Vivid Projects + University of Birmingham + Birmingham School of Art: Forty Years of Handsworth Songs, Courtenay Welcome Micro Residency and community creative workshop with Pass it Down and Carla Busuttil.

The white fathers told us, I think therefore I am; and the black mothers in each of us the poet whispers in our dreams, I feel therefore I can be free. Lorde, A. (1984) ‘Poetry Is Not a Luxury‘ in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, pp. 36

In collaboration with University of Birmingham, Courtenay Welcome, PASS IT DOWN and Carla Busuttil will contribute to community, researcher and creative workshop that takes place at Birmingham School of Art on Thursday the 22nd of Oct.

Courtenay Welcome

Courtenay Welcome will be undertaking a micro residency at Birmingham School of Art, using the historic vitrine housed within the School of Art atrium as a space for reflection and experiment.

Courtenay’s work with the vitrine will develop over ten days, sharing a critically focused practice that seeks to disrupt and rework materiality through an exploration that encompasses race-relations, dreams, revolutionary acts and memory across time/space.

Cathy Wade will be in conversation with Courtenay throughout the residency to develop a text that shares the practice, moods and life of the residency. The vitrine will be publicly accessible from 20-30 October in the opening hours of Margaret St, and you are welcome to view it from 10-4pm (the opening hours of the SoA Gallery).

Pass It Down

PASS IT DOWN invites us to explore the value of home video tapes, and discover unique glimpses of 70s, 80s and 90s music, arts and culture from Birmingham to the Caribbean and beyond. They will be screening archival footage from Big G’s Video Archive made in the same time period as ‘Handsworth Songs’, sharing how young people in Birmingham expressed themselves and shaped their own cultural worlds, crafted their joy, and developed their skills against the backdrop that erupted into the Handsworth uprisings.

Carla Busuttil

Artist educator Carla Busuttil will develop prompts in response to Handsworth Songs and the holdings of Birmingham Media Archive Project, using these multi-layered sources to remix and create new imaginings, engaging with socio-politics and culture from a contemporary and critical perspective. Carla works across painting, textiles, video, performance and collaboration with experimental sound collectives including Babz on Crack and Spectral Karaoke. The focus of these groups is to create live, improvised, performances and projections that merge sounds and imagery into a collective response.

Screening

A public screening and panel discussion of the multi-awarding winning documentary feature film Handsworth Songs will take place at the Mockingbird Cinema, marking the 40th anniversary.

The panel will feature celebrated film composer Trevor Mathison (Founder of both the Black Audio Film Collective in 1982 and Dubmorphology in 2005), award-winning historian, and cultural scholar Professor Daniel McNeil (Stuart Hall Interdisciplinary Chair at University of Birmingham), amongst others.

This residency has been developed as part of the University of Birmingham’s Black History Month commemorative programme and is being delivered through a partnership between the University’s Culture Forward initiative and the ESRC Festival of Social Sciences.