糖心TV

On Thurs 2nd February, Dr. Michael Pigott spoke as part of the 'Cities on Film' series of events at Oxford University. Michael chose the films Dredd (Travis, 2012) and Side/Walk/Shuttle (Gehr, 1993) to be shown as part of the series and the screening was followed by a discussion between Michael and Dr. Peter Wynn-Kirby, who is an environmental specialist, ethnographer, and Research Fellow in the School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford.

Organised by the Oxford Forum and Stanford University Centre in Oxford

For more information about the event

"Films about cities are both part of modern urban experience and a mode of our reflecting on that experience. Over the last century both cinema and cities have been in flux. What have we learned from films that explore cities? About cities? About films? About tradition? About modernity? About fantasy? About reality? About beauty? About ugliness? About living? About ourselves? About making sense or nonsense of any or all of these? In this series of Film events, the Oxford Forum and Stanford University Centre in Oxford are showing entrancing films about cities, followed by dialogues and discussion."

Dr. Harpin will present a paper entitled “Gazing with alterity in Titicut Follies, Blue/Orange, and Ship of Fools” for a public talk organised by the MSc in Creative Arts and Mental Health and the Drama Department at Queen Mary University of London.

5:30PM-7:30PM, Monday 13 February

Film and Drama Studio, ArtsTwo Building, Queen Mary University of University of London (Mile End Campus)

Everyone welcome, Refreshments will be served, Free of charge

This talk is the first in a series of public events exploring the connections of mental health with performance and art practice.

Abstract

How have artists captured and communicated psychiatric spaces and patient experiences? And what types of evidence can we gather from their work to help forge more creative and humane alternatives current care practices? This paper will expose recurrent themes of spectacular cruelty and harm across three art works – Frederick Wiseman’s Titicut Follies (1967), Joe Penhall’s Blue/Orange (2000), and the vacuum cleaner’s Ship of Fools (2010). All three artists question how one looks at madness and mad folk. They ask what it means to care, what constitutes a community, and how far the political capacity to be properly seen and heard is conditioned through interlocking, authoritative discourses. This paper will sketch the ways in which the works politically engage with the apparent legibility of madness and will argue that, through aesthetic means, the three attempt to redistribute the locus of knowledge about madness, widen the aperture of perceptual realities, and decentre the question of where to ‘put’ madness. In their aesthetic interrogations of spectacle, care and harm, they provoke new and vital considerations as to what a hospitable community of support might actually feel like.

JC Niala, Yvette Hutchison and Tim White, who connected through the African Women Playwrights Network, had their proposal for the performance Who you think we are accepted by the Tate Exchange to perform on 14 March in the festival Who Are We? This festival has been designed as a week of engagement, dialogue, debate and lively disruption, asking what it means to belong- across and within borders - in March 2017.

Dr. Susan Haedicke collaborated with Baz Kershaw and Earthrise Repair Shop to conceive and construct Prairie Meanders at the Conrad Environmental Research Area on the prairie in Grinnell, Iowa, in September 2016. This project was a large-scale version of earlier ‘meadow meanders’ created by Kershaw that explore human ‘econnectivity’ to the earth through performance ecologies, conservation and regeneration. Prairie Meanders constructed two meanders, one a quarter of a mile long; the other over two-thirds of a mile. These maze-like pathways mimic major ecological processes of Earth. Once the pattern is established, a walker meanders along the path and viscerally experiences a global ecology on a local, human-sized scale. Combining land art, nature trail, gallery display and immersive performance, the meanders produced dynamic experiences of 'glocal' ecosystem processes as they created environmental puzzles exploring the ecologies of interacting climates, landscapes and species.