 Hello. I'll just wait a couple of moments before starting while everyone joins us before we get going. I can see quite a few people coming into the webinar, so welcome everyone. Okay, great. I think we'll get going. Hello everyone. Thank you so much for joining us and a warm welcome to day three of our unfolding online conference and workshop program, cutting edge collage in Britain 1945 to now, which is presented collaboratively by the Paul Mellon Center for studies in British art and take Britain. My name is Rosie Ram. I am a visiting lecturer in curating contemporary art at the Royal College of Art, and alongside Sarah Turner deputy director of the Paul Mellon Center, and Elena Kripper curator of modern and contemporary British art at Tate. I'm one of the co conveners of this two week event. We are very excited to be able to present our second keynote and artists film presentation in a session that is entitled collage as method manuscript and moving image building upon the different strands of analysis and debate that have been emerging over the last two days, and which so many of you have contributed to with your own thought provoking questions and comments. I think today's session will even further enrich and nuance how we understand collage methodologically as a practice that might adopt different materialities and technologies in order to extend processes of visual inquiry across time and space. These two presentations will not only prompt us to consider questions around collecting archiving and conservation practices, but also how collage might mediate forms of communication collectivized ways of working and even cognition. Before I introduce our first chair for today I just wanted to briefly recap on some general housekeeping points for this zoom webinar format. We'll begin shortly with our first keynote presentation, which will be followed by a Q&A will then take a short break. After that I'll introduce our next presentation and the artist film will be screened, after which we'll close today session with a further Q&A. Please do use the chat function on zoom throughout these presentations. As we've mentioned, it's been so engaging to read your contributions and comments as the discussions have been unfolding. Please then use the separate questions box to post questions for our speakers, which will be read out by the chairs. These sessions are all being recorded and will be made available on the Paul Mellon Center's website and YouTube channel. And if you'd like to enable closed captions, please use the CC button on your screen. I am delighted to now introduce our first chair for the day, Victoria Walsh, who is professor of art history and curating at the Royal College of Art and head of the curating contemporary art program. Victoria is a curator and researcher whose projects span from the post war period to the contemporary. In 2014 she led the reconstruction of Richard Hamilton's 1951 exhibition, Growth and Form, for the major retrospective of the artist's work at Tate Modern and the Rain of Sophia, which built upon her previous experience reconstructing the 1953 exhibition, parallel of life and art. In collaboration with Claire Zimmerman who also joins us today. Victoria co curated new brutalist image 1949 to 1955 at Tate Britain, and together they published a photo article in British art studies in 2016, which both elucidates and extends the research behind that tape display. So I will now hand over to Victoria to introduce Claire Zimmerman, our first keynote for the day. Thank you so much for joining us, Claire and Victoria. Thank you Rosie. And first of all, thank you to all the staff of the Paul Mellon Center I know we all keep thanking but it's extraordinary thing to organize and wonderful for it to come to fruition after the last two years. It's a real pleasure for me to welcome and introduce Claire Zimmerman, Professor in architectural history and theory at the University of Michigan. I'm not sure how many time zones we're all straddling across this morning but for Claire it's very early I think it's like seven o'clock in the morning. So I think we'll see some paraphernalia of coffee cups even if we can't smell it. I'm sure we're going to see it as we go through Claire's talk. And I just wanted to sort of start by just briefly saying Claire and I first met on football fields of Hans Stanton School, a building embedded of course in the history of new brutalism and designed by Allison and Peter Smithson. So we were introduced by Sir I Smithson, daughter of Allison and Peter, and we began a conversation that led, as Rosie just indicated to our collaboration new brutalist image 1949 to 54, which took place at Tate Britain. This collaboration was particularly framed by Claire's interest in architecture and photography and architecture in relation to its cultural mediation. And she's published extensively on this. You've got her detailed biography on the website but a particular note. There was the anti photograph in 2019 and last year anticipatory images. And for those of you not familiar with Claire's work, I would strongly recommend her publication from 2014 photographic architects in the 20th century. And also these this conference came about. It seemed the very perfect totality perfect context for Claire to introduce the extraordinary scrapbook compiled by Allison Smithson as as a private source book. And when I say extraordinary, having seen and handled it with Claire, it's precarious and fragile monumentality is quite remarkable. So fragile and inaccessible and hopefully one day it will be digitized for wider audiences to be able to engage with Claire's paper will offer us a really good opportunity and a unique opportunity and critical insight to the architectural and visual themes and concerns that Allison was exclusively on her own looking at. And I think that will generate hope generate a lot of questions from all of you to talk about at the end and for those who joined yesterday's session with Ben Cranfield and Craig Buckley I think there'll be some very productive connections to draw out. And so without further delay, I'm going to hand over to Claire to get us underway for today. Good morning. Can anyone see me or hear me. Okay, great. So I'll share my screen and get going. First, though, I do want to say thank you to everyone there. Elena, Shawna, Danny, Rosie. And also to especially thank Victoria would certainly not be here had she not alerted me to the opportunity and advocated I'm sure for me to present this work. It was so much fun working with Victoria that we simply allowed the project to drag out for like about four or five years, even. And it's a scream to talk about that but I'm going to jump right in now and get going on today's material. I want to start with two things today. One is an antique volume measuring roughly 12 by 16 by six that strains its binding to the breaking point reinforced along the spine with the trip with a strip of animal fur, a great brick of a book, it's 400 plus pages have been winnowed by cutting, but also thickened by the addition of part images cut or torn from product packaging magazines pamphlets brochures and other books, or in the form of snapshots postcards and portraits. It's most recent inclusions hastily attached or simply slipped between pages, but lie the careful cutting and glued application of earlier interventions. Just as blank spots spots and remnants mirrors of glue whoops we've jumped ahead a little bit just as blank spots and remnants mirrors of glue. Mark the absence of images that had previously been added and later stripped away. These clues suggest a working catalog a storage vehicle for changing images. It suggests how things changed from the scrapbooks early days to the moments of its last editions, after which, the books architect Alison Smithson, followed British antiquarian and publisher Charles night, the first author of the volume into oblivion. The second object is an architectural description for a gallery. Art Gallery, a building type that Alison Smithson described as a container for two kinds of occupants, viewers and objects to be viewed. She described quote, a finely designed pipe for liquids for two liquids, one coaching, but changed at intervals, the other flowing and describing the necessary architectural conditions for an art gallery. The description of her university thesis project reflects an astonishing attention to detail, combined with rather sweeping claims about art perception, notable in a student aged only 21. Quote, to know a picture, you have to move past it at your leisure. The question of presentation is extremely delicate because of the variety of people using a gallery. The form in art is an affair of relationships, and it should be born in mind while designing that each picture should be presented to bring out its full value, and at the same time, not break the harmony of the whole. Apart from this, because of the fundamental fact that exhibitions are an ever changing kaleidoscope. The architectural form cannot be designed for a specific form of presentation. The questions for wall treatment include rough painted plaster, tinted cork, Flexwood textile coverings, parchment paper and velvet. General requirements for textile coverings one must be closely woven and durable, so as not to show marks of presentation to should not contain wool to attract mods. Three, texture should be interesting enough to relieve monotony but not diverting. Another absorption can be explained by that theory which states that the visitors retina must still hold some sensation of what he has just left. When no sensation is retained. The visitor is in need of rest and refreshment of the opportunity to relax his eyes and sit down. All of this in the space of two pages. It's a great scrapbook and the first of many highly detailed statements of design intent organize my remarks today. An architect's practice described in words and a repository of architects ideas stored in images. An architect's practice functioning in the immediate wake of war and rationing, yet with the fumes of American affluence wafting over post war Britain. Practicing architecture in post war Britain simultaneously claiming past and present thinking at big and small scale at once, yet working in and focused on a man's world, or to describe British architect post war British architecture more properly a boys club in which women tried a delicate line between decorousness and employment, even as they sought to consolidate the gains of the previous decades. And finally, a woman practicing architecture as the British Empire slipped into the past to become historical material. But before we get fully underway. A disclaimer, my work on Alison Smith since working scrapbook has been interrupted by developments of best 18 months. Today's remarks therefore must be preliminary, a willing response to the invitation to bring this work into view now, no matter how provisional my own thoughts still may be. My goal here is to situate one object, Smith's working scrapbook in relation to the other her practice of architecture. And to map the contours of a fuller treatment of this unpublished work within histories of collage practice, international modernism, the post war culture of the architectural profession, and women's place therein. Additionally, what might the scrapbook tell us, whoops, about a woman working as an architect in the crucially restrictive and remarkably permissive decades of 1950s, 60s, 70s and 80s Britain. We learned about an architectural practice founded on a call and response between past and present a practice founded by Smithson and her husband and partner Peter, that was deeply founded in history, resolutely modern and modernist, but equally predicated by the traditions that did not run with the boys as it were as the decades unfurled, zooming out yet further the scrapbook reflects how internationalized image culture shifted from vestigial British or your Euro American imperialism to the ancient Cold War bilateralism, in which the Eastern half of Europe effectively went dark to those in the West, and former imperial territories became independent nation states bearing visible scars of colonial occupation. You'll see that in some images coming up. The work that is depicted here cast far afield from her home base in old England to take in a newly global and post colonial scene. To briefly consider the scrapbook under the rubric of collage, it might be related to similar objects of its day from artists scrapbooks to collage works, but also to a longer history of bookmaking. The work of collage scrapbook and pictorial narrative of post war global culture, including architecture. But more insistently it demonstrates a way of working that was in meshed and networked a connective worldview resonates in the frequent appearance of textiles and fabrics throughout its pages. It was a force that continued the dominated the Smith's practice more generally through lattices, maths and patterns, their inheritance from the north perhaps and a recurring preoccupation of Allison's. The scrapbook also evokes what one might characterize as Allison's ambivalent but then nonetheless distinctive feminism, a byproduct of the age in which she lived. The text to the gains made after World War One and World War Two by women, the post war years added and took away British women, for example, who get the pill after 1961, but only if they were married. It became available to all women only in 1967. For sort of scholarly context, like the work of Judith Henderson on working class family life. The sociologist feel a client and Alvin Myrdals, women's two roles, home and work of 1956. He stated women's work working women's situation after the war, arguing that both the home role should be done jointly by men and women, and that women's life cycles and life expectancy have been fundamentally changed by industrialization. The Smith's decision to conduct their practice out of their home might be considered in light of such findings. Allison's position shared by Peter. He stated the necessity for and purpose of cultural production in a technic product world on achieving a balance between opposites. The scrapbook stages a balance of opposites, differently between past and present, not between gender roles, and yet at this time to whom did the past as documented history belong. In any case, sometime in the 1950s. Allowing new images onto the pages of Charles night's old England, a pictorial museum of regal ecclesiastical municipal baronial and popular antiquities, originally published in 1845 this is the foundation of my talk, literally because you are actually sitting on these two enormous volumes of Charles night's book that I bought in order to get closer to the text that that Allison had been embroidering as it were. Old England was copiously illustrated with over 2500 individual in grading engravings. It's inside fly leaf, shown here on the left of the slide seems remarkably Smith's an S to me, like something one would find in any number of places in the archives, but that is interestingly missing in the book that became a scrapbook. Old England was was mass printed at several points in the 19th and 20th century, even as the strict separation between text pages and illustrated pages cease to represent a cost advantage to its name to its maker. Over the next four decades Allison used old England to create a new book filled with a heterogeneous array of material. The substrate of this years long collage project recalls investigations that were ongoing elsewhere in the Smith's practice lithographed images of mounds like those found in the landscaping of their housing project from hood gardens in of 1972. Artifacts of which modern equivalents populated their buildings tower like fortresses and keeps resembling some of their other architectural designs and mise en scene, a little like medieval versions of those published with their projects for a house of the future of 1956 or patio and pavilion filled it's printed and bound pages to these Allison added added a huge image array cut from glossy magazines and other sites of advertisement or salvage from advertisement or salvage from postcards packaging photographs and even the occasional architectural drawing or sketch. The massive end result is a delicate compendium threatened by the sheer passage of time. Like Allison's independent writing projects. And her and Peter's thesis projects, the scrapbook is notably authored by one partner, not the family by which I mean Allison Peter their long term trusted employees, members of team 10 etc students. And while Allison published books under her own name. This volume is intriguing, because it reflects overwhelmingly visual authorship. She was working here as it were in her own. Unlike many things in the archive in the archives, the scrapbook seems to have been left alone by Peter, too big and complex and messy and perhaps do delicate to be effectively edited when he went through the archives from the 1980s on a scrapbook that shows an artist working method and the site where new ideas were generated. It's real power as a historical object may rest in the surprising range of mental associations that underpin the image making revealed here, not meant for public viewing. I want to emphasize the books impenetrability and learn from it, despite this indecipherability or impenetrability, keeping in mind that its most recent maker was primarily focused on the creation of buildings, objects and spaces as noted at the outset. This book is the paratex to a creative practice that takes place in media that differ from those that appear in its pages, for the most part. The sequence in which Anderson filled pages appears impossible to reconstruct, she did not work from front to back, yet a dialogue between book and architect not only recalls myths and projects, but suggests morphological relationships and visual associations familiar from much of their other work as well as collaborations like parallel resembling similar books by others in the IG. This scrapbook is notably more private and more unmannered than many collage works. It's at times frenetic and even a little troubling in places. The Nigel Henderson scrapbooks in the Tate Museum collections are more ordered and comprehensible, despite the evident traffic of visual ideas and influence between IG members in the early years of their association. Eric Ravilius, Edward Bodden and Roland Penrose, however, Henderson and Peolotzi made exhibitable scrapbooks. Alice's version is also notably distinct from the Mikael scrapbook that Craig showed us yesterday. It's a private book and a thought machine, not for exhibition. They were attempting to give a shape to the dialogue between the book and its additions as time only inferred past the Smithson's reputation grew meteorically in UK culture in the 1950s and 60s, when the trifecta of people, their exhibitions, and the economist building brought them to public attention. But they were increasingly left behind by postmodernism in the 1970s and 80s as acutely analyzed by Derek Vanden Heuvel. Rainer Bannam drew the target around them, but it was Charles Jenks and a few others who hit that target effectively silencing the Smithson's in the professional press and in contemporary histories. It seems clear that the cause was at least in part this strong-minded, outspoken, talented, somewhat eccentric woman who was not content to follow the architecture pack in post-war Britain. She was, as Mary Bannam noted in her obituary of Alison, subject to quote, sudden and spontaneous flashes of genius, end quote, and she was ready to lead. The scrapbook might indicate where she would have gone. She had the opportunity to do so. The base volume, Old England, combines pages of printed text, pages of multiple line illustrations and plates of color lithographs. The illustrations added by Alison follow a pattern that is nonetheless often broken, perhaps reflecting rules that changed as the volume filled up. The printed pages of text host the largest number of added illustrations. These, for instance, are text pages on the left and on the right. The books, black and white line illustrations have been more irregularly and strategically replaced with one or two substitutions in many cases. Color plates like these. Oh, there's another page with line illustrations strategically replaced with new new illustrations. Mudbrick African architecture on the right and a cityscape showing mosque domes and minarets on the left. Color plates like these are sometimes partially covered as here, the coronation share overrun by three locomotives. A series that gestures to an entire infrastructure to rival perhaps that of monarchy that threads through this book and repeated images of locomotives. Railroad infrastructure or other aspects of railroad travel. Collage seems both too capacious and too restrictive a descriptor, although paper gluing is clearly used in this work. If the term collage denotes visual or aesthetic composition of cut paper meant for presentation very few pages in the scrapbook show any such intention. A few have with one exception which I will show you at the end very few have cut paper paper that's cut in a clearly intentional shape as or as opposed to simply being torn or cut square. A few, a few pages do have original materials photographs there's a photograph of Allison herself, a few sketches, some original text snapshots. A few of those, but again, a notably limited number of those collections of images associated for obvious less obvious or entirely inscrutable reasons. These are visual notes about different sorts of relationships, or just remarkable things kept for future reference, and they are not to be confused with the many orderly photograph albums. They're not by the Smithsons to document their travels of that which I cannot say more now. So, for example, there are pages filled with great grids and lattices as here circles and double circles, not to be confused with heads and domes steeply invent buildings adjacent to wide open spaces. There's also the charged void, perhaps bicycles and engineering infrastructure join the locomotives as a constant beat throughout the book. More phylogical associations often appear, as in the case of cylindrical forms that don't look alike in the image, but do resemble one another's three dimensional form, define the connections here one must think spatially as also in the case of the pages that depict what I'm in this ornament. One of them taken from one of the original illustrations of the book itself. But this isn't really a work of collage, I would argue, it's more a scrapbook. The book is a consistent motif in the Smithsons work, Vanden Heuvel writes quote the scrapbook method is key to the Smithson rhetorical techniques, it's directly related to the way they collected their materials and organize their archive, where they kept lists and projects with such headings as the 1930s the 1950s or the materials sacred to brutalism, relatively open ended inventories that were always under scrutiny and continuously subject to editing. And quote, Christine Boyer notes of the IG Henderson perlotsie and Allison Smithson were avid scrapbook makers Allison in particular extended her childhood habit of collective scrapbooks, full of Christmas stickers to a large private collection. The compendium of images a private store to be used either literally pulled out of the album or more figuratively in future projects, the case might rest here and the scrapbook become just another oddity of an oddly misunderstood figure. But the substrate volume continually reasserts its presence as you look through the pages, and in the process suggests another possibility. The term for this kind of book, and there is one is extra illustrated the type appeared in Europe in the 18th century, providing a way for individual readers to appropriate mass printed material to populate books with pictures and in the process to stake a personal claim on them by customizing their image program to the readers desire. The illustrated books have none of the disorder and visual chaos that we associate with collage effects. They constitute an orderly presentation, as you see here, and here. A call and response between or here. John of gaunt. They constitute an orderly presentation a call and response between an unillustrated mass printed book, and a particular reader illustrator who thus situates the book, often filling it with pictures from the present of the illustrator, not the present of the author. The form flourish throughout the 18th and 19th centuries among elites but gradually became more popular and middle class becoming known as grangerizing after its controversial agent James Granger. There's a frontispiece to one of his publications the biographical history of England. The practice of extra illustration persisted into the 20th century, long after printing technology had made many kinds of illustrated texts easily available. And an example would be Herman Marx is 1940s extra illustrated edition of Thomas Penn's some account of London, originally published in 1790, which is now held or was given to the British Museum. An illustrated book, not an extra illustrated book, yet there is a connection. The extra illustrated book was gradually commoditized over the course of the 19th century, as the production of extra illustrations became a business in and of itself. In the 18th century, as he pelts notes and to query and miss quote miscellaneous museums or cabinets appeared and began to proliferate in the 1840s, the same decade in which night's volume appeared. Old England may be in effect, a mass printed version. Some of the activity around this kind of work. Old England, another version of clipping the destruction room or room where you can go and cut out illustrations from from books in order to extra illustrate your own book. Old England may be in effect a mass printed version of the extra illustrated book. It's separation of text from image pages and it's interleaved color plates with facing blank pages, suggest not only the economics of publishing the 1840s but also a book form that was both familiar and becoming immensely popular offering not a pictorial history, but a pictorial museum night pushed a step further from the extra illustrated book but along the same path. Naming his now mass printed volume after a new metropolitan space. Alison may have encountered old England whilst working on her Royal Academy project from which I quoted above. There she consulted a similar volume, but limited to the city of London. Pure Jen and Rowland since microcosm of London, published in multiple editions throughout the 19th century, but reissued by john Somerson in 1947. Imposing a glossy consumer world, glossy color consumer world on nights already commercial marketing museum of old England, now internationalized through global tourism and the smithson's own networks. Alison revisited the technique of extra illustration on one of its imitators, not as the amateur practice of elite figures like Horace Walpole and avid extra illustrator. But rather in a shower of commercial image excess, burying the base images in a forest of new illustration. Through this forest one threads a path laid out by patterns of association morphology, formal resemblance typologies, visual jokes, disasters and more subtle forms of cross referencing. So that the scrapbook feels distinctly networked and I think I'm supposed to. The trails are obscure, perhaps they await further exploration, yet something seemed clear enough, Smith's an overlaid a reproduction of strozies the rape of Helen. Onto the front is piece of old England as if to connect this act of appropriation of a woman from the earliest mythology embraced by Western culture, the Trojan War, with the great age of British imperialism to which old England keeps precedent. What I referred to earlier as her ambivalent feminism seems to echo with the silent outrage that she evidently felt around Britain's imperial past, two forms of incursion then one into women's agency their their capacity to act another into colonial holdings. One of the one of the least well understood minds of post where architecture situated herself in the scrapbook I would argue within a changing post colonial landscape in which the very concept of Englishness of nationhood itself is put on display. At a time when nationalism continues to research we might consider the scrapbook as Alison's record of transitory changing national identities with images of international consumer culture, covering and nearly obliterating the English source material over which she mounted them. And here's the one. What I would call collage page in the book which is the hennaed hands of of anonymous women overlaid of the funeral of Marshall Alfonso the military hero of World War two and the resident general of France in Morocco. I'd like to return to the question of collage to close collage but more specifically photo montage was a familiar tool of thought and post war Britain is contradictions have been explored by others in the sequence who have cited juxtaposition relational thinking and mobility as motors of collage practice, along with ambivalence is a crucial response on the part of British audiences to the shower of consumer product set against war and shortage. As other speakers have shown this cultural technique collage can be deployed like language itself as a tool for making and deferring meaning. And here is what sort of dialogue the architect was carrying on with Charles night as the avatar of Britain and Britain's mostly male. Alison's mistrust of and refusal to use machines as well known to those who knew her and study her work, yet she saw the experiential and perceptual possibilities that only machines provided the 1982 book is in DS is one example from a long list of restrained techno optimistic printing offset printing might be another. This simultaneous belief in and mistrust of machines may also explain her admiration for the heroic period of modern architecture, often explained as a period when handcrafted buildings took on the image of machine technology. When being modern within the existing technologies of the building industry was not yet possible, looking modern might do instead. This is at least what into war modernists did the Smith's determination to craft a substantive dialogue between machines and their human operators can be found throughout here it unfolds between a mass printed book, and I guess I should go back a mass printed book. Masquerading as an aristocratic product and the clipper filer and paster who filled it. This helps explain some of the more mysterious aspects of the Smith's and practice buildings spaces and objects in which machine made things can only be described as self consciously handcrafted. The House of the future and its contents, contents credited to Allison, more than Peter are like handmade ready Mades mockups of machine technology, complete with chairs that seem impossibly preliminary. One might ponder this quality and other Smith's and buildings, unbuilt projects, designed objects and books as architects they were far too professional for the unexpectedly rudimentary elements that recurred through their threat their practice admittedly with greater frequency in 1977 70 to be accidental, deeply skeptical of the technophilia of Bannum and his crew, equally refusing the savvy professionalized rhetorical address of Jenks and Sterling, James Sterling or the opportunism of high tech. Allison fought a rear guard battle against too many enemies to reclaim built space from technophilia bureaucratization and optimization. The extra illustrated illustrated scrapbook place out the thread of hand to machine connection through a multitude of juxtapositions and confounding examples collage here means reclamation and engagement with the things of the world, as you find them. Thank you. Thank you, Claire. So so wide spanning so so many so many issues and questions that I've got. Thank you for that. Maybe before I start, just to remind and encourage people, you know, if you have questions use the Q&A box. There are panelists that there are people who I'm sure must have questions and once the participants but maybe I might just begin I've gone backwards and forwards of which particular question I want to start with but I think just where you ended up a moment ago I wanted to ask you yesterday one of the papers Ben Cranfield was talking about time and being with time and raised questions without time and I think in that last few minutes you raised that complicated and problematic relationship with past and present with technology and future but I liked I think you said looking modern within the existing technologies of the building industry was not yet possible. Looking modern might do that that image. We know how to the future, you know, is an extraordinary deceptive deceptive. We know it's made a card and not plastic it always shocked me when I realized. I wonder if you could say what the scrapbook, specifically for Alison, what you think it tells us about the tension with time, her own particular relationship, not just as Alison and Peter Smith's and but whether you learn something about her relationship to thinking through time and the relationship science and technology that's sort of separate from their collective practice. I think it reinforced for me that and looking back at her thesis reinforced for me how deeply historical, she was as a thinker that is she she she had a real interest in relating the present to the past and I hadn't been as conscious of that as as I became and looking at the book I mean just the fact of using one of these old illustrated books about England indicates something of that interest on her part but I think I think that was really wanting to engage the present in relation to the past I think distinguishes her very significantly from many of her peers in in all four of those decades where you couldn't simply produce architecture for the contemporary market it had to be thought through the past as well as the present. Was that distinct from the way Peter thought about history. I think they had, I would characterize if, and I may be going too far here because I haven't studied his writings, in particular for this but there's a kind of tactility to the book. of engaging with these remote things in a very material way that I associate with her, I think there's that the sort of we almost weaving of the of the of these weird torn bits of paper, and, and even the kind of arrangement of the squares there's a kind of woven quality to the book that I think speaks to her interests, and that you can see that in the thesis as well this theme of fabric and textile is just is just kind of pulling throughout the entire thing. The other thing that I found fascinating that might answer this question a little bit is, is the recurrent engagement with large scale engineering infrastructure that runs through the book. People normally would associate that with Peter, but I think the scrapbook tells us that Allison was really interested in large scale systems. Does that provide some kind of answer. It doesn't in fact it answers a question that Susan Seafreed would put forward which was to say could you expand on your concluding comments about the importance or thematic of fabric in Allison's work but I think you've touched on that. I think it's metaphorical and material for her. Yeah, as we saw in that first quote. And I think that the materiality and the metaphoric I wondered, I think you, you talked and said the scrapbook felt distinctly networked, and of course that's one way we're used to thinking particularly today but I think you know when you were pointing out the visual and conceptual connections, but as much as and patterning and morphological thinking once we can easily see, but but there are also many esoteric juxtapositions that I think are quite you indicating quite hard to untangle and I. I just wondered just thinking about Craig Buckley's some of his points yesterday about the technologies and practice of clipping and what that in relation to an information age. And I just wondered if you knew or suspected of any kind of sort of sort of theories or arguments or ideas around information theory or cybernetics that that might have been informing or influencing or shaping. And just a position or whether it's just her cultural thinking practice at that moment. I think it's there in the in the sort of conception of the book, but I think she was also seeing it in in the original publication, which also has some of this quality of of things connecting kind of throughout the book. The the arrangement of the original book is is chapters on all of those categories of things. Baroneal municipal regal religion ecclesiastical popular. So the book is the original book is kind of in a sense woven through. There's a sort of single network that runs through the whole thing. My impression of Allison's thinking is that she's, she's just fundamentally skeptical of confusing belief and ideology. And I think that I see a kind of continuous resistance to accepting anything that you might call the status quo. So I would think her approach to cybernetics might have been similarly skeptical and and and I see the the the turn back to a very arcane manner of bookmaking from in the as early as the 18th century that seems to me in a sense to be a kind of response to the idea that networking is is 20th century there's this sort of yes but and and I find that constantly with her work is this sort of yes but response to to to sort of getting fixed on on something that might prove to be illusory. Thank you. Two, two great questions just come in. So, Ben Cranfield is asking he says the scrapbook seems such a complex object. You said that some extent it was private and I wondered how it related to Alison Smith's relationship to professionalism and it's gendered and colonial formation in the field of 20th century architecture. How, how might the private amateur practice of the scrapbook disturb that. Well, I would say I think Alison was was highly professional but I think she redefined what professional meant. And it basically meant running your office out of your home, maintaining a very high level a very high standard for the realization of work. But not adopting the, you know, the sort of markers of professionalization not wearing suits or uniforms, not going to an office, not separating your children's daily lives from your professional working life. So, I think the scrapbook in a way sort of reinforces the continuity that one perceives between life and work in that household that there really wasn't. There wasn't a distinction of that sort in terms of the, the, the, the wholeness of a life lived, but there's a very strong professionalized approach to the production of things. I mean, I would consider that quite unusual for a 21 year old student to be so extremely serious about a project that is certainly not about to be built and and so detailed about its realization. So I don't know if that answers Ben's question maybe I haven't totally understood it. I think it did. I think it is also that sort of I'm picking of it being a private and, you know, endeavor, you know, and, and, and to what extent, I wonder whether it's propositional whether it's, it's, it's a kind of thinking through and making an argument rather than just making a commentary or a visual record. Do you, you know, I think there's a, I think there's a conversation going through it and I, I'm beginning to get a sense of, of how that conversation unfolds but I need more time with it I think to understand to sort of partly because there, she didn't work from front to back. And so, so the, it's as if the conversation is happening, and she, and time is is running and she rejoins the conversation over the years again and again, in the same place, but at a different time and sort of sorting that out I think will will will will take a little bit more work so there's a huge family of images that are connected to the base material, lots and lots of images of photographs color color images of English medieval architecture and, and then that gives way to other other kinds of concerns but, but you can see that some of those images are brand new and some of them are are older. So there's some archaeology that can happen that might be might be interesting. So looking as you go you're anticipating or engaging with quite a number of the questions so it's a nice. I'm not looking at the questions I hope that's okay. There was a question from somebody exactly about what kind of history and what that relationship to the image of New England was being articulated through the pages and I think you've just spoken to those kinds of history of Old England that the New England and Old England being being being put forward. And I suppose that's also something that it's not that it was contained within the within the original book that she didn't go outside it but she just keeps expanding that book because the book still has is a container of meaning. Yeah, you know, rather than going elsewhere, because in fact the book could have finished, I should think quite a few leaves in. Can there's another question, can you read any of the pages or spreads of the scrap as a coherent work of collage in its own right in which different images and texts are deliberately intended to be placed in dialogue by the viewer. I suppose that does raise the question of who is, who is the imaginary viewer of the analysis and perhaps. Yeah, so there were a few pages and I showed almost all of them I think that have cut that have, you know, distinctive shape shaped cuts. There's only half a dozen or so. So, I came away feeling as though these were experiments, you know, sort of experimental. Or just just, just kind of like, you know, like, like your like your embroidery I mean just something that that she's working on I mean, Zariah describes the book being around and being added to over the course of years. But source book it doesn't mean that nobody could look at it, it just means it was not, it was not produced for public consumption it was produced as a kind of really I think an ongoing conversation about. I think about England in the world, I think England and really in a kind of global framework so there is new England in there. There's a huge amount of non England in there as well in terms of her additions and one interesting exercise would be just to go back and the locomotives and the bicycles are are engaging with contemporary England some of the visual jokes are some of the the natural the disasters the accidents and disasters some of those are focused on England. But the the the global. You know there's a sort of influx of folk culture of sort of ethnographic material from other countries that comes in on the on the wave of global tourism that's that's kind of rising in the 70s and 80s. And about which you may have been quite skeptical but that's very striking that there's this kind of very colorful exotic non English stuff laid over the English stuff. There's very political images the, the evacuation of the embassy and in Saigon is in there there's, there's Reagan and thatcher there's martial joy, as I showed you. There's quite a bit of political material in there as well it needs needs to be parsed more. And I think that scale of flux of political cultural and social change that the period it spans, you know, is so rich and clearly you haven't had the opportunity yet to do anything other than just just catch it. But I think just on as we come to the end just a nice sort of observation, and Briggs has made and maybe want to comment it. Comment on it about as an expert practice as a form of visual cataloging classification and indexing that there's something quite almost calming about that process of classification and ordering when in a period of enormous flux and change, and whether I think that the comment is asking really whether there's something in Allison's approach to that that perhaps was an antidote to other forms of activity and practice going on at the time so I suppose that the kind of proliferation of technologies practices visual. And maybe even model making that there's something perhaps about this I mean you, if you think about the other typologies of the archive, the Smithson archive that you were referring to, do you think this represents a different, a different approach a different headspace mindset. I do think there's, there's a kind of note taking function of storing things of saving things up and not losing them. So there's that for sure and, and you know there's a lot of stuff that's loose in the book that would have been waiting to be glued down or incorporated probably. So that's a very practical function like, you know, like we take a picture with our iPhone. She would presumably cut stuff out and stick it in the book. So, so that's, I think it was the storehouse for this kind of stuff. And that is fundamentally different I think from the, from the curating that's going on in the other kinds of books that they produced. So, so this is is less curated it's more kind of raw, I think that that stuff is is added and kept not presented not not really fully curated, maybe gradually curated over a period of years. I would have thought this was a really fantastic storage device where you could make sure you didn't forget things by holding that. That's great I know we're literally just coming to the end but somebody had just put in a rather nice question and observation about the temple frame of architecture is much longer, and the responsibility to anticipate whether we could bring that into the enabling capacities of the book activity and I think there is something in that. It's a great, it's a great comment and distinguishes Allison's perspective from perspective of someone like I think from someone like Jim Sterling who was very concerned with, with immediate. I think I think that's a perfect moment to, to end on and to welcome back Rosie but thank thank you Claire that very rich and always fun to get through and we should never underestimate the playfulness of the objects we work with as much as the process itself as well. Rosie. Wonderful thank you so much. Claire Victoria is such an incredible object to spend time looking at I think it's kind of complexities and internal interconnectedness with the questions that we were getting a really kind of testament to just what an interesting object that is so thank you so much. We're going to go to a short break now, we'll take 10 minutes or just nine nine minutes actually we'll come back at 10 plus one. So do take a comfort break and then we'll be joined by Judith heal and we'll have a film screening. Thank you. Hello, everyone, welcome back from the break. And huge thanks again to Claire and Victoria for such a rich and textured start today. I'm sure there'll be many resonances between those discussions and our next presentation. I am truly delighted to now introduce to the appeal, who is so generously presenting a brand new film work for us here today, entitled a considered cut, which has been specially produced for this college conference. Judith is currently working towards her HRC funded PhD, which is entitled African Decence at the University of the Arts London. Her doctoral research asks how avant garde filmmaking strategies can frame complex interpersonal narratives. Judith was a founding member of the Sankofa film and video with Maureen Blackwood, Robert Cruz, Isaac Julian and Nadine Marsh Edwards from 1983 to 1988. During this time, she contributed to the events, black women and representation and black feminine exploring images of black women, and to the debut films of the collective, including territories one and two in 1983. She was a member of the art of remembrance in 1986 and dreaming rivers in 1988. Judith later joined the visual arts forum black women artists study group in 1995. She's contributed to numerous publications, including the fact of blackness, France Fanon and visual representation. The film is based in black, the art of the Harlem Renaissance. And today I shall judge nothing that occurs selections from the actor Chrome archive by Lyle Ashton Harris. The film Judah will present today, a considered cut has been produced through a process of practice based collective and interdisciplinary inquiry through a 16 millimeter film workshop entitled dreaming rivers found footage 2021. I'm also so thrilled that some of Judah's collaborators on the project have also been able to join us here in the audience, and maybe I'll be able to contribute to our discussions later on. So Judah, thank you so much for being here and we will now screen the film, which is about 30 minutes long. And just to mention that initially there isn't sound on the film, but the sound does come in slightly later. So I'm going to hand over to Sean. This this project started after attending one of not know where it's found footage workshops. And that was before COVID we were in North Norway studio, that guidance from rare. We had access to materials, we made our marks, we had our stuff digitize and we were able to watch it together. So that was a pre COVID time. And then I started talking to Taylor about 2019 about doing a workshop found footage workshop, instead of a random found footage that came out of the not know where found footage been actually using a print I had on extract of a print I had in dreaming rivers, which meant that people were aware of the film they're were looking on but still had access to the same sort of mark making creativity that the workshop would allow. So that was a conversation that started, you know, with Taylor went on and went on. And then separately, an invitation came from Tate, who were holding a big conference about college, and I put in a proposal for a workshop. And I put in a proposal for something I'd like to contribute to this conference, and then they came back with a schedule for the main body of the conference, then a sort of a morning of workshops which was much more loose, and able, and people like me were able to maybe expand the idea of what college was around filmmaking and the cutting and editing process. And at that point I said to Taylor, would this be something that we can actually work towards would this be beneficial. Anyway, COVID came along. Everything was canceled the conference has canceled post COVID Tata do the conference again but it's an online event. We are planning not to necessarily include dreaming rivers. It seems that the identity of these searching is more group. I mean, not that the individual process then cannot be embedded into the group, but it seems that it can nourish the group connections from the, from the beginning so that is very easily responded from my part. And then, you know, I'm already thinking because I'm trying to respond to, to what and I think that all of us. This is what we have been doing to, to offer to what is given in its discussion. I already have especially because of the, of the current experience focusing on touch I already have in my mind how I could hold the space navigator and more alternative exploration of the material. So my question would be, how does, how, how does, how does a somatic intervention mediate the process of the actor at the point of making a mark on silly Lloyd film. And all of what you were saying about movement I've been reading and thinking a lot about Aaron tree and how a camera might be Aaron and that there's a kind of power in being able to wonder. So that's very interesting to me as just kind of aside. But anyway, and it strikes me that the way that we're talking about somatic movement and also drawing as well. And that scale will be very important. And I don't know just something to think about as we in every different section, because I'm thinking also about the way you're describing seeing film and having to make that kind of adjustment to what time means in terms of this physical view that you see in front of you. So I think scale will be important. And just to say as well. In terms of the finished product, I was wondering what finished product. I was wondering what you had in visit in terms of those little chunks. And that like three seconds is like a very manageable amount to work on, but it's not that much time for someone to register. What's happening if they're watching it for the first time and that maybe it should be a little bit longer. I don't know. It's up to you of course, but also I was thinking that to have evenly sized chunks would be really nice because there would be a kind of standardizing rhythm to the final work. That might impose a kind of like framework on all of us, because presumably we're going to make very different marks together. So that strikes me as something which would work really well, but I'm not sure if the time could be a bit longer, which brought me back to scale again because I was thinking well, yes, that is quite cumbersome to work on like 10 seconds on one time to see the whole thing in one go. And if it's about the process and maybe we could do smaller chunks, but if it's going to be better for the final thing, maybe it would be better to do something longer. In response to like showing the process, I think that's really great. The work does seem to be a lot about how it's constructed. So I don't know, it strikes me as something really faithful to the project to see the process in the end result. Yeah, and that was it really. Those are my thoughts. I have a question about what materials would be used for the film for a marking up film so you mentioned the ink with the brush. So that would be my suggestion for working fast because you can cover a lot by just like a gesture really quickly. And then you might have things that are kind of like quite scratchy and fine and small and slow. Yeah, I mean is color an option is that something that we're talking about as well or colored materials. This is just, it's a pen, it's a nib pen for ink. So it's just like one of those standards old school drawing things. I don't know if this would even work because it is quite bouncy. You know it might not be the right thing. But you know you could possibly use I was thinking like sometimes you can use forks for kitchen, you know, your eating tools, knives and forks and things like that. You can use that to draw with or scratch with and they would be much more robust, I suppose and metal. You can also use things like stones. I have a couple of leaves here so these just came off the plant I have in the room. So if you go outside to a park you might be able to collect up some some twigs or stones or things, things from outside that you can then use to scratch or transfer something or take off or you know whatever so you know those are the kinds of mark making tools that I would normally use but again I don't know what would be best for working with the film. So what was the project originally for like what you suppose. So basically, what we're what we're doing is, so Jutta Ateel made a film in 1988 on 16 millimeter as would most of films been made and, you know, not so that film is now like 33 years old etc etc. And there are copies, it's been digitized, so it also has been digitized and re-released like on digital format and you know it's shown at like the BFI and the Luxe collection etc. She has, she was given a couple of 16 millimeter prints from like the 80s. And basically she took one of those prints and cut them up. And so I think it was five or six sections and I remember exactly, she'll probably say on this video that we're going to watch together. You cut it up into like five or six sections and basically what she wants to do with us is we're going to essentially do like an extended or like an exploded version of Ria's found footage workshops with this film. So like normally with the found footage workshop, you know, we're just doing stuff on like random, you know, random, just junk from the trimming. But actually what's cool about this is that we're basically going to draw on like a classic film. You know what I mean, like. Oh. Which is kind of intense but she's being really chill about it like Ria and I were like, you want us to what but she's she's super chill about it so no no pressure, but basically it's just really cool. I mean, this is very cool. Yeah. So when I first because I think I was there when I picked these things up and then she told me she was probably like Sankofa. Yeah, and like, she was like, you guys before you guys became you guys like, like big time late. So, yeah, she's definitely like, you know, a mentor, I think for the co-op, like, in a lot of ways, but anyway, okay. How did you, how did you come about meeting you don't mind. I think that what happened is that nor who is who you may have met, maybe not. 16 millimeter, 16 millimeter filmmaker. Well, loads of stuff. But nor and Brad and James used to run nowhere was in Bethnal Green, and then they basically left London, they gave what Brad saw in London but they left that one green. And they gave us a bunch of the equipment that's now in the room with you now. And I think that either nor or Brad, maybe it's Brad works at LCC where we're just doing a PhD. And so she found out about us from there and she's literally taking like every single class that we have done, or like every workshop she's taken at least one of every workshop since the beginning so she also knows like all our workshops, which is really cool. And yes, that's how we matter. Okay, so you open the package. And let's see what's in it. There it is. That's the film. This is the, so this is the sound cover film that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So then, once you've drawn on it. They're going to then be digitally scanned again. So, yeah, open it up, keep unraveling it. Um, it is quite uncomfortable. It is quite cumbersome if you keep unraveling it but I don't know, do you have room. I mean, yeah. So, I had this thought like, Oh, maybe I would just try to draw not necessarily draw like a scene or a sequence over and over but maybe draw some kind of abstract image and draw it like over and over and over and over so that when it gets scanned it will like, I don't know, maybe it's just like a new big thing that just does this. I don't know, right. I think most people though, that ended up doing some kind of like continuous lines and kind of continuous mark. So, those are kind of just two ideas, but really like let's just watch this video and then you draw and see. I'm down. Oh, it likes it. Okay. Well, this lady looks like she's in her mid 40s, I would like to think. People are really like that. She never wore it like that. Come here for a moment. Okay, um, do you want me to start drawing after the video is finished or do you want me to start drawing now? Okay, for now. I'll try to keep it nice and sweet. So just kind of going from your writing hold, which is a normal writing hold to playing around with something like this so you can just do it along with me at the same time so hopefully you've got your pencils and paper. And I like to do this one here because you can see how you can kind of make marks, and you could probably not seeing this one very, very well. You can make marks and you can make lines. So if we have the film maybe stretched out you can do something like that. And basically your hand is off the paper. So we're not putting the hand on to the paper but we're lifting it off the paper. And you'll also notice that the wrist is locked which basically means that your hand is moving together with the arm from the shoulder. So it kind of gives you a bigger range of movements. It kind of less controlled movement so it's not as it's not like a fine motor skill which we would use when we're writing, but it gives you a chance to get your body into it I suppose get your arm into it. So firstly we are moving away from the writing hold and just kind of opening up our arms, our hands, and rotating the wrist so you have like a full rotation possible. So by positioning my hand with my palm facing the floor or the desk without moving the wrist was an awareness of my shoulder blade and this wing like movement. Very very very softly and to the extent that this is available to each one of us remember all our bodies are different. Just take the hand off the one side and place it play a little bit with your torso as well. See where you are without pushing anything and just place it on the shoulder blade of the opposite side. And really it's about playing and checking how the shoulder blade is not actually attached to it's not a steady like fixated structure of our bodies but it can actually slide the scapulae it's a very flat if you would like to include a little bit your imagination. It's a very flat bone that slides upon the reap cage. So check a little bit what you can get through the hand of the opposite side while at the same time playing with this articulation. Okay, can I sense how these flat bone is actually the beginning of my arm movement. Usually tend to believe that the shoulder joint is the beginning of the arm movement whereas the shoulder blade starts this articulation. Maybe coming as a transition into a soft contact with. I am a serial collaborator and have experienced the not knowing before. I'm grateful to have the invitation to work with a new material I never touched film before. I tested new strokes, new holds, new marks purely for the pleasure of being in the moment. The sun was shining. I worked outdoors needing space to stretch. I'm intrigued by collage. The merging, layering, slamming together of two things to make a new. What is the analysis? The reading of this new work? What do we see? It was disorientating. I seemed to have amnesia. My memory of the processes I executed did not correspond to the film I watched. I could not even tell which bit was mine. Naming, adding words to a visual to a process taps into a different part of your brain. Aware of energy contained in the film and each other. Questions of permission when working with someone's work. I remember seeing her body unfurl as she very slowly moves in the fabric and folds. And I wanted to mimic the shape of those gestures with my marks. I focus on texture, pattern and adornment in the film. It was difficult to make the first mark. I needed to know what I was looking at and the size and scale of those images means you don't have complete control of the outcome, which is also freeing. I thought about how texture can work with a body or against it over top of it or moving with a body. I used my marks as a reduction to marks to take away, to remove some of the adornment in the background or to form a kind of pattern over the image. I perceived my marks as a precious experimentation. I felt the weight of dreaming rivers, the weight of its history within artist film and video. What a gift to be able to work so freely on a work which means a lot to me. I touch the film and this brings to my attention how it smells. It smells like family and family moments. Moments from another time, celebrations from another time. The emotion side of the film, the emotional side of myself. The recollection of the content of the film, the family, the journey, the woman, the mother, the children, the emotions. How materials connect with emotions. The materiality of internal and external motions. How the somatic materiality of the film connects me more fully with its content. Thank you so much, Judah. Do you want to join me on screen? Thank you so much and thank you to all of your collaborators as well. I think it's so interesting to see in that film the way that you've looped the collective process and the practice back into the work itself. You get this layering of the analog film and the digital film and the different kinds of temporalities that those films contain within them and your interventions into them at different moments in time and across the group as a whole. Thank you so much for sharing with us today. It's fantastic to see. We've been talking about collage, but actually to see the practice unfolding over time through film is really interesting. I wondered if we might start. We'll come to questions in a moment, but I wondered if we might start if you wanted to maybe just talk a bit about your editing strategies and your methodology, maybe both in this film that we presented today and in Dreaming Rivers, the film that you are working with. Maybe thinking about some of those ideas around collage, around cutting, recombining and the kind of editing of pre-existing materials. Thank you so much, Rosie. I just want to say thank you so much to Paul Mellon because you sort of gave us a sort of deadline to arrive at this place, this first iteration of Dreaming Rivers Found Footage 2021. So thank you to all the collaborators and not know where for making this possible, absolutely making this possible. So, yeah, so the whole process, the whole idea of us coming together was to propose a workshop that was inspired by an offering by not know where their Found Footage workshop has been said. But in our thinking around how do we deliver this workshop to people who might want to come in and be part of the mark making. How do we structure the learning? How do we structure the process? And bear in mind we were discussing this over lockdown, so we didn't have the benefit of being together. I've worked with Christina in her studio at East 15 before lockdown, when she put on a two day symposium called Sematic Voices and Beyond. So I had a sense of her practice in physical space, but the other contributors just didn't. And so us talking and working together was to find out how do we make this accessible for other people. And so we decided to put ourselves through the process as a first iteration. Taylor's package didn't arrive in Amsterdam in time for her to be part of the real life marking that we did together. It got to Amsterdam, then it was sent back to the UK. So Ibrahim acted as her hands basically. And so they worked together virtually to achieve their mark making. So the strategies are different with Dreaming Rivers. I had a script. I had an idea. The actors are casted and they had roles to play that were predetermined by myself. That's completely different to this sort of work when you're working speculatively with people who have their own very particular practices and their own very particular way of working. So the film that you've seen is really us documenting ourselves. So me talking at the beginning is me talking to the other members of the group being held to account basically and explaining, you know, the backstory to this whole project for them to consider whether they want to be a pathway or not. So it was constant negotiation, constant negotiation. I think that that enriches the project because in that negotiation, you have to check yourself, you know, to check your own resistances. And then Christina said to me, so you're not considering showing Dreaming Rivers, my immediate response was no, no. And I didn't think in the editing, well, what was that about, you know, and include in to reference what she was saying and, you know, we've eventually extended the context of this presentation by allowing people to see Dreaming Rivers from to understand the way in which racialized bodies work as part of the narrative of Dreaming Rivers. So the strategies are different, much more discussion, not only to represent our practice as a group also to represent individual practices as best as best as I could really. It's absolutely pleasurable, very challenging, very hard to give up the position of instigator and author. But at the end, the reward is brilliant because everybody, you know, is settled with the outcome. It's interesting the way you've taken that workshop model, and then have kind of adapted it for this online, you know, this more kind of COVID induced online atmosphere that we're working in where exchanges are often kind of mediated digitally and as you say having to kind of send things, but fundamentally it still retains that kind of history and legacy of the workshop and the film workshop, as this kind of space for collective practice and for certain forms of experimentation. It comes across really strongly in the work. It's wonderful. I love the workshop model. It provides intimacy, a certain intimacy of care around learning. The workshop model we use as a workshop, we created other workshops of filmmakers to hone in their skills. Nowhere runs workshops which are absolutely beautifully, you know, the mood and the creativity, the freedoms allowed within the formal environment that is open to inquiry, open to discussion, open to discovery. It's absolutely brilliant. And I love the way Ibrahim talks about no, not about nowhere, about nowhere as you guys, you know, she was you guys before you guys are you guys and that legacy is really important, but the funding structures are different. So in the changing funding model is like the survivor of workshops like that nowhere is really crucial to experimental practices of this type. I think it's so interesting that that word care that you use and it's such a different meaning of care in the context of the film that you just shown in relation to ideas of kind of conservation and preservation and how we normally think about caring for archival materials. It's about keeping them in there, in their exact kind of historical state and preserving their structure and actually the way that you're talking about care in this context is, is more about a kind of, and it's quite interventionist and you're kind of cutting as giving care to the materials in their life form and kind of, as you say, relinquishing a certain authority or control and kind of giving the materials over to other practitioners. It's a very different way that we kind of conventionally understand care in archival and conservation I'm very inspired by Derrida. I think he was on the good guy philosophers, you know, he had so many ideas and one of the things I picked up on is the idea of not only the idea of hospitality and the uncertainties of hospitality and sort of the uncertain the uninvited guest turning up, you know, but also the idea of the to come, you know, Avenir, and I just feel so privileged that I've been able to engage with a new generation of filmmakers who have had trouble accessing work from the 80s. But when they've found the filmmakers where they found the material that they've invited filmmakers like myself into conversation. And I think that sort of crossing of parts if you like, you know, me going towards end of my career as it were and them coming into and reframing discussions and creating new discourses is very, very exciting. And I think that whatever happens to dream rivers as it sits in the BFI archive. I'm not so worried about now that I know that there is a generation of filmmakers who have had access to the work and can reframe it in their own considered way. And I must thank Ria for the title because she was the one who actually, you know, gave the critical break on what we were doing to say, we need to consider, you know, what we're doing, because my energy was I want to mark this film. So I think that that sort of critical pause was really, really helpful. I think we might we'll open up to questions in a second. We'll invite some collaborators to join us. I just, I know that you wanted to talk about your use of line in the film. So if you could say a bit about your use of line and then we'll open up to questions. Just a quick, just a quick one because I think there's a sort of a transition from dreaming rivers and its inspiration, the inspiration it took from Sonya Boyce's, Shane holding them up, she's holding on, and the sort of horizontal buildup of narrative of that painting in 80, I think it was 86 and Claudette Johnson's work I came to dance, where it only does it build up the image build up horizontally but it also the narrative builds up vertically. And that wonderful sort of swoosh central line is an amazing representation of movement, I think. And as I was marking my film I kept thinking about this image, especially the triangles because in the in the third vertical section of the image, reading from left to right, those abstracted lines. I can't remember anybody we talking about them and it makes me think about abstraction, especially the way in which British black women use abstraction their work, sometimes gets eclipsed by more dominant narratives and the interpretation and the figurative. And so, yeah, so I suppose with this, with this project, as I was making my marks, I was thinking about the potential of the line, and what the line could mean, and how the line could link us to historical discourses around abstraction and modernism. And it also becomes then the line is the kind of connecting line between you as collaborators as well as the kind of linkage between the different hands that are touching and interacting with the film. Absolutely. I wondered if we might invite your, I know, I think we have Christina and Ilger maybe Rhea here with us today who might come and join us for our final few minutes on screen. Before joining us I'll just ask you we've had a few questions in the chat. Someone says that they they love how the film dramatizes the stretching of image and speech and time that has become so familiar to us through zoom and showcases a new jerky conversational exploratory but also fundamentally disconnected kind of group portraiture embedded simultaneously in the domestic sphere and across the channels of zoom itself. So why don't you talk about this you think as a sort of group portrait. Thank you very much for that observation it's really it's really a complimentary observation, you know, because some of the footage was never really intended for public screening, because the conversations were internal. And I think that the appreciation of that domestic space within this context is, is by, you know, I reciprocate that appreciation. Yeah, do you imagine that people have saved on zoom from these types of conferences there must be masses, you know, that people just saved what to do with it might I've worked with a Jamu X for a presentation of his work to Royal College, I've worked with Jasmine Nicholas for her presentation for Brent when she was one of the artists at Biennale and the Brent Biennial. So in some ways, it's become a convention of working with artists across distance and time, forced on us by lockdown. So it's just finding creative sustainable ways to work during a difficult time. I'll go Christina, did you want to say anything about how did it for you this kind of form of group portraiture and the sort of the way that zoom has mediated your your collaboration with Judah. If I if I may quickly start and you hear me. Yes, we can. Yeah. As as Judah mentioned, I'm actually the lucky one to have had somatic and an actual in person connection with Judah before. And I feel that this was actually to me in a way, a thread a through line that allow me to enter this collaboration with some sort of comfort. There is something about the space and the possibilities that online spaces can allow connection you know with different countries, but at the same time in my understanding. Nothing can actually substitute the in person experience and the depth of the environment in in the real life communication. So personally, I can't wait for us to meet up in person and reconnect with the film and actually being able to come in physical contact with with each other. So there is something about the possibilities, but also a gap in the online space so that makes it. Absolutely. Building on that we've had another question which I think connects to that that idea of touch I think and kind of physical connection that you were gesturing to Christina. And Judah. Was there a particular reason why you wanted your collaborators to interact with the kind of materiality of the analog film directly rather than sort of overlaying drawing at the level of kind of post production was it was it the actual because it's amazing when we see it being unfolded you know we're watching the digital film and we're seeing the physical film being kind of unfolded and enrolled in front of us and could you maybe say a bit more about the 16 millimeter film and why that the kind of materiality of that was important to you. The 16 millimeter film is an analog medium, not many people come into contact with it now. Ibrahim is a film student and he hadn't come into contact with 16 millimeter film. Ilger and Christina hadn't come into contact with it either. So it was really important to actually understand and to feel what it was like and to feel its properties and its potential for mark making to feel its resistance to mark making as well. And it isn't homage to 16 millimeter. And there are very few places in London that specializes in 16 millimeter film work in this way that's why not no way so important. So yeah it was important for me to as a dreamy rivers found footage concept to invite people in who've not had contact with six millimeter film that might have written about 16 millimeter film, especially people have written about dreaming rivers. And maybe art filmmakers would never actually touch the substance to see what that interaction might produce. So yes, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's very, it has properties of its own. And I think that people's response to it is very, very interesting. Especially Ilger, Ilger can probably talk on this actually. I would love to do a second round, you know, having now seen the digitized version of what I made I have, like I said, in the, in the reflection. I didn't recognize the strokes when I knew what I did on the film. I took each segment as kind of unique, a unique kind of set of marks, but when I watched it in a film format, it just didn't make any sense to me I couldn't I couldn't kind of put. I couldn't recognize which one was mine. So I would love to do again you know kind of have that chance to kind of try it out again. And I think that word resistance as well a film is very I thought I was scratching a lot but in the end it didn't actually make any or very little scratches so it's kind of a trial and error thing so. Wonderful. Thank you. And do you know I know that I can see that we can't we're coming to time now. I don't know if you wanted to just close with any, any final. We've had one last question about whether collages are kind of inherently collaborative medium and I don't know if that's your interest in it perhaps. I don't think it's necessarily. I don't think it's necessarily necessarily collaborative. Why do you think it's very impactful. I think I think I remember when I first saw John Hartfield the executioner and justice in the 80s when I was an undergraduate at a golf miss it was so impactful because there are so many injustices that would be experienced in London on the streets that it just spoke to me directly. I think it can be a very impactful medium. Fantastic well thank you all so much and it's great to have. Rosie sorry I must say I've just seen the amni malik's name pop up so I must say amni malik you're one of the people we want to come in to this project because you've written and been so supportive dreaming with us so we'll be in touch. I'm glad I'm glad this is a site a site for future collaboration. Thank you so much Rosie. Thank you thank you very much everyone and thank you to all of our speakers today. It's been a fantastic kind of unfolding of the discussions over the first two days, and we really appreciate all of your contributions.