 Okay, well, hello, hello everyone and good afternoon and welcome to the Paul, the virtual Paul Mellon Center, even even I'm not at the Mellon Center today. I'm Martin Porcel and I'm the Deputy Director for Grants and Publications at the Center, and it's my great pleasure to introduce and to chair today's lunchtime talk effective proximities by Dr. Jessica Carden and Dr. Tiffany Boyle. Before I introduce Tiffany and Jessica, I just want to mention or remind you if you don't know that there is a final panel event on the 3rd of December between 1230 and 2pm, with a number of those who've partaken in the British Art and Natural Forces, this extended conference and a series of lectures that we have and Daniel put a link up there for you. So anybody can join that that's on the 3rd of December 1230pm. Okay, well without further ado, let me introduce our speaker. Jessica and Tiffany, among other things, form the curatorial duo Mother Tongue and they established this just over 10 years ago in 2009. And together they collaboratively produced exhibitions, films, discursive events and texts. And most recently, in 2019 into 20, the exhibition, Transparency, Alberta, Whittle and Hardy-Pantel at the Edinburgh Printmakers. Their research-led project predicts experimentation, migration, post-colonialism and diversity in the arts. Tiffany, among other awards, was a recipient of a PMC research support grant in 2015, Afro-Scots, tracing the presence of black artists in Scotland from the 1800s onwards. Tiffany is based at Glasgow School of Art and, among other things, her post-doc work is on visual representation of artistic gymnastics. Jessica is based at the centre of a grand strategy in King's College London and there, amongst her many commitments, she develops writing, exhibitions and film programs related to her research interests, exploring the intersection of political ecologies and film with regional specialism on the Arctic. And the subject of their talk today is John Akonfra's film of 2010, The Nine Muses, which explores the histories of mass migration of the African diaspora to post-war Britain, against and in the context of more recent footage taken of the Arctic where Akonfra puts black prisons into the whiteness landscape. Okay, I'm going to hand it over to you now and I think we've got Jessica speaking first, I think that's right, and so we're going to have a screen share now. I will mute myself and go invisible. Right, thank you. Thanks very much for that. A huge thanks to the Paul Mellon Centre for inviting us here today, we've been following the events over the last month and are really very happy to be part of this programme. We also want to extend our thanks to John Akonfra, of course, and David Lawson at Smoky Dogs Films, who have kindly enabled this talk today and permitted us to screen The Nine Muses, which is the focus of our presentation today. For those of you who haven't seen the film yet, I believe that we still have a code for access, so please do get in touch. So our talk today is going to focus on the visual analysis of The Nine Muses and the film is obviously incredibly rich and analysis could be taken in several directions, but today within the context of best talk, we're going to focus specifically on Akonfra's employment of the Arctic landscape and discuss how it relates to connected notions of race and landscape, identity and climate. So we're proposing ultimately that this film enables us to think about enjoying colonial representations of the Arctic and how we are influencing the geopolitical context of the region as a space which is critically important for climatic futures. So I'm sure most people are aware, but for those who are not, John Akonfra is an artist, filmmaker, director and writer who began his career co-founding the hugely influential black audio film collective in 1982. John Akonfra just recognises one of the UK's pioneering filmmakers. This work spans four decades and challenges, issue, race, class and identity. Akonfra, John has produced several television documentaries and has also written fairly extensive rare and politics in African cinema and his works are often deeply imbued with a sense of affect and melancholy and profound reflection of which The Nine Muses is no exception. So the focus of our presentation The Nine Muses is a stylised, poetic and deeply effective feature-length filmic entity which extends the genre of documentary filmmaking and creates a monument to the migrant narrative through a montage of film from around 1948 to 1970s. And this is combined with freshly shot digital footage of the Arctic. It's conceptualised as a contemporary epic about the history of mass migration of South Asian and African and Caribbean settlers to the shores of post-war Britain. It's been described as a solo song. The film unites sound scales, image and literary narrations to present a kind of poetic essay that serves as a testament to the migrant experience. It takes the classic Homer's Odyssey, which is considered an excellent work of Western literature. Akonfra uses this poem as a key reference point and demonstrates that pillars of classical, white, patriarchal literature have the ability to speak for multiple experiences of charming memory loss and trauma. Akonfra's meditation on the history of migration to post-war Britain kind of emphasizes and draws parallels with migrant conditions of journeying from margins to centres here and contemporary times. It also mirrors the structure of the poem in the sense that it's kind of compiled of raptured narratives and these overlapping storylines. And so the Nine Muses aligns migrant and black British experiences from the late 1940s up until today with one of the founding texts, the texts of Westerns, the Bleding. So the film is arranged into nine sections in each one's type of after one of the Nine Muses, who was born to Greek goddess Memesine after spending nine nights with Zeus kind of gods. Each section is very unique in its assemblage. It comprises a vast array of baby scenes from the 1940s onwards, and it shows scenes such as migrant arrivals into English dropyards, towering monuments, riot scenes. And this is intermixed with kind of very typical elemental English scenes like heavy rain, everybody dressed in monochrome, these grey smoggy suffocates. And this archival black and white footage is then spliced with freshly shot high definition and colour scenes of the Alaskan Arctic panoramas. The footage of the Arctic was shot in Alaska by a concha as part of the previous BBC filming commission to document the fallout of the 1989 X1 oil disaster. If we are around, I think it's around 10 million US gallons of crude oil were spilled into the ocean at the Prince William Sound, which is in the South Coast of Alaska, and to this day it remains one of the most devastating human caused environmental disasters. Describing hellers and the thematic framework of the menu's and ideas of being and the coming, a concha asserts that he wanted to understand how people in this case migrants move from this place of certainty, like a birthplace or a hometown, and this other thing which is, is not really here nor there. And within the menu's is this, these notions of being here nor there are signified and they're visualised through Arctic imagery. And so the white Arctic landscape is employed to conjure these notions of detachment and distance and hostility and otherness and this kind of real palpable sense of unfamiliarity, which all serve to aid the concha's visual descriptions of the human experiences of occupying this space between being and becoming. And so the Arctic becomes this kind of twilight zone and this space between spaces and through these visualisations are conferred and he enables us to question and critically address these representations of the Arctic and the significance of these representations in this specific moment. And the significance of these representations in this specific moment. And I think with early 19th century explorations, sorry, explorations now, Arctic was used as a platform upon which British imperial aspirations were performed and these, the kind of accompanying national characteristics were solidified. And the polar scholar Jen Hill has said that, and this is the quote, the Arctic made legible and exclusive invisible spaces of ideology and national subjectivity, separating the Arctic from other colonial spaces, and gave the Arctic a place in the British national and imperial imaginary things. And so Arctic imagery is for the Victorian era spectacle panoramas were produced for exhibit and expedition voyages often featured crew members and artists who depicted really captured the British imagination. And so all of these images and memoirs and literary narratives and scientific data that were collected and brought back to the home teaching by the new American explorers, they've further filled all of these representations of the Arctic with the patched plants and kind of mythologised other worldly space and secured its identity as the end of the known and habitable planet. And so alongside these constructions of the Arctic as the big bath into the plan, by which conveniently allied the indigenous population. So racial virtues, white racial virtues were were ascribed to the region, and these were also these were born from the same imperial heroic expedition accounts and flight men in a flight space that kind of rendered the Arctic pure and stainless landscape from the racial threats of slavery that were present in the traditional imperial colonial counter such as India. Again, aligning the indigenous populations and to the cementing the Arctic is this literal and symbolically white space. And so the Arctic becomes a space which is, like, intricately connected to notions of this idealized imperial whiteness and masculine imperial whiteness. And so the Arctic spread the relationship to landscape, which is a recurring concept within his work as multi layers. And then the first thing to describe has been influenced by romanticism and its relationship to notions of freedom. romanticism originated in Europe towards the end of the 18th century and was characterized by its emphasis on the privacy of the individual ideas of subjectivity and emotion. But most of all this kind of glorification that happened between the past and nature. And then there was a movement which was gaining strength at the same time as early 19th century Arctic explorations. So romanticism is new aesthetic categories, this kind of triangulation of crowds between sublimity and terror. And so we came to represent Arctic exploration visual narratives and alongside some other territories, perhaps the Scottish Highlands that can be attributed to work that can are based on the Scottish Highlands and also alpinism with more Western Europe. But most significantly romanticism foregrounded this question of the coming, which as a compromise identified within the context of the late 18th century was really a question of how one became in front of the eyes of God. And therefore it posed relatively radical ideas about freedom in relation to the kind of political conventions of the age of enlightenment. So, in the sense of comfort, he uses the past historical ideological movements and aesthetics, and he uses them in order to realign and reclaim spaces that have been dispossessed, so these spaces of dispossession. And romantic images depicted this heroic individual and cementing the idea that the precondition for experiencing and with a primal authentic sense of self of being kind of relies on this connection with the outside world and otherwise termed nature. So, as a conca has discussed specifically in an interview about his film The Call of Mist, which was a film set in the Scottish Highlands. He discusses his, what's termed layered relation to landscape as a concept. And he talks about the assumption that these kind of pristine and barren landscapes have always existed in this manner that's, you know, that's actually construction British history. So, I don't know if these exist as empty spaces for historical reasons, but they are, in fact, legacy one of your actions which we can see are can be evidence rather than we look at, and the high influences which took place across Scotland over the course of 100 years in the late 18th, 19th century. And that that corresponded with the height of romanticism and historian Eric Richardson has identified that it's no coincidence that these lands remain largely unblockable when the majority of actually, well, if you wanted to better avoid these portions up as agricultural property of the aristocracy. So, through a conference engagement with landscape to eliminate these kind of power dynamics that way, and this representation of natural and untouched. To eliminate the content of the power and specializations of landscapes and reveals that they're not nearly these natural backdrops to the circle now, but they're actually active agents of cultural and political power and their own right. And so, although romanticism was a relatively radical movement, I think most notably many of the romantic spot where the abolition of slavery which didn't at all represent populist or reflects other populist politics at the time. It's foregrounding of the individual heroic male figure within these dramatic landscapes that began to create symmetries between identity and. And it's solidified visualizations of the white national character. And so romanticism yielded this power to cement a relationship between the national character in the most spaces of nature. It's precisely this unquestioned symmetry between person and place, which a conglomerate is tackling within his works featuring landscape. So the foregrounding of this central isolated character is an attempt to confront what occurs in Congress to a space. And does it seem out of place and they then question this connection between character landscape, race and landscape, place and identity. And through these new images of solitary figures in the landscape. Which is a primary icon of the European romantic movement, a Congress eliminating this concept of racialized landscapes, and he's subverting the movement's white history and extends the possibilities by uncertain black presence and what is or has been an exclusively white visual, cultural and political narrative. And so now that I've tried to read out the very kind of historical context, I'm going to hand over to Tiffany to say a little bit more about this idea of identity and landscape with reference to some of John O'Connor. And but also began to bring in the contemporary artistic and geopolitical context. Thank you. And so, yes, in order to further contextualize the nine muses we're going to be looking to the work of two of O'Connor's peers, so as to unpack it in more depth. The artist Ingrid Pollard created her seminal photographic series pastoral intro goods in the late 1980s, and which examines the symmetries between identity and place in a similar vein to O'Connor. Pollard has produced a wealth of visual research on the issue of racialized landscapes and notions of alienation, particularly in relation to the significant tension which exists between rural and urban areas of England. The majority of her work challenges the lack of written and visual representations of the black body in the English countryside and decipher as ideas of belonging alongside constructions of quintessential Englishness. The story interludes challenge the way English culture places black people in cities and confines the countryside to the white middle and upper classes. Pollard Highland England has traditionally represented itself by an idealized rural landscape of green pastures, golden valleys and pretty floral gardens, predominantly constructed via 18th century English paintings and the picturesque. The artist challenges the idea of who is considered to be an authentic part of that landscape by creating images of black women and men in rural settings around the Lake District, an area which established itself again via 18th century painters such as Thomas Gainsborough and Joseph Farrington as a location of upper class whiteness, creating his art historian, Ceylon Talwoodros describes as a metaphor for individual freedom and transcendence. Subverting established narratives of traditional landscapes of the English countryside, Pollard's imagery of black figures in quintessential English rural locations reveal the socio-economic and political ideologies the landscape is imbued with. Fences, stone walls and railings become literal and metaphorical borders for who is permitted and who is not. As Pollard lays out in the image caption for the particular work on screen, the constructed spaces of kindness and harmony represents alienation and tension to that have been obscured from its representations. On the caption says, it's as if the black experience is only lived within an urban environment. I thought I liked the Lake District, where I wondered lonely as a black face in the sea of whites. A visit to the countryside is always accompanied by a feeling of unease dread. Artist Isaac Julian in a similar timeframe has also produced visual essays concerned with landscape and race, primarily with his Arctic work True North. His first work of three screen film installation was inspired by the African American Explorer, Matthew Alexander Henson was born in 1860 in 1955, and Henson accompanies famed American explorer Robert Peary on the 1909 expedition to the North Pole. He joined from official exploration histories and Henson's own accounts of the 1909 expedition. Julian on Earth's Henson story and rescues his memory from the invisibility which has shrouded his key role in American exploration history for centuries. Through a series of narrations, fractured narratives, sonic compositions and abstracted frames, Julian describes the tension and fear which came to define the explorership after the discovery. Henson had overshot his mark and arrived at the pole first. Henson's character is channeled through the actor Vanessa Myria, longstanding news for Julian, who features in a number of his other productions. Julian's casting of a black female to play Henson imbues the film with questions of gender in addition to race and challenges the imperial masculinity so highly associated with explorer figures and who traverse polar space. Henson's epic journey across the frozen sea, images of Myria's spectral figure meandering the landscape, summon notions of ghostings and temporal disjunctures, transporting the film between past, present and future. The true North's intervention into the history of discovery reveals the racialization of the landscape which has operated as a principal location for the performance of white to work imperial masculinity, the legacies of which continue to reverberate into the Arctic identity as a key ideological space for racial like this. Julian's film akin to a conference prompts us to ask whether certain bodies appear incongruous in a space and if so why. The idea of who belongs in which space and a key is a key question in relationship to the Arctic and a critical space for global futures and under international law and a global area of common heritage for all mankind as we know representation is important in terms of the determination for all those with vested interests in global futures, democratic futures. The release of the nine muses in 2010, the geopolitics of the Arctic has encountered a momentous shift, transforming from a detached and imagined landscape to an increasingly crucial location for global futures. Accelerated global warming has led to the Arctic functioning as an international barometer for ecological crises, the effects of which have rendered the territory a space which is no longer culturally and politically isolated, but one that is inextricable from worldwide political ecologies. Despite this critical role in collective global futures, colonization of the territory as a blank barren and passive space, continued to be employed by those with a vested interest in collusions for neocolonial ownership and strategies for mass resource extraction, in what historian and cultural critic T.G. Demos terms self serving politics of erasure. In his political ecology study, decolonizing nature contemporary art and the politics of ecology was published in 2016 demos evidences this by citing us politicians justifications and as the George Bush administration who argued that the Arctic was empty of wildlife and therefore oil drilling pose no risks. Similarly, a past US Secretary of State to describe the Arctic as an I quote, flat white nothingness. Furthermore, demos describes tell Alaskan Senator Frank Murakowski held up a sheet of black white paper and claimed it depicted an accurate illustration of the high north in an effort to garner support for mass resource extraction. The foundations of these competing territorial claims lie within economic interest to extract, which is thought to be 13% of the world's undiscovered oil reserves 30% of undiscovered gas deposits and 20% of undiscovered gas liquids. This has led to rapidly increased political and commercial interest in the region by superpowers such as the US Russia and China, which in turn has produced a contemporary scramble for the Arctic via increased militarization and scientific culture and political mapping strategies. The consequences for Arctic life should resource extraction score ahead would be disastrous fragile ecosystems would be irreversibly disrupted inviting new invasive species damaging food chains and further displacing the Arctic's Inuit communities and animals. In addition to the physical transformation which would take place across the earth through rising sea levels. This accelerated an unprecedented shift in the identity of the Arctic as a prime site for diverging futures is the disconnection which the main uses enables us to critically address thinking through race environment identity as they intersect. A comfort reclaims the landscape from dominant white chronologies and inserts black voices bodies and histories in amongst the witness, allowing us to critically evaluate the representation of a region so important current moment. Despite 10 years passing since the film's release, it's significance only grows in line with the Arctic's reordering as the climate crisis intensifies. The current volatile nature of the territory in terms of the political threats of military conflict and devastating resource extraction attested the crucial need to reevaluate the underdeveloped study of visual representations of the Arctic. The nine uses becomes a vehicle through which we can question the future of the region and examine the political and aesthetic strategies at play in dominant geopolitical discourse. The nine uses demonstrates the complexities of race, nationalism and landscape which are entangled in the history of the Arctic and its current identity. Visualizing Demis's proposition that, and I quote, environmental matters of concern are inextricable from social, political and economic forces, and quote, also being led by his hypothesis that, and I'm putting again, environmental stresses can be both a driver and a consequence of injustice and equality, including poverty, racism and new colonial violence, end quote. In this sense, the nine uses highlights the proximities between these issues and creates a new context for them to be read within one space. And that's the end of our presentation. Thank you very much for listening. Well, thank you very much. Thank you both, Jessica and Tiffany for that. There's so, so many ideas that you managed to, thoughts that you've managed to pack in into just over half an hour. I'm just going to start my video so you don't think I'm sitting somewhere in Wales. So, I just, if I may, I just want to kick off and it's, and that's really on the issue of, which you more than touched on in your talk. And I'm going to go back to relating to polar exploration, which is very important, I think part of this narrative is this Arctic and Antarctic, because this is, you know, we're talking about the poles just just not just the north pole. This white space is this male white space. And it's fascinating that this does continue into the present day, not just in terms of exploration, but but also not and I was thinking back to and it just, I hope you're going to see this. Do you remember quite recently Burning Ice, this exhibition that took place in 2005, which I wasn't involved in directly, but we did a project at the Tate about the Sublime and Cape Farewell. We talked to Cape Farewell and it's interesting because at the time we were thinking, and it was, it was very interesting. It was very innovative and artistically very aesthetic, but it was very white. And it was very male. And it was very traditional exploration, you know, you get in a boat, you rough it out, you might die. And there's all that sort of things that are part of it. A conference that strikes me and I don't know vast amount, but the little I looked at and read is is a very different approach. He talks about this sort of philosophy of montage of fragments coming together and in his films that that's a very important part of it. This dialectical philosophy where two opposites collide and some sort of synthesis is bought about. And I just wanted to talk about in 90s is the idea of some sort of synthesis because it's visually stunning. But also it's backed by great literary narratives and stories and tales. Odysseus, you know, you think back to modern tales. Shackleton is the obvious one where Shackleton writes he escapes. He's bound to escape, he escapes when he gets there. So could you just talk a little bit about that in terms of his own narrative, the use of heroic narrative and this kind of backdrop to which he is very aware of and kind of uses I think. I think ultimately Tiffany mentioned within her part of the presentation, the film True North by Isaac Julian. And I very much see True North and the nine users as their, you know, significant interventions into what you've just described, which is this white dominated in many senses, this, these narratives that continue to the present day. And if we look at, you know, the genre, like visual culture as a whole. And we look at political narratives like the, the, the films of John O'Connor and Isaac Julian in the Arctic are probably the most significant interventions into these narratives and acts of reclaiming spaces and this idea of reclaiming these this landscape of this possession. And they're probably the most significant contributions to that in the last 10 years or so. And I mean, obviously, the way that the films are, you know, they're very different in a sense, but they each kind of retrieve forgotten histories. And in terms of Isaac Julian, he's looking at this real life example of Matthew Henson, who was an African American explorer. And to all intents and purposes, he was the reason that Robert Peary got to the North Pole. He was the reason that Peary was anointed with, you know, the honor of being the first man to the pole. But his, you look at, sorry, Arctic exploration history, and you'll find it really difficult to find any material on this guy, up until maybe when Drew North was brought about, and Isaac Julian helped to eliminate his story. And in the case of John O'Connor, the fact that he is using, you know, pillars of, you know, westernization, his texts, and he's, he's, he's cutting and mixing these texts with stories of contemporary kind of migrant struggle and loss. He's reclaiming those. And he's allowing the landscape and these histories to speak for other experiences other than this, this whiteness. And in that sense, yeah, I would say that they're, they're huge interventions into what you've mentioned. But I just want to, if I may, I want to just comment when you said the Arctic and the Antarctic, these two poles. I still see, you know, of course, there are like the visual similarities of like these poles existing as these white barren spaces. But I think the geopolitical context of the Arctic, and the fact that these films are set in the Arctic, not the Antarctic. They provide a whole different kind of context for these films to be read within, not only because of the kind of geopolitical, the geopolitical context of what's happening in the environmental, but also this sort of north-south divide, which the artists are trying to eliminate within their work by placing bodies that are perceived to belong to the south within the north. Yep. And I think that's an important point as well. Yeah. And that this is an inhabited landscape as well. You know, that's important. Well, that's the irony because the indigenous population are non-flight, but this region has been constructed as the scholars as the heart of whiteness. So that's the deepest irony of the mall, actually. Indeed. And it's fascinating when this idea that the comfort, the idea of memory and amnesia, which is so important to him, the idea that, you know, one hand is about a kind of visual memory and a memory going back. But this is very interesting. I was just watching this morning his film about why history matters. He talks about what struck me. He says this process of amnesia, which gives rise to a hierarchy that there are beings and there are non-beings. I think that's very much at the heart of something which strikes me in this film. You know, there are visible and invisible. You know, we know that, you know, when people climb Everest, the visible people are the white people, invisible people without names or Sherpas. And there are many dead bodies on Everest. The ones that get reclaimed are the white people. And then the Sherpas are sometimes regarded as collateral. I think that something that's in terms of our focus on the nine users today is not so present, but it's something that's also within a conference practice because I'm very often like Julie and he works in multiple channel film installation. And I think that there's, in terms of visibility, a conference often kind of refuses our kind of binocular vision and asks us to look at a plurality of screens with differing material, different voices, and kind of competing narratives, and he asks us to engage with that plurality in the kind of wider kind of deconstructions that he's kind of putting forward. So I think that in terms of visibility, I think that the way that he present publicly in the exhibition space as it relates to vision, I think is also really significant. The nine users is the kind of cinematic version of Mendezine, which is a shorter artist film, which we showed at the CCA Glasgow in 2012 as part of a group show, which is again a single screen work, but many of his other works for it to go see purple for example, exist across multiple channels. It's a very, yeah, that his strategies of installing his work in like a physical space where people's encounter is very purposeful. Thank you. I do have a question here and this is from Theo Wood, if I may, and I'm just going to read it out. And Theo says, in the nine users, there is a certain amount of indexality that refers to the journey, the moving through, moving through life of an everyman quotes from Paradise Lost, Dante's Inferno, Pilgrim's Progress. And we are taken through the journeys of the Windrush generation and see the process of mixing is the Arctic as seen in the film also a symbol of the coldness of the white reaction to the immigrant. I would like to answer that. Very good question. Absolutely. That's, yeah, I would say that's spot on. I think the kind of complex employing these colonial representations of the Arctic. And I'm using them to signify the kind of hostility essentially. The, I mean, just the, the, the visuals of the space, this kind of, this sea of whiteness in which the visibility of that first thing, like the third certain color and what is the yellow jacket symbolically literally in certain color and to what is this monochromatic space. And it's a very difficult claim to exist with them. There's so many parallels there for sure. Theo, if you're out there, do you want to comment on that? If you stick up your, your hand or make yourself visible. If you do, if you don't, that's fine too. But if you do want to. Yeah, I've got Theo here. Okay, Theo. Yeah, you're live. Are you on mute? Can you hear me? Hello? Hi. Hi Theo, you're on mute now. Okay. Can you hear me now? Absolutely. I did note the other jacket appeared in many scenes and it's actually appears in several of Donna conference film. I can remember seeing the African soldier where you went back to the African. He was visiting the village after he returned from the war, First World War. But also at one point you see the person using a camera and filming and taking in the Arctic via the film. And I was thinking that was interesting because he was taking something from it in that sense. He was exploring, but also recording his explorations. But to come again back to the whole, the thing about the journey and the quotes throughout were very telling. I mean, we included the one from Enoch Powell that immigrants get more privileged than us, which is found out. We've got one from Shakespeare. Talk about nationalism. This happy breed of men, this precious stone set in a silver sea, this blessed plot. It's just something that John Boris Johnson might say, the whole nationalistic thing and claiming the land in a certain way. And seeing the photograph of the black woman in the country was quite moving because I have heard that that is so, you know, that they feel isolated from what is to be their land as well. So it's all our land. It's not something that just belongs to English people. Thank you. Can we move on? It's not so much. This is from Dorothy Price. Here's not so much a question as a comment. I just wonder whether you'd like to make that your vocally dot. I could read it out, but it would probably be better if it comes from you, I think. So if we could unmute you, Danny. Yeah, no problem. Could Dot please raise her hand. Perfect. Thank you. Okay, am I unmuted? Yes. Hi Dot. I just thought it'd be better if you actually presented. No, no, no, fine. It was just, it was something that occurred to me as I was watching and listening. Thank you so much. That was really interesting and really insightful. And it was just, it had lots of resonances for me with the film and your talk and your presentation and the sort of idea of decolonizing the Arctic. With a project that a student of mine was working on, he sadly passed away before he could complete it. But he worked at the Wilson Museum in Cheltenham. I don't know, do you know the Wilson Museum at all, anyone? It's devoted to the Antarctic explorer, Edward Wilson. And in the course of his research, Nadim had kind of uncovered quite a lot of archival photographs of the explorations that they went on, the expeditions. And some of those were photographs of the evening entertainments that Wilson and his team and his crew went and performed for each other in their tents in the middle of the Antarctic, which were Blackface and Minstrelsea performances, which I thought was kind of really resonant and really kind of interesting. And obviously for Nadim it was kind of a really in good way into his project actually in terms of this whole issue of kind of decolonizing those spaces, which are, as Martin and yourselves have pointed out, extremely white spaces. So that's all I wanted to say really, just to draw your attention to the Wilson project, because obviously that work is now not being done by Nadim any more sadly. But I think there's a really interesting project there to be done in relation to decolonial Cheltenham, because Cheltenham is obviously very resistant to this, and the museum was renamed quite recently after Edward Wilson, and there's a statue to him, and he's very central to the identity of Cheltenham, which I think raises all sorts of interesting issues around Britishness and the Antarctic, etc. That's all I wanted to say. But thank you. Thank you, that's fascinating. Thank you. Do we have any other chat questions or written questions there? Just to follow, the one thing that's both in John's film and is the role of the Black sailor of course, the Black mariner in terms of travel, and I think one or two appearing. It's kind of an interesting sort of thought in a way, and it goes back to this guy who was part of the Antarctic exploration. Is that something that you considered or thought about? Because the fact that in this film, Nadim uses the boat, the ship, and migration. So not just about Black people being transported, but actually working on ships and boats. It's quite interesting that just occurred to me in the wake of John's question or role of the observation. Yeah, absolutely. I think it chimes really well with the eyes of two wings, true north, because again, it's about a history that has been kind of disappeared and invisible. It's a history of somebody who was probably, you know, like I said, the best explorer on the expedition team. He was responsible by many historical accounts to be, you know, the reason why these men survived. The expedition, the 1909 expedition, and actually reached the pole. I mean, what's known about his life is that after that expedition, he didn't, when he arrived back, when he was anointed, the first man to reach the pole. I think he only had something like 200 pounds. He lived off that for the rest of his life, and he died in abject poverty as a car park in New York. So, you know, there's been very horrific histories that these artists are bringing to the fore, and especially, you know, it's important to think about it in terms of, like you said, not just these Black bodies being in the kind of traditional sense, the movement of Black bodies, the histories of people of colour that were active agents in these programmes that are completely disappeared, and it's not visible anywhere in these recorded histories. I'm just looking around, Danny, are there any other, I haven't got any more questions in the Q&A. No, I haven't got any through here either. But if there's anybody who does have an observation on, not just on Nine Muses, but any of other of John A. Comfort's films. I think maybe it's something that we wanted to impress, whether we've done so or not, with the presentation, I don't know. But really, quite a big part of the work is about from our dish research, as it can be described by researchers, about thinking about the relevant, how the Nine Muses was made in 2010. But it's ten years later, and the significance of the film seems to, for us at least, increase over time. In line with the kind of reordering that's happening in terms of the geopolitical context of the arts, you know, it's transformed from this space of kind of, you know, it's within, it's a post-colonial space, you know, it's transformed from this kind of imagined empty landscape to this kind of really critical space for global futures. Lots and lots of kind of computing powers, these neocolonial collisions for ownership. But these visual representations are continuing to be employed in a way that determines who has, you know, a voice within these spaces, and that's really crucial for right now in terms of the kind of ecological crisis that we're witnessing. And I think that's why people like T.J. Demo, who gave the keynote speech to this programme, has been so important for this research, because what he does within his work is kind of picks up these strands that we see in the films, like this real interconnection of race and climate, and what's termed climate colonialism in class, and manages to bring all these threads together and highlight that these are not kind of separate issues that happened or all connected. And so T.J. Demo has been really important in bringing that all together and helping us to understand the kind of relevant context in how these films are super, super important, because visual representations will ultimately play a huge part in international relations in the region and how we understand that region and how others understand that region. Hmm, it's interesting. And I'm absolutely right. I was listening to the talk he gave just at the melon there, just the other evening when they had the Q&A session. And it's interesting, the points he was making about how one responds, how one reacts, how one protests. And I know there's been various voices about the rights and wrongs of extinction rebellion, for example, and the sort of protest that that represents, and it has been criticised for being very middle class, very white and kind of older. And in a sense it takes one kind of stance, which is actually, it could be argued, is also quite exclusive in terms of who it involves. And what he, I was very struck by the fact, and what can you do. And the very good was, is be informed, read as much as you possibly can around. It's being informed, but very struck me. And that's really why he's able to extrapolate so many different things because he has read, absorbed, thought, and connected these different strands and threads. Interesting, in a bit of a way. Absolutely. And that's the kind of power and a testament to visual culture in a way, and these films and many other artworks is the fact that they're able to draw these threads together within one context. We look at hard science and hard data for climate change and for geopolitical concerns, and that exists in one space, but these films enable us to think about them all altogether. And that's really important, this kind of interdisciplinary analysis that happens. I was listening to talk between John O'Connor and all of our lives, and they were talking about their work as being kind of what they, how they felt about their work, the agents of change in this kind of moment of climate crisis. And they talked about the notion of asset, and how a lot of the time, when we look at the torque of climate change, it's a, you know, it's, there's a detachment process that happens, whereas through visual culture and art, we're able to actually have a kind of more human experience, like, you know, the feeling, they rise the motion, like that's a huge part of beginning to change behavior. And I think that, you know, continuing to work with art is going to be, you know, really important for any change to take place. Well, we're coming up, we're about two minutes to one, so just a couple of things. Danny, as you would have seen, has posted the link, the Vimeo link to Nine Muses, so you haven't had a chance to watch it. And it is otherwise difficult, I have to say, if you don't see it, you're not going to see the whole thing on the web, as far as I'm aware, you can see snippets of it, is that correct? But you do have an opportunity to see the whole film through this Vimeo link now. So it just remains to me to thank Tiffany and Jessica, and to thank you for bringing a conference film to us and to discussing it in such a kind of suggestive way. I had been somewhat aware, but it's really given, you know, one of the great things about these talks is they allow us to spend time thinking more about things that perhaps we've just been subliminally aware of. And so, I think that's all, I don't think there's anything more. We've got a question here to all. Let's go. This is from Birgit Arendt. And she says, is the absence of indigenous voices amuses if I'm correct, not rather striking. Isn't Akonfa also appropriating the landscape for exploring identity and ignoring other presences and identities? So what would you make of that comment? I think we've focused on, I don't want to say one element, but we're kind of our analysis and kind of looking at this kind of a very specific context in the Arctic. I think when you watch the whole film, something that's really obvious is that Akonfa is kind of presenting the Arctic in its entirety. There's a lot of kind of the industrial images of industry that are taking place and the change of that landscape. And they almost take on some sort of like ontological kind of, there's like a feeling of like ghosts or something because it's still came nightmare. You see these like huge pylons and these kind of big kind of what look like industrial pipes and factories. And so I think that that nods to the kind of changing dynamic landscape. I was just going to say that I think that the indigenous voices represented within the soundscape for the work. And so I think that it, I think that it is and that it is present with, I mean, obviously the soundscape is made of many different components, but I think that it is there and I think it's there and especially in the beginning. And I mean, I think that the figure as kind of you were saying is this kind of yellow coated figure. And it's, I think there's a lot of ambiguity around that figure obviously kind of we know kind of what we know and what we're talking about. And, but you know, we don't kind of come face to face with them. So I think that they're. I think that I come from from my own personal reading that that figure is a kind of a racialized other. And I don't think that it's them. Yeah, I think that, you know, coming from his context, you know, he's thinking about black in the widest sense of how it was historically used within the UK, you know, catch all term for everyone who was not white. And so I think that that presence is there. And, but yeah, I think that it's there are aspects of that were kind of big or ambiguous or which are kind of in amongst a mix of many other kind of contributions. Okay, thank you very much Tiffany I'm aware we're after one o'clock and people have to go so thank you once more to the two of you final comment from Theo Wood just before we go. So how do people feel about the soundtrack in the nine users, the juxtaposition new master to this juxtaposition of songs such as let my people go. She was a bit of a riser the sounds of the trains in Britain during this winter so different to today's etc. Yeah, it is a very good point I think about the soundtrack and the use of music as well I think is actually very important compelling part. I think we're going to have to stop there so I don't think I'm in control that you're in control Danny is that right.