Topographies of the obsolete
(2023)
author(s): Anne-Helen Mydland, Neil Joseph Brownsword
published in: Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design, University of Bergen
Topographies of the Obsoleteis an Artistic Research project (KU Prosjekt) initiated by Professors Neil Brownsword and Anne Helen Mydland at Bergen Academy of Art and Design (KHiB) in collaboration with partner universities/institutions in Denmark, Germany and the UK. Our main collaborative partner is the British Ceramics Biennial, who invited KHiB to work at the original Spode Works factory in Stoke-on-Trent, to develop a site specific artistic response as a core element of their 2013 exhibition program. More than 40 international artists and theoreticians have participated in this multidisciplinary project with a program of seminars, publications and exhibitions. Three residencies have accumulated individual artistic projects from which the overriding project has developed.
The project focus centres upon the landscape of post-industry, more particular; that of Stoke-on-Trent, a world renowned ceramic capital that bears in its city evidence of fluctuations in global fortunes. The original Spode factory, situated in the heart of Stoke-on-Trent, was once a keystone of the city's industrial heritage which operated upon its original site for over 230 years. Amongst Spode's contributions to ceramic history include the perfection of under-glaze blue printing and Fine Bone China. The factory's industrial architecture dates from the 1760's to the late 1980's, with spaces associated with all aspects of the design, manufacture, retail and administration in close geographical proximity. In 2008 Spode's Church Street site closed, with most of its production infrastructure and contents left intact.
We Would Strike!: Beyond Representation in a Post-Industrial Town.
(2022)
author(s): Arturo Delgado Pereira
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
On 30 July 1984, 11 mercury miners locked down in the mines of Almadén (Ciudad Real, southern Spain) to protest against their precarious economic and social conditions. 650 metres deep inside the oldest and most productive mercury mines in world history, the miners endured the dark and contaminated galleries for 11 days and nights until their claims were addressed. As an emigrated local filmmaker, I come back to post-industrial Almadén in 2019 to make a documentary film about the mining strike. The premise is to find young locals willing to live inside the now-closed mines for 11 whole days in homage to the older miners and to recreate the experience of 1984, 35 years later. Apart from engaging our collective mining past, performing the form and duration of a previous workers strike, Encierro proposes the underground as a living and symbolic space to foster a series of conversations, encounters, and social and political propositions to reimagine Almadén, which rose from a mine shaft more than 2000 years ago, as ‘something else besides’ a mining town.
This exposition explores the potential of documentary film fieldwork to take on a different relationship to normal life that the same or similar events would have as ‘untransformed reality’ – a strike versus the reenactment of a strike – and its potential for activism and social transformation. I will also explore the use of the conditional tense in documentary; a speculative and hypothetical approach to reality sensitive to the ‘potentially’ real, the ‘possible’, and the ‘what if’ as modes of documentation. What happens when the forms of ‘documentary’ and ‘reenactment’ are exceeded, and act upon the world rather than only represent it?