: Zoë Maxwell


The exhibition, hosted in the main gallery of Studio Voltaire, gave visitors the opportunity to attend  a live research project, where it became possible to interact with memories, testimonies and ideas produced in the workshop. Curated selections from the archive were looped on 5 TV sets in the centre of the gallery speaking to big themes like Community, Memories as well as the relation between community, the politics of evictions and short term housing policies. Old residents also contributed with examples of the art that they made on and in the street, memorabilia and photos that populated the walls of the gallery.

The exhibition has attempted to open a dialogue between the audience and the video archive material by letting the public choose from a vast catalogue of rough archive footage: full interviews with long term residents, residents who were born and grew up on the street, public figures, supporters of the co-op, artists and hours of visual archive collected from 2014 to present, documenting the street, clapham old town and key places in and around Clapham. Visitors have also contributed to the archive, sharing their own memories that filled the gaps of a big collage representing the complex history and outcomes of squatting and short term housing in London.

Visitor’s memories of Rectory Gardens

The Rectory Gardens video archive project has been part of Unearthed: Collective Histories, a project supported by Historic England’s ‘Everyday Heritage Grants: Celebrating Working Class History’ and Hartfield Foundation.

Spectacle Media

Growing out of Spectacle’s decades of pioneering participatory video practice, Spectacle Media is a non-profit Community Interest Company specifically championing community uses of digital media. Spectacle Media uses new technologies to empower groups and individuals through learning video-making skills, working collaboratively on community-led media production and engaging with online participatory filmmaking and editing.

Spectacle Media also has access to Spectacle’s production equipment and thousands of hours of Spectacle’s unique video archive on themes including urbanism, human rights, social justice, utopianism, alternative media, top-down vs. bottom-up regeneration, housing and more. Spectacle Media aims to develop projects to open and explore the video archive with communities interested in its content.

Studio Voltaire

Studio Voltaire is one of the UK’s leading not–for–profit arts and education organisations. Championing emerging and under-represented artists, Studio Voltaire commissions and produces exhibitions, collaborative projects, artist development programmes, live events and offsite projects

Studio Voltaire is a registered charity and part of Arts Council England’s National Portfolio.


Read more about Spectacle’s participatory model and past projects.

How to contact Us

If you want to be trained in Participatory Video you can attend one of our Participatory Video Workshops or organise a bespoke programme for you and your organisation.

For more information or to chat about your project and ideas email us at training@spectacle.co.uk 

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Oberhausen ‘Gasometer’ as an example for alternative use of Battersea gasholder

Battersea’s ‘listed’ gasholders are being demolished to make way for new homes, shops and business space. Wandsworth council approved the demolition of this and three other adjacent gasholders in Battersea in January 2013, as part of the regeneration of Nine Elms.

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The Evening Standard reported the following on this:

”Objectors say that alternative uses for the site should be examined. Architect Keith Garner says: “In the German city of Oberhausen, there is a gasholder with the same features and it has been transformed into a museum and a centre for art.”

The Gasometer in Oberhausen, Germany, is a former gas holder which has been converted into an exhibition space. It has hosted several large scale exhibitions, including two by Christo and Jeanne-Claude. The Gasometer is an industrial landmark, and an anchor point of the European Route of Industrial Heritage and the Industrial Heritage Trail.

In 1992 the city council of Oberhausen, with a margin of 1 vote decided to acquire the gasholder, gasometer in German, and convert it to an exhibition space. At the time, plans were being developed for building CentrO on an adjacent plot, and IBA Emscher Park planned to use the Gasometer for its exhibition. Ownership transferred to the city of Oberhausen, with Ruhrkohle AG paying 1.8 million DM in saved demolition costs to the city.

gas

Hopefully the owners of the Battersea site will reconsider the usage of the gasholders for a similar purpose. Unfortunately, work (on the Prince of Wales Drive) has already began on tearing the disused holders down and they are planned to be gone by the end of 2014.  The owners have planning permission to demolish the listed Victorian Pump House at any time.

Click Battersea Power Station for more blogs
See our Battersea Power Station project pages for more information and videos.
Or visit PlanA our general blog on urbanism, planning and architecture.

For more on Christo and Jeanne-Claude. visit Artsy Christo page

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Spectacle’s work shown at Airspace Gallery Exhibition

Material from the Silwood Project will be shown during the Small Change Exhibition at the Airspace Gallery, as well as some of Spectacle’s work with Brussels partner Plus-tôt Te laat.

small change flyer_web

Small Change focuses on change and place making in the city, seen both as a physical and imagined entity. The project comprises a group exhibition featuring existing and new work by four artists, a public intervention and a talk. Alongside artists, collectives from the UK and beyond contribute to the exhibition with audiovisual material that documents their engagement with the public realm. The exhibition is a response to the book Small Change by architect Nabeel Hamdi and its main idea that small-scale actions have the power to bring about positive change in urban communities. Acknowledging creative practice and collectivism as agents of change, the exhibition invites artists and collectives whose practice addresses issues of place and social change. The artists will realize new work, alongside showing existing sculptures, drawings and video’s. Audiovisual material from collectively-run projects that aim to making meaningful contributions to their environments, will open up the gallery space to various localities and concerns.

Small Change is curated by Sevie Tsampalla and the participating artists are: Jane Lawson, Noor Nuyten, Lauren O’Grady and Claire Weetman with contributions by collectives: Buddleia / public works, Network Nomadic Architecture, Plus-tôt Te laat, Quartier Midi and Spectacle.

Spectacle’s following Silwood video’s will be shown:

Work in progress. 13:49
Moving on 1:43
Time to move on 1:45
My walk home 3:36
Watercolours 2:34

The exhibition is running from the 8th of November till the 7th of December. Enough time to give it a visit. The opening hours are: Thu-Sat 11pm-5pm and Tue-Wed by appointment. Find out how to get there.

See our Spectacle Catalogue for buying video’s from the Silwood Project.
See our Blog Homepage for more information and videos.
Or visit PlanA our general blog on urbanism, planning and architecture.

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Kilner House showing at the Made Possible by Squatting exhibition

Our 1981 documentary Kilner House has been selected for the Made Possible by Squatting exhibition held in a squatted building.

Kilner House in Kennington was occupied as part of the Squat against Sales campaign against the first Greater London Council house sales.

Keywebland

The exhibition will run from 9th-16th of September at 15 Dock Street E1 8JN. During this time stories and histories will be collected into an on-line archive.  There are over 30 pieces going into the exhibition from interactive mapping of London squat history, to puppet performances, to some great documentary films, installations and pop-up books!

There will also be a rota to have people in the space at all times.

Made Possible by Squatting seeks submissions for an on-line archive that collectively celebrates how squatting has positively affected the lives of individuals & communities in London.

See our interviews with anti-squat company Camelot who lobbied in Netherlands, France and UK for squatting to be made a criminal offence.

See our Spectacle Catalogue for buying Kilner House.
See our blog homepage for more information and videos.
Or visit PlanA our general blog on urbanism, planning and architecture.

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Why Germany Isn’t Rooting Out its Neo-Nazis

 

 

 

 

 

 

Far-right violence against immigrants has become endemic in parts of Germany and that won’t change anytime soon. The public and the police are too often indifferent to extremism, despite the risk it poses to the country’s reputation. Deep down, Germany still hasn’t grasped that it needs to embrace its minorities…

The rest of the article can be found here.

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Germany after 1945: A Society confronts Antisemitism, Racism, and Neo-Nazism

 

The Berlin-based Amadeu Antonio Foundation is organising an exhibition about Antisemitism in East Germany. “Germany  after 1945: A Society confronts Antisemitism, Racism, and Neo-Nazism” explores the relationship between the country and the widespread anti-Semitic attitudes in Eastern Germany.

The exposition focuses on the history of the Holocaust as well as on the current right-wing extremism in Germany. Furthermore it shows initiatives to protect minorities and promote democracy in every day life .

The exhibition also features a picture of “The truth lies in Rostock“. The film was  produced in 1993 and is one of the rare documents about the riots in Rostock-Lichtenhagen 20 years ago.

“Germany after 1945”, which is designed as a touring exhibition, opens its doors on Tuesday, August 21 in Berlin. Next spring the exhibition can be seen in New York.

 

Click The Truth Lies in Rostock for more blogs
Or visit our The Truth Lies in Rostock project pages for more information and videos.

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Images of the 1986 Wapping dispute

Nic Oatridge has posted a set of images and artifacts relating to the Wapping dispute in 1986 on his Flickr page. The image above is part of this collection.

The exhibition “News International Wapping – 25 Years On” starts on 1 October at Goldsmiths College. A public launch on Tuesday 4 October at 6pm feature speakers who were directly involved in the dispute.

When: From 1 to 14 October
Where: New Academic Building, Goldsmiths College, New Cross, London, SE14 6NW
Entry: Free

Further details can be found on Goldsmith’s website or for the Guardian’s Jon Henley’s article on the exhibition, click here.

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