Down at the Bamboo Club

Down at the Bamboo Club
2008 - 2009

Down at the Bamboo Club project explores legacy through participation, historic sites and events with 3 commissions, an exhibition and a publication.

Down at The Bamboo Club: Film, participation and re-enactment was developed by Picture This as a response to national and city wide projects marking the 200th anniversary of the abolition of slavery act.

Picture This was keen to develop participatory projects involving re-enactment through workshops and community events. Re-enactments offer sensitive ways to link to diverse communities and gain newly produced material. Re-enactment is a means of expression that has sympathies with oral traditions of storytelling. It has the potential to reconcile the dynamics of contemporary and historical perspectives of slavery and to respond to the specific site, place and context of Bristol.

Through a period of research and development Picture This invited artist Harold Offeh to start conversations with three organisations in the city with links to sites and moments in the city's history of slavery, abolitionism and community relationships - The Georgian House, Wesley's New Room and the Bristol Black Archives Partnership.

These conversations developed into a brief to three commissioned artists (Barby Asante, Mandy McIntosh and Mark Wilsher) to produce new film and video works with communities and partner sites.

Following the commissions Picture This curated an exhibition bringing together the three new works with existing film and video pieces which share ideas of legacy, re-enactment and community.

blog

The Use of Money
by Mark Wilsher

Bamboo Memories
by Barby Asante

STAN DOUGLAS: Television spots/Monodramas

TELEVISION SPOTS (1987/88)
In 1989, his first series of short works for television, the twelve Television Spots, were broadcast in Saskatoon and Ottawa amid regular programming, as if they were commercials. Unidentified, the short scenes depicting open-ended, banal activities baffled viewers.


MONODRAMAS (1991)
Douglas's "Monodramas," ten 30- to 60-second videos from 1991, conceived as interventions into commercial television, interrupted the usual flow of advertising and entertainment when broadcast nightly in British Columbia for three weeks in 1992. These micronarratives mimic television's editing techniques, but as kernels of a story they refuse to cohere. They are tales of dysfunction and dislocation, misanthropy and misunderstanding. When the videos were aired unannounced during commercial breaks, viewers called the station to inquire about what was being sold, their responses evincing how the media can refocus attention from content to consumption. -- Nancy Spector

Tacita Dean- Kodak

After discovering that the Kodak factory in Chalon-sur-Saone, France, was closing its film production facility, Dean obtained permission to document the manufacture of film at the factory with the soon-to-be obsolete medium itself. The 44-minute-long work Kodak constitutes a meditative elegy for the approaching demise of a medium specific to Dean's own practice. Kodak's narrative follows the making of the celluloid as it runs through several miles of machinery. On the day of filming, the factory also ran a test through the system with brown paper, providing a rare opportunity to see the facilities fully illuminated, without the darkness needed to prevent exposure.

Francis alys: seven walks

TS Eliot: Choruses from 'the Rock'

'dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.'

Katri Walker 'Keep us together Tear us apart'

radio 4: Analysis- thought experiments

Studies have shown that if the smell of fresh bread is in the air we are far more generous than otherwise. In the past few years, a fascinating range of experiments has begun to shed light on the moral choices humans make. Philosopher Janet Radcliffe Richards asks whether the results can tell us not just how we tend to behave, but how we should behave.