Culture Caleidoscoop

Towards a Model of Community co-curation in the Caribbean:

2022-06-08T10:58:03+02:00

In 2018, The University of the West Indies and The Barbados Museum & Historical Society embarked on a project to facilitate a community-led composite history of the Caribbean migratory experience to Britain. This was the Museum’s first attempt at an intentional large scale community collaboration across the diaspora. The resulting outputs - the Virtual Museum of Caribbean Migration and Memory and The Enigma of Arrival: The Politics and Poetics of Caribbean Migration to Britain, a rare Caribbean-based travelling exhibition on post-war migration from the Caribbean territories to Britain and the subsequent post-independence rejection of Caribbean migrants, and the process which generated them, are models for how Caribbean museums with global communities and audiences can incorporate an inclusive practice model. This paper chronicles how the museum has evolved from small community interventions and collaborations to this major project as examples of a “community of curatorial practice” (Lave and Wenger, 1991) and explores next steps for imagining the truly inclusive museum in our curatorial practice going forward.

Communities that film, watch, and walk

2022-07-01T14:03:41+02:00

Since 2009 Alistair Gall and Dan Paolantonio have been running an open-access DIY film collective called Imperfect Cinema (IC). The interplay between community-led creative practice and critical film-making provides a generative intersection from which to situate their (imperfect cinema) praxis. Their ongoing project Home of Movies brings to light Plymouth’s largely forgotten cinema history by engaging a local community through screenings, history walks, and film-making workshops. Rather than producing objects for aesthetic and critical reflection, IC’s main aim is to produce welcoming and creative environments that anyone could enter.

In this piece, which relates to my broader PhD research into the area, I will explore how the aesthetic, practical, and activist streaks that run through the work of IC intersect. The piece will combine verbatim conversations with IC and descriptions of their events. My intention is to emphasise the importance of the DIY and imperfect in IC’s practice, which allows them to engage hard-to-reach communities.

The civic role of cultural spaces in culture and immigration

2022-07-07T19:45:57+02:00

In this contribution I reflect on Becoming Czech, Romanian, Alman, and British – a series of creative residencies interrogating national identities and processes of belonging from the perspective of local first-generation immigrant artists and communities. I draw upon my lived experience and my advocacy as one of the co-founders of the UK-based Migrants in Theatre Movement to reflect upon the role of cultural spaces as sites of power and social change for and by immigrants.

Challenges to community arts and online communication during Ireland’s Covid-19 lockdowns

2022-07-01T10:43:56+02:00

This paper is an auto-ethnographic account of an online project that I instigated in Ireland during the Covid-19 pandemic. It reflects on the difficulties in building a group project with people who had never met before, the move to online events, my lack of skills and experience in that realm, and unexpected communication that was unsettling, all of which were exacerbated by my personal struggles during a global pandemic.

Let's Talk Art

2022-06-08T10:56:09+02:00

What can artificial intelligence tell us about bias in art and technology? Art historian and museum editor Sarah McGavran’s interview with multidisciplinary artist Michelle Lisa Herman explores how Let’s Talk Art, a 2020 artist’s book written in collaboration with machine learning software, uses humour to reveal underrepresentation in both fields, particularly in terms of gender, disability, and race. Additional topics include exclusionary conceptions of art and artists, art speak versus accessible language, as well as objectivity and subjectivity.

Culture Caleidoscoop’s inaugural issue

2022-10-03T20:25:08+02:00

An introduction to the inaugural issue of Culture Caleidoscoop – ‘Working with and for people: Mapping socially engaged practice in the cultural sector’. In this issue we wanted to explore the main focus of Culture Caleidoscoop: socially engaged practice in the arts, cultural, and heritage sectors, revealing what this kind of practice looks like in different organisations and to people working in different roles and around the globe. In this editorial we reflect upon the response we had to our first call for contributions and give an indication of what you can expect from the first issue. We indicate some of the themes that have emerged and the questions the pieces we already have pose. We also look ahead, as we look forward to continuing to build on these perspectives.