“ They left behind monoliths as remote observers that were also capable of taking a variety of actions according to the wishes of their creators…. who had abandoned physical form, but their creations, the monoliths remained, and these continued to carry out their original assignments…” 2001 A Space Odyssey.
On loan to the School of Music and Fine Art until June 2016, ROOM is a converted 20ft shipping container designed by architect Simon Barker. Painted bright blue and fully fitted with power and light, ROOM functions as studio, gallery and public engagement space. Located outside the Pilkington Building on the University of Kent Medway campus at Pembroke, with the aim of extending student activities beyond the studio to encourage cross-disciplinary dialogue and exchange.
The shipping container or TEU (Twenty foot equivalent unit) with its promise of plenty has become a powerful symbol of standardisation and globalised trade. Sixty percent of the goods arriving in containers at the port of Naples escape official customs inspection and go unchecked, begging the question; what is really inside?
To keep ROOM activated, and to shape its new ‘assignment’ The School of Music and Fine Art invites any department in the Universities of Kent, Greenwich or Canterbury Christ Church to contribute artworks, ideas, knowledge or processes to ROOM.
ROOM is ideal for experimental use of sound and video projection and performance but also includes wall space and vitrine space for 2D and 3D objects.
ROOM can be booked for a maximum of 5 days. Whilst its use can be for wondering, experimentation and research, rather than exhibition, it is essential that you allow an open door policy for the passerby; ROOM is a transmitter of new and developing forms of knowledge so it is important that this signal is maintained. You will need to produce a brief proposal and sign a ROOM use agreement which includes health and safety guidance and a risk assessment.
To book ROOM please first contact ROOM’s curatorial team made up of SMFA students and staff, who will help facilitate, promote and archive your project, via Emma Murton; E.V.Murton@kent.ac.uk
For information on upcoming events at ROOM please see the news-feed on the SMFA webpage and Facebook page.
Nadia Perotta and Georgina Wilcox – Wetlands Project, 2015 Medway Culture Design & Tourism Awards. Photo by Dave Thomas
Wetlands, an innovative participatory community arts project from 2015 School of Music & Fine Art graduates Ben Crawford, Clarinda Tse, Nadia Perotta, Aggela Ioannidou and Georgia Wilcox was shortlisted for the 2015 Medway Culture, Design and Tourism Awards.
The awards celebrate the outstanding achievements of groups, individuals, projects and people and their contributions to the area’s cultural vitality, in arts, design, heritage and tourism. Wetlands was shortlisted for the highly competitive Visual Arts category along with artist and SMFA lecturer Adam Chodzka’s work Great Expectations; Rochester Kino; Nucleus Arts and the winner, The IN-SITE project – a series of public realm art works at changing regeneration sites in Rochester and Chatham aimed at supporting local artists and increasing participation in the arts.
SMFA Delta Project Officer Alan Mash was shortlisted in the Music category and SMFA Music Technician Charlie Fleming was nominated as part of the Fort Amherst team who put together a visitor audio app.
The 14 winners of the 2015 awards were announced at a gala presentation evening on Thursday, 22 October at MidKent College, Gillingham.
NEW for 2015, this is the first in a series of masterclasses, starting with multi-award winning vocalist, violinist, songwriter/composer and improviser, Alice Zawadzki is a distinctive presence on the creative music scene in London, nationally and internationally. Her music has been featured on Jazz FM and BBC Radio 3, and draws together influences from her early exposure to New Orleans soul and gospel, a classical training and an exploration of world and improvised music. Alice’s diverse background and striking ability to perform across genres while retaining her own expressive musical style give her a unique accessibility. Her widely acclaimed debut album China Lane was released in 2014. http://alicezmusic.com/
The masterclasses run from 9am-10.30am and 12 noon 1.30pm
Further to the announcement that The School of Music and Fine Art has joined the Academic Supporters Programme of the British Association of Songwriters, Composers and Authors (BASCA) there will be a presentation by Cindy Truong, BASCA Member Events & Relations Coordinator, under the educational partner programme, on Monday 2 Nov at 11am, followed by a Q & A session, networking – and pizza! The venue is the atmospheric Chatham Historic Dockyard, Room CT102. FREE to attend, this is a fantastic opportunity for musicians and songwriters. Places are limited, so booking is essential. Please confirm your attendance with mfareception@kent.ac.uk by 28 October.
About BASCA
The British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors (BASCA) is the voice for music writers; the independent professional association representing music writers in all genres, from songwriting, through to media, contemporary classical and jazz and can trace our history back over 70 years. Whilst we are well known for putting on the British Composer Awards, the Gold Badge Awards and The Ivors every year, there is far more to us than these events. BASCA campaigns in the UK, Europe and throughout the world in order to protect the professional interests of our members. We count on the best songwriting and composing talent in order to do this important work and are entirely self-funding, relying on the continuing support of our members, who include Sir Paul McCartney, Dizzee Rascal, Michael Nyman, Gary Barlow, David Arnold, Sir Elton John, Imogen Heap, Howard Goodall, John Powell, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, Kate Bush, Chris Martin, and many more.
Cindy Truong- Member Events & Relations Coordinator
Cindy is Member Events & Relations Coordinator at the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers & Authors (BASCA). BASCA exists to support & protect the professional interests of songwriters and composers of all genres and to celebrate & encourage excellence in British music writing. BASCA own and organises The Ivor Novello Awards, British Composer Awards and Gold Badge Awards. Her role at BASCA involves organising over 30 events a year for members and looking after BASCA’s Academic Supporters (of which University of Kent is one).
Prior to BASCA, Cindy spent five years working at Making Music, a charity which supports amateur music groups across the UK, where she organised their annual conferences. She is a classically trained pianist with an undergraduate degree in Music & History from Oxford Brookes University but doesn’t, unfortunately, make time for piano playing nowadays. (Although she did recently take up a grade-one-athon challenge which was to learn and pass Grade 1 Flute in 3 months – which she did and proudly displays her certificate on top of her dusty piano…)
Saturday 21st November 2015, 10am-3pm – Clocktower Building, School of Music & Fine Art, University of Kent, Chatham Historic Dockyard.
The School of Music and Fine Art at the University of Kent are holding taster sessions for all of our undergraduate degree programmes on Saturday 21 November 2015, 10am 3pm. These sessions are free of charge and are aimed at Year 12 and 13 students (or mature applicants) who are considering applying to university to study in a related area.
The sessions provide a great opportunity to see and use our award winning facilities on the Historic Dockyard, to meet and work with some of our academic staff and students, and to gain first-hand experience of the courses and opportunities we offer.
There will also be seminars, workshops, subject talks and guidance on writing your personal statement and what to prepare for interview/audition.
We are offering taster sessions in the following subject areas:
Book Online
If you would like to attend please book a place via the Online Booking Form confirming any accessibility requirements. For any additional enquiries please email MFAadmissions@kent.ac.uk
Connect with us via Social Media
In advance of the day, feel welcome to connect with us on social media to help you find out more about life as a student at Kent:
How to find us
For details of how to travel to the Historic Dockyard, Medway Campus by road, sea, air, channel tunnel, rail, bus and foot, please see Direction for Travel.
Campus Maps are also available online to help you find your way to the Clocktower Building.
Artist and Reader in Fine Art at the School of Music and Fine Art, Shona Illingworth is on the Judging Panel for FACT and Channels: The Australian Video Art Festival 2015 Artist Bursary. Her fellow judges are Soda Jerk, an art collective working with video installations and experimental film, currently in residence at FACT, Rory MacBeth, Practicing artist and Head of Fine Art at Liverpool John Moores University and Sarah Tutton, Senior Curator, at Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI).
Channels is an international biennial based in Melbourne, that showcases contemporary video practice from around the world. Provoking curiosities and critical dialogues around video art and its digital future, Channels will present a 10-day festival in September 2015. FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology, based in Liverpool, UK) and Channels Festival, as part of an international competition to support video artists and filmmakers, are looking for artists to submit innovative moving image work which explores contemporary issues around Memory, Time, Space and Identity.
The overall winner will have their work showcased simultaneously at the Human Futures Forum – an international symposium on Place hosted at FACT Liverpool in November 2015, and MPavillion, part of the National Gallery of Victoria, Australia. The winner will also receive a bursary of £2,000 to support the production of a new piece of work that will be showcased on National Media Arts Player and UK multi channel network for the arts Canvas and be put forward for exhibition in Hong Kong as part of ISEA 2016 . The winner will also be invited to join the selection panel for the following year’s competition.
Shona’s exhibition Lesions in the Landscape will be on display at FACT during the Human Futures Forum.
British Forum for Ethnomusicology: Annual Conference 2016 14–17 April 2016
The BFE invites proposals for its 2016 conference, which will be hosted by the School of Music and Fine Art in Chatham Historic Dockyard from April 14-17th, 2016. The British Forum for Ethnomusicology (BFE) is an association formerly known as the International Council for Traditional Music (ICTM, UK Chapter). As an Affiliate National Committee to the ICTM, the BFE aims to advance the study, practice, documentation, preservation and dissemination of traditional music and dance, including folk, popular, classical, urban, and other genres, of all countries. BFE is a body fiscally autonomous from any other organisation, and membership is open to anyone interested in the study of music and dance from all parts of the world. The BFE, in association with Routledge, publishes the scholarly journal Ethnomusicology Forum (formerly the British Journal of Ethnomusicology).
Proposals on any current research are welcome; papers having a nautical theme would be particularly appropriate, given the surroundings.
Proposals are invited for:
Papers (20 minutes with 5–10 minutes for questions)
Organised sessions (3 or 4 linked papers around a theme, totalling 1.5 or 2 hours)
Round table discussion sessions (3 or 4 shorter presentations, around 15 minutes each, followed by a chaired discussion, totalling 1.5 or 2 hours)
Poster or other material for digital display.
Proposals should be submitted in the following formats to enable them to be reviewed anonymously:
Paper proposals: include the name and email address of the proposer, paper title, and abstract (the latter not exceeding 300 words). The name of the proposer should not appear in the abstract. Organised session proposals: include the names and email addresses of the proposer and the other participants, an overall abstract for the session (not exceeding 300 words), and abstracts for each contributor (no more than 300 words each). Abstracts should not include the names of any of the participants. Roundtable proposals: include the names and email addresses of the proposer and the other participants (the proposer will be assumed to be the chair unless stated otherwise), an overall abstract for roundtable (not exceeding 300 words), and abstracts for each contributor (no more than 300 words each). Abstracts should not include the names of any of the participants. Poster/digital display proposals (digital displays will allow research to be shared using electronic posters as well as videos and other media). Include the name and email address of the researcher, a description of the material to be presented (not exceeding 300 words), and a brief description of your technical requirements. The name of the proposer should not appear in the descriptions.
DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS IS 1 NOVEMBER 2015. Successful applicants will be notified in December.
Please note that all presenters must be members of the BFE. Proposals should be submitted by email to: bfeconference2016@outlook.com
The next School of Music and Fine Art Cargo Music gig will be at the end of the Christmas term on Thursday 17th December, 8pm until late at Cargo, Liberty Quays, our award winning bar and bistro, in a stunning nautical and industrial-style venue and the perfect place to sample some of the best live music acts the area has to offer.
These gigs offer a platform for the numerous wonderful bands that have formed amongst SMFA students. The gigs, which have a fantastic atmosphere and always draw a crowd, are free to attend.
For details for bands wanting to perform, either email Alan Mash or go along to the Bands Forum with Rich Perks on a Tuesday at 5pm, where you can receive coaching. Individuals who wish to join a band are also encouraged to attend Bands Forum to meet and play with other musicians.
The Easter SMFA gig at Cargo was a huge success, with three fantastic bands from across the stages of the School of Music and Fine Art giving powerful and exciting performances.
The bands included: Wondermoth (headline act) Beat the Devil’s Tattoo The Outcome
Acclaimed contemporary visual artist and Senior Lecturer in Fine Art in the School of Music and Fine Art, Adam Chodzko, is preparing to open Design for a Fold at the Sidney Cooper Gallery. Funded by the Arts Council England and The Elephant Trust, it is a new installation incorporating many of Chodzko’s works made locally since his move to Kent in 2001.
Mapping his particular engagement with places, times and communities around where he lives and works in Whitstable, the exhibition seeks to root, or fold, the idea of the local within another, apparently remote, alien and distant place; Beppu, Japan. It will expand, compress and twist an understanding of Kent into a new form, questioning who, what, when and where we might be within its landscape and communities.
Chodzko’s art explores the interactions and possibilities of human behaviour. Exhibiting internationally since 1991, Chodzko works across media, from video installation to subtle interventions, with a practice that is situated both within the gallery and the wider public realm.
After studying the History of Art at the University of Manchester and Fine Art as a Masters at Goldsmiths College London, Chodzko has exhibited at numerous venues around the world. These include the Tate Britain, Venice Biennale, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Istanbul Biennial and locally at the Folkestone Triennial.
Adam Chodzko has been shortlisted for the prestigious Jarman Award.
Design for a Fold opens at the Sidney Cooper Gallery on Thursday 15 October with an exclusive evening with Adam Chodzko and Dr. Andy Birtwistle, Director of The Centre for Practice-Based Research in the Arts at Canterbury Christ Church University, from 5.30-6.30pm. Please contact the gallery for further details and to book a place.
The exhibition will run until Saturday 21 November and admission is free.
Grierson Award nominated film Public House premieres on 12th October 2015 at the BFI London Film Festival. This genre-blending documentary of spoken word / text/ opera/ film, funded by a production award from Film London Artists’ Moving Image Network (FLAMIN) and a research award from the School of Music and Fine Art, University of Kent, is directed by Sarah Turner, Reader in Fine Art and Director of Research in the School of Music and Fine Art.
Artist and Ivy House shareholder, Sarah Turner, lives nearby the pub and has been documenting key moments of the community take over since April 2012. Then, the pub’s staff were given a few days notice of eviction and closure; the cherished Ivy
House had been sold for conversion into flats. The creativity and energy of the community ensured this did not happen: the sale was blocked through an English Heritage listing, the pub was registered as the first Asset of Community Value in the UK, then triumphantly purchased. The Ivy House Community Pub re-opened in August 2013 and in doing so has both rewritten London history and proposed the potential for an alternative social imaginary.
We invited Sarah to talk about the inspiration for this ground-breaking work.
“Public House takes participatory documentary to a whole new level. Activated in response to the community take over of the Ivy House pub, London, SE15, the film is a multi layered exploration of memory, community and social reinvention which fuses fact and fiction in a shape shifting genre hybrid that moves documentary into a form of opera. The community owned Ivy House is now itself a shape shifting venue, hosting events as diverse as folk music, swing classes, knitting circles, big band Sunday roasts and samba workshops for pre schoolers. The film mirrors this cultural transformation in a movement through documentary events, to forms of community participation that are rooted in pub culture – in this case, spoken word and performance poetry – to a minimalist opera that is composed of ambient sound and the collective voice. The film’s final image takes the creative energy of the Ivy House out of the pub and onto the streets, where a mass community assembly re-imagines William Blake’s vision of angels on nearby Peckham Rye. “A tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars.”
Public House explores the social function of pubs with the Ivy House story at the centre of it. What it means to be local, ideas of insider / outsider, community and participation, home and belonging, are the crucial anxieties of our age, crystallised in our relationship to place and space. Pubs are spaces that allow us to connect with others who are often quite different from us; the encounter with a stranger is at the heart of pub culture, and also – possibly – why we value it. What other spaces allow us to explore our fictions, both the events of our lives, and the complex human emotions which are staples of pub culture – lust, fear, desire and mourning – socially, in a public, as opposed to a private, house?
A unique social choreography took place in the community take over of the Ivy House when a dynamic and defiant community responded to the loss of a treasured public space. The film interweaves portraits of these key characters, events and voices with portraits of the surrounding landscape and streets. Key sequences of animated stills punctuate the work: The Ivy House overlooks a vast field of allotments and wide time-lapsed tableaus have been photographed over a couple of years. This almost pastoral image of artisanal labour, growth and seasonal transformation, offers an alternative portrait of Peckham Rye, an area often associated with the usual urban clichés of blight and decay.
Public House, the film, performs its own unique choreography through its approach to participation: We brought together a group from within the wider pub community to share experience – through writing poetry. We were preoccupied with the idea of remembering an encounter with a stranger that was life changing/ transformative. In the process the poems expanded from that – into – a wider thematic of pub encounters/pub experiences. Empathy, connection and the limits of understanding (what we learn and how we are changed by an other) became a major part of this: participants had to work with /interpret & support the “others” experience and crucially; when they performed the poems in the pub to an invited audience, they were paired off and they performed the other’s poem first. In the film, we intercut both versions of the performance, largely moving from other to self: this produces some uncanny translations – eg, an older woman enacting the story of a much younger man – and is also key to codes of reading; who is inside and outside both the community and the film: There is a synergy in the experience of the pub and film audience: both are re translating, projecting/ re-associating these stories, as we see the person that we suspect is the subject of one story that we’re holding the memory of, narrating or performing another’s.
The multiple levels of voice, memory and performance, are further developed in the word/text poetry of the Soundscape, which carries the underlying structural movement of the film. The Soundscape is composed – as with music concrete – through fragments of spoken word and ambient audio drawn from the immediate environment. Much of this is in the sound design and is developed through accousmatic composition. Accousmatic composers work through an understanding of acoustic ecology, which sonifies ambient sound harmonically and tonally. In the film this builds through sound design/repetitive refrain and culminates in clear shifts where the fragments of voice resolve into fully formed librettos.
These librettos are constructed from verbatim voice recordings of pub users – past and present – engaging in ‘pub talk’: memories of the space as well as their fears, dreams, desires. These recordings form a sonic ethnography of the unconscious of a community: the verbatim performance of memory and imagining – or, the continual and engaged movement of the past in the present – is formed of the collective voice: cyclical refrain builds into harmonics, which stages the creative action and imaginary of the community as a form of creative expression.
The film weaves these elements together: moving from a document of individual memory via the testaments woven through the soundscape, into the pub’s swing dance classes, which re interpret the movement of the 30’s in this 30’s space, through to the staged collective authorship that explores different forms of encounters through performance poetry, the film culminates in a mass assembly which proposes an alternative vision of Blake’s angelic presence. This mass response to a historical image is a metaphor for how our imaginary potential is engaged through an exchange with our past. Public spaces that incorporate our every day, connect us with our past, our fictions and our truths are increasingly being privatised. Public House is an allegory of how the resonance of individual and cultural memory has the potential to reinvent these spaces, and in so doing imagine a different social contract.”
Sarah Turner trained at St Martin’s School of Art and the Slade School of Fine Art. She is an artist, filmmaker, writer, curator and academic. Her feature films include Ecology, 97mins, 2007, Perestroika, 118mins, 2009, (theatrically released by the ICA in 2010 and featured in Tate Britain’s major survey: Assembly), and Perestroika:Reconstructed, conceived and executed as a gallery work (Carroll Fletcher Gallery, London, April/ May 2013).
Turner’s short films include Overheated Symphony, UK, 10mins, orchestrated for Birds Eye View Film Festival 2008, Cut, 17 mins, 2000, was broadcast on Channel 4, and A Life in a Day with Helena Goldwater, 20 mins, 1996, and Sheller Shares Her Secret, 8 mins, 1994, both headlined Midnight Underground when they were also broadcast on Channel 4. Sarah has had feature scripts commissioned by the BFI, Film Four Lab and Zephyr Films. Amongst other curatorial projects, Turner produced (with Jon Thomson) the launch programme for Lux Cinema in 1997; Hygiene and Hysteria: The body desired and the body debased, a touring programme of artists’ film and video for Arts Council England and programmes for Tate and the National Film Theatre.
