An exhibition at multiple locations 18-21April 2013, Open 1-6pm daily

An Audio Guide will be available to download at www.re-assembly.org once the exhibition opens.

Site 1: The St Marylebone Church of England School
14 Blandford Street, W1U 4AZ

Site 2: St Marylebone Parish Church
17 Marylebone High Street, NW1 5 LT

Site 3: The St Marylebone Church of England School
64 Marylebone High Street, W1U 5BA

Ultra-red
RE:ASSEMBLY: Songs for Edgware Road 2012
Five-channel video stills
© 2012 Ultra-red
Courtesy Bevis Bowen

The Serpentine Gallery’s Edgware Road Project presents RE:ASSEMBLY, an exhibition that provides a window onto a unique partnership between radical sound art collective Ultra-red and students and staff at The St Marylebone Church of England School. RE:ASSEMBLY demonstrates the important role that the arts play in schools.

Since 2009, Ultra-red have worked with students and teachers across many subject areas. Embedded into the curriculum, they have developed sound walks, audio recordings and listening sessions departing from the question, “What is the sound of citizenship?”.

Like most other schools in London, the St Marylebone student body is diverse. Many of the students are refugees, asylum seekers or new immigrants to the United Kingdom. Consequently, the legal issues surrounding state citizenship have a particular urgency within the school. This is not, however, the only form of citizenship students must negotiate. Schools are essential to the production of social citizenship, which involves preparing the young to participate actively and productively in civic and community life.

Responding to these issues, Ultra-red led students through a set of actions in the classroom and sound walks through the surrounding neighbourhood. They listened to the school, the city and each other. Listening situated groups in the present and brought the big questions of citizenship into the everyday activities of the school and the city. Together they reflected on how rules, regulations and social norms affect learning and visions of life beyond school.

Throughout the project Ultra-red invited other artists and activists into the school. During a Year 8 ‘Citizenship Day’ where the school might have invited in police officers, councillors or businessmen as guest speakers, Ultra-red invited trade unionists, housing activists and migrants’ rights organisers to be interviewed by the students. Working with 150 students in Geography and History, Ultra-red brought artists and activists to redevelop a special unit on migration, based on listening exercises in the neighbourhood and the school.

The works exhibited in RE: ASSEMBLY draw from the archive of student and teacher responses to a number of issues: the relationship between the school and the neighbourhood, the relationship between state and social citizenship, issues of private property as well as the contradictory demands society places on young people and their role in developing the future.

Providing a glimpse of four years’ work, RE:ASSEMBLY presents installations and performances at three locations.

This Orientation, a downloadable audio walk made by Ultra-red in collaboration with Year 11 students, departs from the school’s Blandford Street location and situates the students’ observations about their education in a broader historical context. Possible Conversations presents the school’s head teacher, arts faculty members, students and local activists on nearby rooftops listening to the city and making statements about its future, referencing the angels on the church’s cupola.

Mapping the Political Economy of Edgware Road includes composites images and texts created with Year 11 students in response to four areas of the school’s neighbourhood. In Hymnal, religious texts are replaced with the students’ analyses of citizenship in the local area and school and then embedded into the fabric of St Marylebone Parish Church. In the church’s crypt, Songs for Edgware Road presents five students interpreting songs from Hymnal through choreography developed with the late Gill Clarke and projected at life scale.

At the school’s Marylebone High Street location, Songs for Getting Through displays concrete plaques marked with the lyrics and song titles that help students survive exams and daily pressures in and out of school. In Lessons, the teachers’ own thoughts are inscribed into six framed textiles.

The exhibition is not the project’s end point. As members of Ultra-red state: ‘Our listening is an act of respect and caring, and it manifests a certain vision of what it might mean to see each other as citizens. While the works exhibited in RE:ASSEMBLY represent an outcome of our collaboration, they are starting points for the next phase of the investigation. They are not only a response to the question “What is the sound of citizenship?” but they are also an invitation to others to come together and explore the question within the context of this city. This is a process described by Paulo Freire, the Brazilian popular educator, as “people’s thinking about reality and people’s action upon reality.”’

OPENING EVENT

Wednesday 17 April

6pm – 7pm
Songs for Edgware Road: a choral performance
St Marylebone Parish Church
17 Marylebone Road, London NW1 5LT

7pm – 9pm
Reception
The St Marylebone Church of England School
(adjacent to the Church)
64 Marylebone High Street, London W1U 5BA

RSVP by Monday 8 April
Duncan Welsh +44 (0)20 7298 1503
rsvp@serpentinegallery.org

EDUCATORS FORUM

Saturday 20 April

What is the sound of a critical arts education today?

University of Westminster, Front Room (MG14)

35 Marylebone RoadLondonNW1 5LS

2-5 pm

In a climate of economic austerity and cuts to the arts, what kind of arts education is possible? Join artists and educators for listening sessions and round-table discussions related to how art, design and architecture education might be reoriented towards critical spatial analysis and action.

Roundtables will be led by the Radical Education Forum; Another Roadmap for Arts Education; Department of Architecture, University of Westminster and students and teachers at The St Marylebone Church of England School.

The event is free of charge, but booking is essential. To book a place, please email information@serpentinegallery.org

The event is part of RE:ASSEMBLY, a multi-site exhibition by sound art collective Ultra-red in collaboration with students and teachers at The St Marylebone Church of England School from April 18-21 2013 developed through the Serpentine Gallery Edgware Road Project.

Ultra-red

Exploring acoustic space as enunciative of social relations, Ultra-red use sound-based research to directly engage political struggle. With ten members working in North America and Europe, Ultra-red pursue a dynamic exchange between art and political organising, from which they produce radio broadcasts, performances, recordings, essays and installations. Founded in 1994 by two AIDS activists, the collective has expanded to include artists, researchers and organisers from different social movements, including the struggles of migration, anti-racism, participatory community development and the politics of HIV/AIDS. Their recent explorations, undertaken as the School of Echoes, have shifted the group’s work from composing sound to composing listening, inviting groups to listen to and record what is already there and respond to the question, “What did you hear?”. Ultra-red’s residency on the Edgware Road Project was undertaken in collaboration with The St Marylebone Church of England School and Raven Row.

RE:ASSEMBLY is curated by

 Janna Graham, Projects Curator

jannag@serpentinegallery.org

Amal Khalaf, Projects Assistant Curator

amalk@serpentinegallery.org

Free Cinema School Salon: Policing the Crisis with John Akomfrah 

28 February 2013

Acclaimed artist and film-maker John Akomfrah hosted our final Free Cinema School Salon at the former site of the Centre for Possible Studies at Gloucester Place.  He shared archival footage related to the ground breaking study on policing undertaken by Stuart Hall and the Birmingham School in 1978.  A recording of this event will be posted online in the near future.  

John Akomfrah is a filmmaker, lecturer and writer who lives and works in London, U.K. One of the founding members of the Black Audio Film Collective, Akomfrah’s previous films include The Nine Muses (2010), Mnemosyne (2010/11) and Seven Songs for Malcolm X (1993).

Photo by Marcus Kern 

The Embassy Ball

by Implicated Theatre 

Members of Implicated Theatre hosted The Embassy Ball, a participatory theatre event based on the processes of Brazilian Theatre Director Augusto Boal. The piece bid adieu to the Centre for Possible Studies at its location on Gloucester Place. 

Based at the Centre for Possible Studies, Implicated Theatre has been working together since October 2011 to develop theatre workshops, performances and research. The workshops are based in the praxis of the Brazilian director Augusto Boal (1931-2009). Boal’s conception of the ‘Theatre of the Oppressed’ explicitly challenges the divisions between active and passive subjects in theatre. These experimental workshops explore the relationships between political speech and action, the self and the collective, voice and silence. Implicated Theatre are a collective of artists including users and supporters of the Migrants Resource Centre, London.

Still from Steel Town

Free Cinema School Salon: On Pedagogical Film, Part II with Daria Martin and Massimiliano ‘Mao’ Mollona

Thursday 24 January, 7-9pm, Centre for Possible Studies 21 Gloucester Place, London W1U 8HR 

In this second part of our series of salons on pedagogical film, January’s Free Cinema School will be a presentation of Steel Town (2013) a film by Daria Martin and Massimiliano Mollona. The film is shot on location at Volta Redonda, a Brazilian steel town whose economy, and consequently its citizens’ lives, revolve around the Companha Siderurgica Nacional (CSN), the biggest steel mill in Latin America. Following years of research with unions, Steel Town, focuses on working-class life in Volta Redonda, building a critical dialogue between documentary, ethnography, art and activism in a film that involves members of the Volta Redonda community, workers of the steel mill and a director from Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed Centre (Centro de Teatro do Oprimido – CTO).

Daria Martin Born in San Francisco, USA, in 1973. Lives and works in London. Daria Martin’s films aim to create a continuity or parity between disparate artistic media (such as painting and performance), between people and objects, and between internal and social worlds. Martin trained in humanities at Yale University and painting at the University of California, Los Angeles. She has had solo exhibitions at the New Museum, New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and Kunsthalle Zurich, among other international public galleries, and a solo survey is forthcoming at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, in 2013.

Massimiliano Mollona is an anthropologist based at Goldsmiths College, London. Specialising in political and economic anthropology and experimental filmmaking, his main research focus is on the anthropology of work and class. He conducted long-term fieldworks in Sheffield (UK) and Volta Redonda (Brazil – still ongoing) two steel-towns deeply affected by privatisations and radical class changes. Mollona also uses film as a tool of political reflection and intervention, with a focus on experimental ethnography, the politics of realism and working class representation. In 2000, he wrote and directed Steel Lives, a film about a community of steelworkers in Sheffield in the post-Thatcher era. In Brazil, he developed several media projects in favelas and hosted film discussions in homes, communities and shopfloors. He has published extensively on political anthropology and film and is regularly invited to talks on film and work at various galleries, festivals and workshops in the UK and abroad, including in 2012, Raven Row, GasWorks, BFI, Steirischer Herbst festival (Graz) and Il Festival della Filosofia in Modena.

From the upcoming publication New Voices (2012)

FREE

11am – 6pm

Centre for Possible Studies
21 Gloucester Place
London W1U 8HR (on the corner of George Street)

This one-day exhibition brings together works from New Voices, a photography project run by the Migrants Resource Centre. These works were produced over a period of four months with six young people aged between 18 and 24 who were invited to produce photographic work around the themes of culture, migration and life in London using analogue photography techniques. A book of the work produced will be available to view and order from the exhibition. Also on show are works from Young Voices, an offshoot photography project by 13-15 year olds at JusB Youth Centre in Bromley, as well as works from Cultural Mosaic, a media4us photo competition.

Implicated Theatre, the theatre group in residence at the Centre for Possible Studies will be running an open workshop from 3-5pm.

www.thenewvoicesproject.tumblr.com

For more information please contact:
Janna Graham, Education Projects Curator
 jannag@serpentinegallery.org

Amal Khalaf, Assistant Curator, Projects
amalk@serpentinegallery.org

Still from ‘Democracy at Work’ (c) BBC-TUC film archive

FREE, no booking required

7pm

Centre for Possible Studies
21 Gloucester Place
London W1U 8HR (on the corner of George Street)

November’s Free Cinema School Salon revisits the histories of Pedagogical Film in the UK. Hosted by artist, Margareta Kern with artists from no.w.here, see excerpts from videos that were made as part of the television series ‘Democracy at Work’ – a collaboration between the BBC Further Education department, Trade Union Education Service, Workers Educational Association and Sheffield University Extra-Mural department, aired on the BBC in 1978. These television programmes were accompanied by a detailed booklet, and available to trade union members to be used as tools for education, agitation and worker organisation. The videos cover topics such as job satisfaction, industrial democracy, safety at work, worker representatives on the board, role of the women in trade union movement, nursery provision in industry, obtaining information from management and history of collective bargaining. In re-visiting these videos, this Salon will explore how films were utilised historically as pedagogical tool for empowerment of the workers, in order to re-think its current status in the context of contemporary disempowerment of unions and workers.

For more information please contact:
Janna Graham, Education Projects Curator
jannag@serpentinegallery.org

Amal Khalaf, Assistant Curator, Projects
amalk@serpentinegallery.org
Join the facebook page for this event here: https://www.facebook.com/events/550409114986126/

Join us at a screening and celebration of ‘Timeframe’ a short film made by young people in Westminster exploring the heritage of Church Street.

There will also be a launch of a publication about the film made by the filmmakers.

Snacks and drinks provided.

Timeframe is a FreqOUT! and Vital Regeneration production.

You can see the pamphlet on edgwareroad.org

‘Continuing the feminist critique of Marx: primitive accumulation, technology and the war on women’ 

A Talk and Discussion with Silvia Federici

Centre for Possible Studies
21 Gloucester Place, London W1U 8HR (on the corner of George Street)

FREE, 7pm

Author, teacher and feminist activist Silvia Federici will be giving a talk at the Centre for Possible Studies to mark her latest book Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction and Feminist Struggle. Written between 1975 and the present, the essays collected in Revolution at Point Zero represent nearly forty years of research and theorizing on questions of social reproduction and the transformations which the globalization process has produced. Originally inspired by Federici’s organizational work in the Wages For Housework movement, topics discussed include the international restructuring of reproductive work and its effects on the sexual division of labour, the globalization of care work and sex work, the crisis of elder care, and the development of affective labour.

Silvia Federici is one of the cofounders of the International Feminist Collective, the organization that launched the international campaign for Wages for Housework. Federici has been instrumental in developing the concept of “reproduction” as a key to class relations of exploitation and domination in local and global contexts, and as central to forms of autonomy and the commons. Her decades of research and political organizing accompanies a long list of publications on philosophy and feminist theory, women’s history, education, culture, international politics, the worldwide struggle against capitalist globalization and for a feminist reconstruction of the commons. She is also a contributor to the upcoming Serpentine Projects book Art + Care: A Future.

This talk is organised in collaboration with PM Press.

For more information:
Janna Graham, Education Projects Curator
+44 (0)20 7298 1535
jannag@serpentinegallery.org

Amal Khalaf, Assistant Curator, Projects
+44 (0)20 7723 3162
amalk@serpentinegallery.org

Double Evil: A talk with Eyal Weizman, Matthew Fuller and Andrew Goffey

Tuesday 23 October, 7-9pm

Centre for Possible Studies, 21 Gloucester Place, London W1U 8HR (on the corner of George Street)

This public talk brings together Eyal Weizman with Matthew Fuller and Andrew Goffey, the authors of two recent books exploring different concepts of evil in the present day.

Eyal Weizman’s The Least of All Possible Evils, humanitarian violence from Arendt to Gaza is an analysis of the way human rights laws and humanitarian concerns have become the means of manipulation and, in several cases, the means of conducting warfare. The cases discussed in this book include some of the defining political moments of the present era.

Matthew Fuller and Andrew Goffey’s Evil Media uses the format of Machiavelli’s notorious 16th century book The Prince to propose a series of stratagems for media dominance in the 21st century. A dark handbook for politicians, entrepreneurs, moguls and, conversely, those who are affected by them, it suggests new ways of understanding the ‘evil’ of algorithms, search engines, and other media active components of 21st century life.

Eyal Weizman is Director of the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths.
Matthew Fuller works at the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths.
Andrew Goffey works at the Department of Languages, Cultures and Area Studies, University of Nottingham.

For more information see:
The Least of All Possible Evils, humanitarian violence from Arendt to Gaza http://www.versobooks.com/books/532-the-least-of-all-possible-evils

Evil Media http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=12995

Park Nights Tarek Atoui  La Suite  

Friday 12 October 2012  6-11pm
Memory Marathon Dome, Serpentine Gallery

Tickets £10/8 available from the Serpentine Gallery Lobby Desk (020 7402 6075), or ticketweb.co.uk

Acclaimed Lebanese sound artist Tarek Atoui transports audiences through a lost world of Arabic culture with a trance-inducing, five-hour performance to launch Serpentine Gallery’s Memory Marathon

For his Park Night, and opening event for Serpentine Gallery’s three-day Memory Marathon, which takes place during Frieze Art Fair Week, acclaimed Lebanese sound artist Tarek Atouiperforms La Suite, a five-hour work inspired by classical Arab music. This Sharjah Art Foundation commission is presented by the Serpentine Gallery.

Exploring Tarab, both as a traditional form of music and an Arabic word to describe the emotional effect music has on the listener, Atoui is inviting fourteen internationally renowned musicians – from hip-hop and electronica performers to contemporary and traditional instrumentalists – to create a dialogue with the collection of Kamal Kassar’s AMAR Foundation which houses the largest library of Tarab and classical Arab music in the world. Atoui has long been captivated by the improvisation inherent in this deeply evocative music, which binds the audience to the performer. As Atoui says “Tarab is not a music genre but a state of ‘melotrance’ that you reach after being exposed to music for a certain amount of time.”

La Suite is commissioned and produced by Sharjah Art Foundation and is a development of his earlier works Revisiting Tarab, performed in Sharjah this past March and Visiting Tarab, performed in New York, November 2011 as a Performa Commission with Sharjah Art Foundation . Responding to the theme of the Serpentine’s Memory Marathon, Atoui’s interpretation of this largely forgotten music promises to transport the audience to a lost world of Arabic culture that dates back to the beginning of the 20th century.

Tarek Atoui was born in Lebanon in 1980 and moved to France in 1998 where he studied sound art and electro-acoustic music. In 2006, he released his first solo album in the Mort Aux Vaches series for Staalplaat Records, and in 2008, he served as artistic director of the STEIM Studios in Amsterdam, a centre for the research and development of new electronic musical instruments. Atoui is a sound artist who initiates multidisciplinary interventions, events, concerts and workshops and specializes in creating computer tools for interdisciplinary projects and youth education. He has presented work internationally including the Sharjah Biennial, Sharjah, UAE(2009); the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (2010); La Maison Rouge, Paris (2010); the Mediacity Biennial, Seoul (2010), the Haus Der Kunst, Munich (2010), Performa 11, NYC (2011) and dOCUMENTA 13 (2012).

Performers: Uriel Barthélémi, John Butcher, Mira Calix, Susie Ibarra, Hassan Khan, Kazuyuki Kishino, Lukas Ligeti, Robert Lowe, Ikue Mori, Sara Parkins, Zeena Parkins, Ghassan Sahhab, Sam Shalabi.

Tickets £10/£8
Available from the Serpentine Gallery Lobby Desk (020 7402 6075) or Ticketweb ticketing.