Carroll / Fletcher: Page 3

Carroll / Fletcher

Jessie Brennan

Re: development – Inside The Green Backyard

A collaborative networked exhibition

28 March – 1 May

Jessie Brennan, Ashtray, cyanotype, from Inside The Backyard (Opportunity Area), 2015–6

After five years hard work by its volunteers and incredible public support, The Green Backyard, a community growing project in Peterborough (run entirely by volunteers), is no longer threatened with redevelopment: the owners of the land, Peterborough City Council, have offered a rolling 12-year lease. Re: development – Inside The Green Backyard is a collaborative networked online exhibition to celebrate the success of the campaign to safeguard The Green Backyard from redevelopment. The exhibition features cyanotypes (camera-less photographs of objects from the site) and voice recordings (oral testimonies by the volunteers) from Jessie Brennan’s work Inside The Green Backyard (Opportunity Area), 2015–16, an outcome of Jessie’s year-long residency with The Green Backyard and arts organisation Metal. More about Jessie’s residency project can be found here in an article she wrote for the Guardian.

Jessie Brennan, ‘Sink plug washer’, cyanotype, Inside The Green Backyard (Opportunity Area), 2015–16

Michael Alexander, volunteer (Caravan and bog oak)

Jessie Brennan, ‘Robin’, cyanotype, Inside The Green Backyard (Opportunity Area), 2015–16

Nina Jepson, visitor (Maracas, shark, bell, bracelet, star)

Jessie Brennan, ‘Cotton lavender’, cyanotype, Inside The Green Backyard (Opportunity Area), 2015–16

Rosemary Steel, volunteer (Cotton lavender)

Links to other exhibits (in alphabetical order)

BOM

Carroll/Fletcher Onscreen

The New Bridge Project

Digging for Our Lives: The Fight to Keep The Green Backyard

Sophie Antonelli, co-founder of The Green Backyard

This piece was written for Re:development, a book brought together by artist Jessie Brennan following her year-long residency at The Green Backyard. Published before the land was finally safeguarded, it traces the journey of transforming a former derelict allotment site into the thriving community growing project that is now The Green Backyard.

Jessie Brennan, If This Were to Be Lost, 2016, painted birch plywood on scaffold, 1.9 x 19 m, situated at The Green Backyard, Peterborough. Photograph by Jessie Brennan

In early 2009 we first opened the gates to a site in Peterborough that had been closed and unused for 17 years. A 2.3-acre site in the city centre, next to two main roads and the East Coast main line to London should not be hard to miss, but after almost two decades of disuse many people had simply forgotten it existed. I’d like to say that we knew what we were doing at that time, but as is often the case in voluntary groups, the creation of what would become The Green Backyard was motivated by the seizing of an opportunity, in this case offered land, together with a tacit sense of need: to preserve years of learning created by my father on his allotments; to create a space for people to learn and change; and to challenge the momentum of the city, which in my life-time had seemed stagnant and apathetic.

At the time I could not have articulated these motivations, and I am now very aware that my own impetus is likely to have differed from others’ around me. I find this to be the case with many community spaces: everyone comes to them with their own very personal set of hopes and needs which are often complimentary, and occasionally divisive.

The lessons that grew out of those undefined early experiences of creating a shared space made visible the participatory qualities inherent to the project and fired up the desire for imperfect spaces – rather than meticulously planned ones, with defined budgets and personnel. The threat then imposed by the land owners, our City Council, in response to the slashing of local authority budgets following the 2008 financial crisis, actually served to crystallise this value and catalyse a movement of enthusiasm for radical change in a city long-complacent and passive.

The battle to stop the land being sold off for development, I think, surprised everyone. First came the obvious shock when council officers arrived just a few days before Christmas in 2011 and told us of their intention to sell the land… [continues here].

Re: development: Voices, Cyanotypes & Writings from The Green Backyard

Jessie Brennan

This piece was written for Re:development, a book that brings together voices, cyanotypes and writings from The Green Backyard following my year-long residency there. Published before the land was finally safeguarded, it questions the capitalist logic of the site’s proposed development by the landowner, Peterborough City Council. The book shares the voices of The Green Backyard – of those defending their right to the city.

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Jessie Brennan, If This Were to Be Lost, 2016, painted birch plywood on scaffold, 1.9 x 19 m, situated at The Green Backyard, Peterborough. Photograph by Jessie Brennan

Among the borage plants there lies a toothbrush, its simple white length surrounded by vivid blue. It’s an object donated by a visitor to The Green Backyard (which is acting as a collection point) for refugees in Calais, and it is one of many hundreds of objects here that seem to invoke the voice of The Green Backyard: offering a conduit through which people close to the project can articulate its value. The objects that call forth the voice reveal, in turn, that those voices also tacitly object: through positive tactics of planting and communing, individuals speak of the necessity of The Green Backyard as public, open, urban green space, and why its proposed development must be resisted.

I first set foot inside The Green Backyard, a ‘community growing project’ in Peterborough, in May 2014, at a time when the threat of a proposed development by its owner, Peterborough City Council, was at its most heightened. What brought me to this site were questions of land ownership and value (framed by the long history of community land rights struggles) and the ‘right to the city’: whom the land belonged to.

Because, of course, feelings of belonging to a place in no way necessarily mean it belongs to you, as users – visitors, volunteers and trustees – of The Green Backyard are all too well aware. Despite the current social value that this urban green space clearly provides, debates around the proposed development of The Green Backyard (and many other volunteer-run green spaces) have been dominated by arguments for the financial value of the land – referring to the short-term cash injection that its sale would generate – rather than the long-term social benefit of the site… [continues here].

Resources and Links

Case Study: Seeds From Elsewhere – The Garden as Poltical Metaphor. ‘Seeds From Elsewhere’ (2016 – ongoing) is a project by They Are Here, in conjunction with Furtherfield, that has begun to re-animate a dilapidated play area in Finsbury Park, bringing together young asylum seekers and refugees, family, friends and other professionals.

10 Things You Need To Consider If You Are An Artist – not of the refugee and asylum seeker community – looking to work with our community. “There has been a huge influx of artists approaching us [RISE, Australia] in order to find participants for their next project. The artist often claims to want to show ‘the human side of the story’ through a false sense of neutrality and limited understanding of their own bias, privilege and frameworks.”

The Landworkers’ Alliance: An organisation of farmers, growers and land-based workers campaigning for policies to support the infrastructure and markets central to its members livelihoods, building alliances and encouraging solidarity.

Community Food Growers Network: a network of community food growing groups launched in London in 2010 who are actively engaged in growing food plants and supporting others to grow food, in healthy, sustainable ways.

Granby Four Streets: a Community Land Trust in Liverpool that aims “to create a thriving, vibrant mixed community, building on the existing creativity, energy and commitment within the community, where people from all walks of life can live, work and play.”

The Ivy House: London’s first community owned pub. In 2012, the Ivy House pub in Peckham was under threat of sale to property developers as part of the ongoing gentrification of South London, but the locals triumphantly saved it as the first asset of community value in the UK. Featured in Sarah Turner’s film Public House. Public House will be screening at various venues throughout England in May. Details here.

Arte Útil: Arte Útil roughly translates into English as ‘useful art’ but it goes further suggesting art as a tool or device. Arte Útil draws on artistic thinking to imagine, create and implement tactics that change how we act in society.

William Raban – making films politically?

Close Up and Carroll/Fletcher are delighted to present a programme of films by William Raban at 8pm on 28 March, 2017. Artist filmmaker William Raban was a central figure of the London Film-makers’ Co-operative (LFMC), he was the manager of LFMC Workshop from 1972 to 1976. Initially known for his landscape and expanded cinema works of the 1970s, Raban’s films from the 1990s onwards look at the island of Britain and its people, in the context of the global economy and the effects of urban change. Despite the apparent shift in Raban’s interests, his work has always been informed by a structural film approach. As he recently commented: “[A structural film approach] is especially evident in About Now MMX (2010), which uses grid-like camera movements to create a cinematic map of the city of London. Perhaps it is less obvious with films like the Houseless Shadow (2011) and Time and the Wave (2013), but nevertheless I see the methodology of using straight cuts and no special effects as linked back to minimalist principles. When making a film now I am always asking ‘what is the simplest and most direct way to achieve the desired affect?’”

Sundial, 1992, 2 minutes

Island Race, 1996, 27 minutes

About Now MMX, 2010, 28 minutes

Time and the Wave, 2013, 15 minutes

Available Light, 2016, 9 minutes

London Republic, 2016, 2 minutes

Each of the films will be preceded by a brief introduction by William Raban. The programme will be followed by a q&a with William Raban, moderated by Steve Fletcher.

Tickets can be booked here.

“The problem is not to make political films, but to make films politically.” Jean-Luc Godard.

“Using camera movements to link particular ideas, is part of the larger project to determine the extent to which it is possible to construct political meaning by image and sound alone without dependence upon commentary or text. This has been the methodology that I had developed in Sundial (1992), A13 (1994), Island Race (1996) and MM (2002).” William Raban, 2015.

“Four principles of political filmmaking:

(1) reflexivity: active audience participation rather than passive spectatorship;

(2) reflexivity: revealing the modes of production rather than concealing them;

(3) reflexivity: as understood in the social sciences – the effect that the researcher [film-maker] has on their subjects [content and audience];

(4) an ethical dimension of aesthetics – appearance determined by material conditions of production, it is not the pursuit of style.”

William Raban, Sequence, Winter 2012.

“Art does not do politics by reaching the real. It does it by inventing fictions that challenge the existing distribution of the real and the fictional.” Jacques Ranciere.

“When I make a new work, the thing I find myself striving for is to make an object of both truth and beauty. But of course truth is beauty so maybe the sole object should be to make an object of truth?” William Raban, 2013.

Pallavi Paul

3 March – 27 March

A Trilogy

Pallavi Paul, Shabdkosh, 2013. Courtesy the artist and Project 88, Mumbai.

Introduction

Over the three weeks from the 7th to the 27th of March, Carroll/Fletcher Onscreen is showing Pallavi Paul’s trilogy of films – Nayi Kheti/New Harvest (2013), Shabdkosh/A Dictionary (2013) and Long Hair, Short Ideas (2014). Central to the trilogy is the revolutionary poet Vidrohi (the rebel), who began writing in the 1970s as India was witnessing a time of great political turbulence and violence from both the state and far-left groups. However, as Paul notes in her preface to the first film in the trilogy, Nayi Kheti, “the films are not about the persona of Vidrohi, rather I attempt to use his poems as a kind of laboratory to test the tensile strength of resistance as a material of life.” In Nayi Kheti, the poems act as a witness to a relentless stream of images and sounds as the protagonists engage in a dizzying exchange of ‘metaphysical, scientific and aesthetic ideas’. In contrast, Shabdkosh/A Dictionary, the second film in the trilogy, occurs in the silences between poems; a contemplation of the need to be heard against the imperatives of forgetting. The final film, Long Hair, Short Ideas, is constructed around Vidrohi’s wife, her relationship to the radical movement of the 1970s in India, and her intimate experiences of domesticity, sexuality and labour. Throughout the trilogy, as Paul explores the contours of fantasy, resistance, politics and history she extricates the political from a language of nostalgia or mourning to get to the heart of resistance.

Nayi Kheti

“In the piece Nayi Kheti (New Harvest) I have tried to create three impossible, unfeasible conversations. In the anarchic text After Lorca, poet Jack Spicer writes to Federico Garcia Lorca nearly twenty years after Lorca’s death. Unlike in the book, in the video, amidst the relentless velocity of images and sounds, Lorca has to write back. Simultaneously, Poul Henningson, credited with the invention of the pH lamp, speaks about the desire of the scientist to reverse the rhythm of the day and the night, and reflects on how that dream lacks creativity, because ordained laws of creation too must be challenged. Caught within this question of light and darkness is the image of cinema itself. It has now been scratched out, cut open and remade to the extent that what now exists is only a trail of what we recognised as the filmic. Located as a witness to all these metaphysical, scientific and aesthetic exchanges are the poems of Vidrohi, a vagabond political poet. Nayi Kheti, is not about the persona of Vidrohi, rather I attempt to use his poems as a kind of laboratory to test the tensile strength of resistance as a material of life.” Pallavi Paul.

Camera- Bhamati Sivapalan, Pallavi Paul

Research- Uday Shankar

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Pallavi Paul, Nayi Kheti, 2013. Courtesy the artist and Project 88, Mumbai.

Shabdkosh

“Shabdkosh (A Dictionary) occurs in the silences between poems. A contemplation of the need to be heard against the imperatives of forgetting. Many forms of ‘last records’ are conjured to create ‘deceased time’. A time that is not simply un-alive but has a force much beyond the world of the living. Salvador Allende’s haunting last speech hangs in the air mingling with Vidrohi’s obsession with being recorded, while images of hunters and the hunted slowing trickle in. All these together form the skin of the question that Spicer asks of Lorca- ‘What did you want to do with a poem once it was over?’ Should ‘silence’ and ‘records’ always be placed antithetically, or can a new imagination of practice emerge from the world of the forgotten and the
misplaced?” Pallavi Paul.

Pallavi Paul, Shabdkosh, 2013. Courtesy the artist and Project 88, Mumbai.

Long Hair, Short Ideas

The film Long Hair, Short Ideas (2014) attempts to create a conversation between the pressures of excavating a political moment and the elasticity of the documentary form. Starting from the desire to look at the women’s movement, the artist found herself immersed in the viscosity of struggles. The inability to find perspectival stability started to become the very site from which possibilities sprouted. The film is constructed around Vidrohi’s (the revolutionary poet) wife. Her relationship to the radical movement is traced via the turbulent political history of India in the 1970s (Emergency and the gagging of free press and civil liberties) and her intimate experiences around domesticity, sexuality and labour. In revisiting her abandonment by her husband and the choices that she had to make as a result, Paul not only recasts the traditionally absent figure of the ‘revolutionary’s wife’ but also pushes us to rethink the orders of ‘silence’ and ‘absence’ within new precincts.

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Pallavi Paul, Long Hair, Short Ideas, 2014. Courtesy the artist and Project 88, Mumbai.

Vidrohi

Ramashankar Yadav (3 December 1957 – 8 December 2015), also known as Vidrohi (‘The Rebel’), was an Indian poet and social activist. Vidrohi was expelled from his PhD studies at Jawaharal Nehru University (JNU) for his involvement in student politics. Until his death during a student protest in 2015, he continued to live on or around the JNU campus – the trees of JNU, the corners of its hostels, the benches of its dhabas and the office of its student union his home. Vidrohi’s life was devoid of almost any material possessions. His clothes, in most cases bought by others, being the only exception. He did not seek money, fame or power. Vidrohi did not write down his poems; he recited them from memory – whatever work of his we see in written form is the result of the efforts of his admirers.

Courtesy wikipedia.

Bio

Pallavi Paul works primarily with video and installation. Using the disruption between ‘reality image’ and ‘documentary’ as a starting point, she attempts to create a laboratory of possibilities which test the contours of fantasy, resistance, politics and history. Paul’s works have been shown at BALTIC 39 as part of the 2016 AV Festival, Newcastle; the Edinburgh Festival; the Mumbai Film Festival; Tate Modern; and in the exhibition Hundred Years of Experimentation (1913 – 2013) a retrospective of Indian Cinema and Video, Experimenta Film Festival, Bangalore. She is included in the forthcoming, Contour Biennale 8 in Mechelen. Paul currently lives and works in New Delhi. She is represented by Project 88 in Mumbai.

Filmography

Nayi Kheti/New Harvest (2013) – 11′ 02″, HD, colour, sound, 16:9
Shabdkosh/A Dictionary (2013) – 19′ 16″, HD, colour, sound, 16:9
Long Hair, Short Ideas (2014) – 24′ 42″, HD, colour, sound, 16:9
The Common Task (2016)

The Dreams of Cynthia (2017) (three channel, commissioned by Contour Biennale 8 and the AV Festival)

Links

Artist’s Profile at Project 88

“[Her videos] are not making simple connections between reality and documentary… [For Paul] documentary means resistance, possibility, a second horizon on which things can happen.” Profile of Pallavi Paul in July 2016 issue of Art Asia Pacific by Kerstin Winking.

“Pallavi Paul: “In the old days there were several ways of murdering a book,” he said. One of them was to publish it, but ensure that no one got a copy. It had to be known that there was a paper object somewhere, but not anyone who could claim to have seen it. Soon a real thing would become a rumour, a misplaced claim. Cynthia lives inside one such rumour. Even though she is the tragic heroine of a murdered book, the death of the book is hardly a tragedy. This is because books do not die like people, but, like people, different books do die differently. An infinite horizon of relay and hysteresis, such books mutate to become not un-alive but to have a force beyond the world of the living. Like salamanders, they regrow lost parts—some willingly surrendered. We watch Cynthia watching—the theatre of a dead book reconstituting itself.” Paul’s latest project, The Dreams of Cynthia – a three channel film installation, opens on 10 March 2017 at the Contour 8 biennial in Mechelen, Belgium. The work is a co-commission of Contour 8 and the 2018 AV Festival, Newcastle, UK. The accompanying text, written with Anish Ahluwalia (the author of the poem the work is based on), can be found here.

Contour 8 Biennale.