London Regional Network
Verusca Calabria
Freelance oral historian
www.veruscacalabria.co.uk
Telno: 0779 1092850
Email: info@veruscacalabria.co.uk
Sarah Gudgin
Curator of Oral History and Contemporary Collecting
Museum of London, 150 London Wall, London, EC2Y 5HN
Telno: 020 7814 5756
Email: sgudgin@museumoflondon.org.uk
Rob Perks
Curator of Oral History
British Library, National Sound Archive, 96 Euston Road, London NW1 2DB
Telno: 020 7412 7405
Email: rob.perks@bl.uk
Pam Schweitzer
Director, European Reminiscence Network
15 Camden Row, Blackheath, London SE3 0QA
Telno: 0208 852 9293
Email: pam@pamschweitzer.com
Solomon Yohannes
Curator of Oral History and Contemporary Collecting
Museum of London, 150 London Wall, London, EC2Y 5HN
Telno: 020 7814 5765
Email: syohannes@museumoflondon.org.uk
European Reminiscence Network
In October 2008, I organised the ‘Lifetimes Festival’, a festival of reminiscence theatre in Greenwich involving around 150 ethnic minority elders. Two groups of elders performed plays based on their personal and group memories specially devised for the occasion. One was a group of 20 men and women aged between 65 and 80 from Nigeria belonging to the Ajoda group in Greenwich. They worked with me over several months, piecing together a joint story based on their individual and shared memories of growing up in Africa and later moving between Africa and London during the early years of Nigeria’s independence. The scenes were linked with songs which the group sang beautifully, spontaneously harmonising and with dance steps… all very animated and warm. Working with this group was not always easy as there were tensions within the group and people’s attendance was erratic, but the end result was terrific and justified all the effort involved.
The other group was much smaller and more focused: a group of eight Caribbean women aged 63 to 79 from the COFA group, all of whom had worked as nurses in the NHS. Their play, also with songs, was based on their experiences of growing up in different Caribbean islands and coming to England to train, work and bring up their families. The play explored their past and present lives, the things they were proud of and their hopes and fears for the future. Both plays were performed in Charlton House for an audience of 100 ethnic minority elders and others as a highlight of Black History Month 2008. After the plays, the players and audience shared a lunch and in the afternoon worked together sharing memories and songs.
The afternoon workshop used many different reminiscence activities including moving along a time-line and marking out significant journeys and memories and sharing them with others they encountered in the exercises.
If anyone would like to see the short film shot on this day, it is on my websites under the title Lifetimes. www.pamschweitzer.com and
www.europeanreminiscencenetwork.org.
The entire project, of which these productions and the festival were a part, was called ‘Sites and Signs of Remembrance’, a two-year reminiscence and remembrance project with German and Polish partners which ended in November 2008. To read about the project, please visit www.sisie.eu and click on the sign for each city to learn more about how the project was pursued in each country and internationally.
‘Remembering Yesterday, Caring Today: reminiscence in dementia care’ (RYCT) is a research project supported by the Department of Health Research Institute. It is evaluating the effect of reminiscence on family carers and people with dementia, meeting over a 12-week period followed by seven monthly meetings. The project, which began as an action research project initiated by the European Reminiscence Network in 1997, has developed over the years with support from various trusts, from the Medical Research Council and now from the Department of Health. Twenty four RYCT groups have been established across the country each involving up to 12 families, including the person with dementia and their main family carer who attend together. Control groups match those involved in the intervention and researchers at five universities are evaluating the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of the project, reporting in 2010.
I have been operating as trainer and consultant to this national project and also co-leading, with Caroline Baker, the south London groups, in association with the Memorial Hospital and Oxleas Trust. The North London groups, based at North East London Mental Health Trust, are running in Barking, Havering, Waltham Forest and Redbridge, co-ordinated by Jen Wenburn of NELMET. A training film featuring this project is in preparation and will accompany the project book Remembering Yesterday, Caring Today (by Pam Schweitzer and Errollyn Bruce published in 2008 by Jessica Kingsley Publishers).
I have taken oral and written testimony from people with dementia and carers and created a series of monologues, Stories from the Front Line: a video-training/education pack for the Alzheimers Society, each about three or four minutes long. They are performed by two professional actors, Pam Lyne and Godfrey Jackman, and accompanied by discussion ideas for use by groups of family and professional carers of people with dementia. The monologues have now been performed at several conferences including the September 2009 AGM of the UK Alzheimers Society. They are performed between key speaker presentations in plenary sessions in order to keep the discussion focused. The monologues have now been professionally filmed and the edited result will be launched at the Dementia Congress of the Journal of Dementia Care in Harrogate in November 2009.
‘Transitions in Later Life’ is a project in preparation. The idea is to explore through reminiscence and through enactment how to make the transition into partial or complete retirement. Using Reminiscence and Life Review approaches, the aim is to explore concepts of identity, status and imaginative projection into the future in a small and trusting group. Anyone interested in exploring this idea further with me, please contact me at pam@pamschweitzer.com.
Pam Schweitzer
Museum of London
The new £20 million Galleries of Modern London will be opening in spring 2010. The new displays cover the period from 1666 to the present day, and in the galleries which focus on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, oral history and video play an important and informative role. Our aim was that the foreground voices of Londoners themselves would help to personalise history and reflect multiple perspectives, by revealing the stories, experiences, and opinions of Londoners from all walks of life. An immersive oral history-led audio-visual exhibit does this through the personal experiences of people living through the Second World War.
A number of video oral history exhibits also feature within the post-1950 gallery. Oral history A/Vs include ‘Portraits’, which looks at values amongst people in the capital contrasted against interviews carried out by Peter Davies in the 1960’s. New material collected for the ‘London Liberationists’ interactive reflects upon civil rights movements of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, which were aimed at achieving social and economic equality for women and legal and social equality for LGBT people.
The opportunity to ‘Challenge London’ poses six audio debates with new material collected around themes such as energy and climate, identity and integration, homelessness, religion and schools, death, and alcohol and entertainment. Oral history, including material collected as part of the ‘Refugee Communities History Project’, will also feature in ‘Collections on Line’, a database that will be available both in the galleries and online.
‘Homeless in the Capital’, which opened in December 2008 was the outcome of a joint oral history project at The Connection at St Martin-in-the-Fields. The Connection helps homeless and ex-homeless people by providing specialist services and activity programmes to 200 people in central London every day. The project, which began in April 2007, set out to enlighten the public about the reality of homelessness and about the individuality of people who are or have been homeless. Also this year, the second phase of the ‘Refugee Communities History Project’, in partnership with the Evelyn Oldfield Unit and London Metropolitan University, is underway. This will focus in particular on learning resources and schools sessions and on developing a toolkit for community organisations interested in undertaking oral history projects.
We were delighted to receive a substantial grant from the Esmee Fairbairn Foundation to assist us in carrying out the ‘Recorded Media Strategy Project’. The Museum of London Group and the Sainsbury Archive hold a number of important recorded media collections, and intend to develop and implement a new strategy and plan for the long-term conservation and preservation of, and improved access to, those collections.
We are intending to carry out several contemporary collecting projects in the coming year. ‘Olympic Collecting’ will focus on the impact of the 2012 Olympics in the capital, concentrating on community sports organisations. We hope to record new oral histories, collecting photographs and objects relevant to this important event in the capital. ‘Market’ will explore London’s global context and connections through street trade, using oral history, photography and new collecting to build up a record of the character of one of London’s most colourful market places along the Portobello Road. ‘Mixed’ will be a new oral history and contemporary collecting project which will consider the rich and varied contributions of people of mixed and multiple heritages to London’s diversity over the past 30 years. It aims to provide an opportunity to collect relevant new material reflecting a growing shift in society and to consider how far this mirrors attitudes towards communities, race and identity.
In July of this year, Annette Day, our Senior Curator of Oral History and Contemporary Collecting, left the team after many years’ service to become Head of Programmes at the Museum of London. The oral history department is currently made up of Sarah Gudgin and Soloman Yohannes. We continue to build on the Museum’s oral history collection, with new interviews and projects. We will also continue to provide advice in response to a steady stream of enquiries from people from a range of backgrounds and sectors working on oral history collecting and display projects as well as from an increasing number of students looking at oral history as part of museum studies and migration studies courses among others.
Sarah Gudgin & Solomon Yohannes
Other London projects
This year saw the completion of the ‘Belonging in Brent’ oral history project in which I recruited, trained and supported a group of ten volunteer elders to record 45 hours of life histories of Irish, Jewish and West Indian people who came to settle in the Borough of Brent from the 1930s onwards. The project culminated in an audio-visual exhibition showcasing text, sound, photographs and objects that reflect on the interviewees’ life stories, with a particular focus on the themes of settling and belonging. The exhibition is open to the public at the community gallery, Brent Museum, Willesden Green, London, until 21 February 2010.
I also worked as an oral history consultant for Black Cultural Archives’ project ‘The Black Women’s Movement in Britain’, which has focused on collecting the testimonies of women involved in the movement for the rights of black women, including activism, organising, campaigning and lobbying at a grassroots, national or international level. The project has been themed around the seminal black British feminist book The Heart Of The Race by Beverley Bryan, Stella Dadzie & Suzanne Scafe (Virago, 1985), which examined black women’s lives in Britain using oral testimony. Those involved in the production of the book were interviewed about their experiences and the legacy of the book, including the authors and original interviewees as well as a number of other key figures in the movement. For more information please contact: info@bcaheritage.org.uk.
I have been providing oral history, transcription and sound editing training to the volunteers of the project ‘Do you Remember Olive Morris?’ by the ROC (Remembering Olive Morris) collective. This takes as a starting point the historical figure of community activist Olive Morris (1952-1979), a key figure in 1970s South London. She was part of the British Black Panther Movement, set up the Brixton Black Women's Group, was a founding member of the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent (OWAAD) and was central to the squatters' campaign of that decade. The project aims to contribute to making public a history of black activism in 1970s South London through the focus on the charismatic yet under-documented figure of Olive Morris. At the same time, the project explores the current state of young women's involvement in politics and community leadership against the backdrop of migration in post-colonial Britain. For more information about the interviews carried out so far, please visit: www.rememberolivemorris.wordpress.com.
I have been training volunteers on the ‘Minding Histories’ project organized by Mind in Bexley. The project works with individuals and communities to record the testimonies of up to 60 individuals from BME groups, including the Vietnamese, Chinese, Bangladeshi, Indian, Russian, Polish and Irish communities who reside in the London Borough of Bexley. The project will focus on resettlement experiences and their related impact on mental health since the 1950/60s, with a particular focus on discrimination and racism, poverty, isolation and stigma. Audio and video recorded interviews will be carried out with individuals from these communities who are experiencing, or have experienced, mental ill health/distress, including those who were residents of the now demolished Bexley Psychiatric Hospital. For more information visit: www.mindinghistories.org.uk.
I have also been managing the collection of the oral histories of the ‘plinthers’ as part of Antony Gormley’s ‘One & Other’ project, which ran from 6 July to 14 October 2009. The project was conceived as a portrait of the UK, using Trafalgar Square and the Fourth Plinth as an instrument through which 2400 individuals drawn from all regions of the UK were invited to represent themselves by occupying the plinth for an hour each in whatever way they liked. It is envisaged that the digital audio interviews will be placed on a micro web site linked to the Wellcome Trust main site and Artichoke Productions’ website hosting the videos of each ‘plinther’, and together will go to create a long term resource not dissimilar to Mass Observation.
Verusca Calabria
[Record] [Create]: Oral History in Art, Craft and Design. 2010 OHS Annual Conference.
Venue: Victoria and Albert Museum, LondonStarts on: 2nd July 2010, Finishes on: 3rd July 2010
More information can be found at this link here.
2010 Oral History Society Annual Conference in association with the V&A
Friday 2 - Saturday 3 July 2010
10.00 – 17.30Sackler Centre
Oral history has become a significant methodology for understanding the contexts, objects, and meanings of art and design. It has also been a catalyst for creative work. This international conference will bring together the global community of those working with oral history in the diverse field of the arts. This groundbreaking two-day conference will feature presentations from creative practitioners, academics, archivists, oral historians, community arts projects as well as museum professionals.
The focus will be on three key themes: History, Practice, and Interpretation.
Keynote speakers include the artists David Toop and Michael McMillan.
History: The contribution of oral history to the documentation and preservation of creative practices; the creation of creative identities through oral history narratives; the interconnections between the individual practitioner and their wider cultural context; the narratives of creativity; the construction of alternative histories; memories of lost practices.
Practice: Creative practice using oral history and memory work; designers as mediators in oral history projects/works; ethical considerations in using individual memories for art/design work; the use of images as memory prompts; arts-based community oral history projects; oral history as visual narrative.
Interpretation: Oral history as producer of meaning; oral history and testimony in the museum and gallery; narrative research in the arts and oral history; oral history and arts education; the problem of oral history as biography; the border between orality, aurality, and visuality.
A full programme of all panel presentations and keynotes will be announced in March 2010.
REGISTRATION (includes buffet lunch both days).
£112
£94 concessions (OHS members, OAPs, disabled)
£30 students
Please register now now at Events Booking Online, telephone the V&A Bookings Office on +44 (0)20 7942 2211 or email bookings.office@vam.ac.uk. A handling charge per transaction may apply.
Each delegate must fill in a delegate registration form, which is circulated to attendees at the conference. Visit this link to download the form which should be completed and emailed to tickets@vam.ac.uk at least two weeks before the event.
(Please note that speakers will fill in a separate form, sent to them direct by the OHS Conference Administrator).
ACCOMMODATION
Accommodation can be booked at Imperial College, a short walk from the V&A. The Conference organisers have reserved a block of rooms in Eastside and Southside Halls, which are both located in Prince’s Gardens, SW7 1LU. Rooms must be booked with Imperial College direct by delegates and the bookings procedure is not organised by the OHS or the V&A.
Visit: this link
Please state that you are booking for the OHS conference held at the V&A.
CONFERENCE VENUE
Opened in autumn 2008, the V&A Sackler Centre is a dedicated space for arts education and gives airy, light-filled spaces that house state-of-the-art facilities. The space has been designed for school visits, adult courses and special educational/social events. It has been carefully researched to accommodate a wide range of artistic activities while still retaining a modern, minimalist feel.
Within the Sackler Centre on the ground floor, there is an artist’s studio and a digital lab with computers and laptops with the latest design programs. A central staircase leads up to the first floor where there are two soundproof seminar rooms, ideal for discussions and meetings. The Hochhauser Auditorium is a beautiful lecture hall with green leather chairs, large screen, sprung floors, lighting facilities, performance space and views onto the courtyard. It’s a versatile space, which can be used to host dance and theatre as well as conferences and films.
The Exhibition Road entrance is the most convenient for the Sackler Centre. For more details about transport to the V&A and a map of the building visit this link.
For more information on the Sackler Centre visit this link.
The conference is run in association with:CCW Graduate School, University of the Arts London
National Life Stories at The British Library Sound Archive
The University of the West of England, Bristol
Email: belinda@essex.ac.uk