Trellis: lines of separation or connection - An essay by Tom Jeffreys - UCL
←
→
Page content transcription
If your browser does not render page correctly, please read the page content below
Trellis:
lines of separation
or connection
An essay by Tom Jeffreys
...the University will have to become one place, among others, where the attempt is made to think the social bond without recourse to a unifying idea, whether of culture or of the state. In the University, thought goes on alongside other thoughts, we think beside each other. But do we think together? Bill Readings The University in Ruins, 1996
Frames
and frameworks
Usually associated with gardens, The catalyst for Trellis is the
a trellis plays a functional role – it construction of UCL East, part of the
supports the growth of climbing ongoing transformation of the Queen
plants – as well as an aesthetic one. Elizabeth Olympic Park. In addition to
As a framework, a trellis helps to UCL, the site will see major cultural
direct growth in a way that facilitates institutions including London College
gardening as (interspecies) co- of Fashion, Sadler’s Wells and the
production process. As a frame, V&A making up a cultural cluster
the trellis directs the eye towards known as East Bank. As a new arrival
an aesthetic engagement with the in a place undergoing significant
garden as place or experience. Trellis change, UCL East is taking seriously
is therefore an apt name for a multi- its responsibilities to both new and
stage public engagement initiative existing communities. Multiple projects
that involves artists, researchers have been taking place in the local area
and participants across several east ahead of the scheduled opening of the
London communities coming together campus in 2022. This is where Trellis
through diverse processes of creative comes in: as “part of the wider vision
collaboration. Trellis is about working for UCL Public Art and Community
together and working together can be Engagement to create opportunities
complicated. for collaboration between artists,
researchers and communities based
Trellis consists of five projects, each around the future UCL East campus”. In
with its own processes and priorities, some ways, each artist is being asked
thematic interests and approach to to play a mediating role between the
collaboration. Together, these five institution and local communities. But in
projects have resulted in a multitude of doing this work through contemporary
artistic outputs – walks and workshops, art, Trellis also opens up possibilities
films, drawings, photography, an artist’s to stay with and attend to specific
book – as well as multiple legacies entangled complexities beyond the
that may or may not be defined as simplifying narratives of regeneration.
art, including new relationships, new
knowledge and understanding, new
ways of working together and, more
tangibly perhaps, tree cuttings that will
soon be planted in the grounds of UCL
East, the university’s new campus in the
Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.
For 2020-21, the five projects are:
1 Flow Unlocked, involving artists
Jon Adams and Briony Campbell
with autism researcher Georgia
Pavlopoulou, working together with
autistic communities to explore the vital
importance of relationships for autistic
people
2 Xenia Citizen Science Project,
consisting of artist Sarah Carne
collaborating with biochemical engineer
Charnett Chau and architect-designer
Danielle Purkiss on a composting
project with Xenia, a community
knowledge and language exchange for
women in Hackney
3 Mulberry – Tree of Plenty with artists
Sara Heywood and Jane Watt working
with biomaterials specialist David Chau
and Bethnal Green residents to explore
the multiple meanings and material
applications of the mulberry tree
4 Artist Edwin Mingard in partnership
with interdisciplinary historian Keren
Weitzberg and people in east London
who have been oppressed by the hostile
environment policies instituted by the
UK Home Office
5 Light-Wave, a collaboration between
artist Rubbena Aurangzeb-Tariq, sign
language researcher Bencie Woll,
and people in east London’s deaf
community to engage with and increase
recognition of their history, culture
and language.
Mulberry leaf, by Sara Heywood
Mapping
people
and place
Both Light-Wave and Mulberry have the appearance of these species in
been informed by an interest in mapping London from Roman times, their use
as a way to understand and visualise in medicine, food and drink, and as
relationships between people and symbols of official local identity (there
place. Heywood and Watt, who have are mulberries on the Tower Hamlets
worked together on several site-specific coat of arms and on local street signs)
projects in the past, settled on the and even sites of resistance, such as
mulberry tree as a way of exploring the ancient mulberry tree threatened
overlaps between materiality and local by developers and the ongoing battle
history. Across walks, workshops, to save it by local campaigners.
online talks, a short film and more, the According to the artists, Mulberry
pair, along with their collaborator, Chau, developed through the “organic growth
channelled multiple forms of knowledge, of conversations from one person to
including local legends, biotechnology, another”. The project therefore did
oral history, memory and lived not only map existing connections but
experience. There are two species of formed new ones through conversations
mulberry tree in the UK: most are black and informal modes of knowledge
mulberries (Morus nigra) which produce exchange.
a juicy, wine-like fruit, but there are also
white mulberries, much rarer in the UK,
which are grown for their leaves to feed
silkworms. Heywood and Watt charted
Multiple conversations have also campaigning. Across 2020-21,
created new connections through the conversations revolved around, among
work of Aurangzeb-Tariq. Perhaps other things, Black Lives Matter. In
best known for her expressive, allusive Sign Language, Aurangzeb-Tariq tells
painting and drawing, Aurangzeb- me, there are different ways to sign
Tariq makes work in response to her “Black” (depending on whether it refers
experiences as a deaf Muslim woman. to a person or a colour) and no single
After discussions with deaf people in sign for ‘Matter’. As researcher Bencie
east London, Aurangzeb-Tariq’s initial Woll puts it, “2020 saw the very rapid
aim for Light-Wave was to create a introduction of a new expression and
collaboratively sculpted mosaic map the way somebody signs it can tell you
that would use imagery based on Sign about the attitude they might have”.
Language specific to east London to
draw attention to sites of deaf historical These discussions therefore took place
significance across the area (such as along lines of difference within the
England’s first school for deaf people, deaf community, lines of separation or
opened in 1783 off Mare Street in connection based on age or politics or
Hackney). lived experience. In response to these
important conversations, Aurangzeb-
But with Covid-19 rendering this Tariq is producing a film that combines
initial plan impossible, the project personal stories from deaf participants
was reconfigured in response to with a series of the artist’s recent time-
numerous online video conversations lapse drawings of bodies expressing
around language, translation and overlapping emotions and ideas
the experience of relying upon through Sign Language. “I’m mapping
Rubbena Aurangzeb-Tariq - Light-Wave
interpretation. British Sign Language out different communities through
was recognised as the fourth language conversation,” she says.
in the UK in 2003 but while Scotland
Photographs by Ollie Harrop
passed a BSL Act in 2015 to promote
its use, there remains no equivalent
legislation in England despite sustained
Compost bin - Xenia, photograph by Sarah Carne
Questions of language and (mis) publication, rich with writing across a
translation inform Sarah Carne’s myriad of modes: workshop notes, email
approach too. Like Heywood and Watt, exchanges, chat messages, personal
Carne’s work has long engaged with recollections and conversations –
materiality, but her interest is more some in translation, some about
in the relationship between materials translation. The book’s title stems from
and status, questioning why certain a misunderstanding. As Carne reveals in
materials are privileged and valued and the introduction, one of the participants,
others derided. For Trellis, Carne, Chau Fatima, spoke of having a bitter orange
and Purkiss initiated a composting tree and an orange tree in her garden
experiment with Hackney-based in Damascus. Carne admits that this
Xenia as a way to engage directly with sounded “odd” in translation and that
biodegradable plastic and foreground her instinct was to edit the resulting text
the importance of lived experience, to remove what she had perceived to be
knowledge sharing and care – of an error. But it was explained that these
people, objects (including compost) and are in fact two different types of tree.
community. Carne’s resulting book, A “My assumption,” admits Carne, “was
bitter orange tree and an orange tree: wrong”.
practices of care, encapsulates this
approach. The book is a multi-textured
© Sarah Carne
Hiding in space, Briony Campbell Trust Within each Trellis project are As an artist with autism, Adams’ numerous, complex relationships involvement in Flow Unlocked was structured in part by differentials also a sign that the project could of power, precarity and personal be trusted by other autistic people. experience. An ethos shared across As one participant, Benny Wheeler, several projects has been “not subsequently said: about..., but with”: not about deaf people but with deaf people; not “It wasn’t like the kinds of research/ about autistic people but with autistic focus groups I’d been used to; the ones people. Sometimes this came from that are more like data collection, where the researchers; sometimes from the you answer the questions and go on artists. Any collaboration involves trust your way never to be contacted again. but for those Trellis projects working We were kept involved and consulted with marginalised and oppressed on everything, and had a lot of input communities this was especially into how we wanted to be represented fundamental. “Trust to an autistic and what ideas we liked and didn’t like. person is very important,” says artist Everyone was equally as important; our Jon Adams. “We are so often on the opinions were all valued.” i receiving end of what everybody else wants for us,” he tells me, citing This approach is vital for art but also widespread media misrepresentation for academic research. As Woll puts and mistreatment by charities and it: “working with the deaf community scientific researchers more interested doesn’t just mean sharing research in discovering biomarkers for autism with people but listening to them. It than in addressing the questions that means working with a community to find autistic people actually need answers research questions that are important to, especially around sleep, mental for the community.” health and the alarmingly high suicide rate. “Society thinks we are a disease that needs to be cured, but we’re just a natural part of human evolution,” he says. “We’re not broken; we’re broken by society.”
Still from H is for Hostile Environment, film by Edwin Mingard
Power and
payment
When it comes to engagements with issue of how much we’re each paid, and
academia, artists – usually operating therefore how much our experience is
as individuals – can find themselves valued, we are level from the off.”
subordinated to the needs of the
institution. In participatory art, however, Mingard and Weitzberg’s project
the artist often has power over the involved collaborating with people
participants. Several Trellis artists in east London who had first-hand
sought to counter such hierarchies experiences of oppression by the UK
through a number of strategies Home Office whose hostile environment
including, quite simply, paying all policy, creeping surveillance and
participants. This is not always common militarisation of data across many
practice in participatory art. Edwin aspects of life can prevent access
Mingard, whose work has often involved to healthcare or benefits even when
co-production and establishing DIY people have every legal right to be
and grass-roots initiatives, identified here. Participants in the work include
the dangers of a possible power A, who fled civil war in Somalia and is
imbalance between the artist and other a legitimate asylum seeker. Yet for over
collaborators. “If everybody is paid,” a decade, the Home Office has been
says Mingard, “everybody can mark attempting to deport him to Yemen,
out that time. It’s important for this a war zone that A has never visited.
project that lived experience is valued These accounts are deeply shocking,
equally to artistic experience and is paid says Mingard, and they are stories that
accordingly. And that is quite powerful, people should know about.”
especially for somebody that has had
difficult experiences. On this critical
Still from H is for Hostile Environment,
film by Edwin Mingard
But Mingard’s approach goes beyond argued that biometrics “opens a gulf
raising awareness. “It’s not just telling between streamlined bureaucracies
stories,” he says, “but exploring cultural and people’s messy lives”. ii Perhaps
traditions”, and doing so together. Mingard and Weitzberg’s project might
Mingard honed this way of working be seen as a kind of choreographic
while making An Intermission (2020), embrace of the messiness.
a film made in collaboration with a
network of young people experiencing Both Mingard and Briony Campbell
homelessness in Stoke-On-Trent. For made clear to me that it is not only the
Trellis, he adopted a similar approach, ethics of collaboration that matter but
involving participants at every stage also the quality of the artistic outcome.
of the process – from idea conception Campbell’s work as a photographer and
to filming and editing. One participant film-maker has focused on relationships
is a formerly undocumented Chinese in a wide variety of contexts: from a
artist, who wanted to perform a type collaboration between London rappers
of peasant opera from Fujian Province and musicians in Mali (Routes to Roots)
partly as a way to teach his son about to the artist’s own relationship with
his cultural heritage. He collaborated her dying father (The Dad Project).
with Edwin and video artist Wei Zhou to “Relationships are how I understand
create a section of the film, discussing the world,” says Campbell, an approach
ideas and rehearsing the performance she shares with Pavlopoulou, who has
together. This is a living cultural tradition been working with autistic people and
that he had not performed publicly in 20 their families for nearly two decades. As
years. Pavlopoulou puts it: “I have a passion
working with multidisciplinary teams,
Mingard’s collaborator on Trellis, UCL experts by experience and scholar
researcher Keren Weitzberg, is an activists in community-based mental
expert in the socio-political implications health research.”
of digital technologies, especially
biometrics in east Africa. She has
Still from H is for Hostile Environment,
film by Edwin MingardThe collectors show and tell, drawing by Jon Adams - Flow Unlocked
A result of these shared approaches, Campbell’s approach to making work
Flow Unlocked focuses on the is considered and time-consuming:
importance of intimate relationships for Trellis, she tried out multiple
for autistic people. The project saw possibilities, making photographs
Jon Adams return to drawing after a and moving image works in response
fifteen-year hiatus in which he focused both to Adams’ drawings and to
mainly on sound and installation. Over the poetry produced by autistic
the past year he has produced an array participants (including Adams) in the
of incredibly detailed Biro drawings, group workshops, and then adjusting
entitled Covid Corvids, in response to the works and developing new ideas
conversations among the participants. in response to further feedback from
Some of these are like formal portraits; those involved. One iteratively produced
some are full of the freedom of flight; work is a film of Adams reading a
others are articulations of trauma. poem that he wrote in response to
One striking work shows an individual one of Campbell’s videos. To me,
holding up a mammal skull in its while Campbell’s work feels quiet and
dinosaur-like forearms before a group of reparative, some of Adams’ drawings
four fellow corvids. Each grins to reveal are strikingly tense. It might be a result
rows of teeth – a nod to their dinosaur of the medium (the uncompromising
ancestors and to Adams’ past as a lines of Biro ink) or the way that Adams
palaeontologist. has characterised the subjects. You
can trace the lines of attention from
one individual to another, but the layers
of emotion or intent remain powerfully
open to interpretation.Making sense of the strangness, Briony Campbell
Campbell speaks of a sense of At the same time, Campbell has shared
responsibility to do justice to the with me an online sketchpad containing
contributions of others: “more than dozens of images: a moth held in a
any project I’ve ever done, this has human hand; an orange bag floating in
involved a weighing up of relationships a canal; the blurred wings of a pigeon
and expectations,” Campbell says, in flight. Each is like a multi-layered
with participants at once co-producers collage of ideas and emotions, text
of the work and its most important and image, but there is more: “how the
audience. As she explains: “firstly, I images sit together is sometimes as
am representing autistic people whose important as the individual image,” says
lived experience of autism I don’t share, Campbell. This online format enables
and secondly the dual role of artist and users to re-arrange the images as they
facilitator creates multiple priorities that wish, thereby offering the possibility of
do not always easily align”. an open-ended composite artwork that
questions a clear distinction between
process and outcome, and allows the
collaboration not only to remain ongoing
but to grow.
Photograph by Briony CampbellPhotograph by Ollie Harrop
The Trellis
effect
To me the open-ended interactive that is collaborative (with Mingard
possibilities of Campbell’s work feel and Weitzberg) but also independent,
like a crystallisation of many of the only coming together as a whole (if
questions being explored across the indeed a whole is what is formed) in
Trellis programme. If there is one thing the completed work itself. Mingard
that all five projects have in common, himself speaks of the work’s “modular
it is perhaps their engagement with structure”. Campbell creates an open-
the trellis itself. Not only has each ended framework for a multiplicity of
project been shaped by the overarching possible encounters while Heywood
structure of Trellis but each project has and Watt suggest that perhaps a
also created its own internal trellis-like place is like a trellis – a framework of
structure. The result is almost fractal- connections between histories and
like: trellises within trellises. This is true traditions, memories and relationships
of the complex, sensitively thought- – and they do so through a project that
through processes that every project itself exists in many parts. Meanwhile,
has entailed. But it also to varying Aurangzeb-Tariq’s film offers her
extents, true of the finished works own time-lapse drawing as a kind of
themselves (as if, having spent time punctuation that structures the signed
with works such as Campbell’s, one contributions from participants. Or
could ever again draw such a clear line perhaps it’s the other way round, with
between process and outcome). the signing like punctuation between
the continually evolving sentences of
Carne’s A bitter orange tree and an Aurangzeb-Tariq’s endlessly beguiling
orange tree, is one example of this time-lapse drawing.
trellis effect, with the material form
and organisational structure of the
book a way of gathering together an
extraordinary array of contributions,
each with its own voice and grammar.
Mingard and Weitzberg’s film functions
similarly, with each participant an
artist in their own right, creating workPhotograph by Briony Campbell
The limits
and beyond
Just as the university has long been Participatory art may be empowering,
modelled as an ideal community, but what kind of power can it truly
so it can be tempting to see within confer? Several Trellis projects are
collaborative art utopian possibilities engaging with societal issues of vital
for wider social change. Claire Bishop, importance: the misrepresentation
a well-known critic of participatory art, of autistic people in the media, the
has argued that the field demonstrates silencing of their voices by those
“a lack of faith in the intrinsic value who claim to speak for them; the
of art and lack of faith in democratic marginalisation of deaf people and
political processes”. iii Bishop’s thesis culture, including the active suppression
has been challenged on several grounds of Sign Language; the relentless
but it remains important to acknowledge persecution of vulnerable people by an
the limits of participatory art. There is a increasingly oppressive state...
vast difference, as Black feminist author
Brittney Cooper has argued, between At their best, projects such as Trellis
having power and feeling empowered. can offer both critique of today’s failing
In her memoir Eloquent Rage, Cooper power systems and momentary utopian
writes that “power is conferred by social glimpses of something better. Some
systems” while “empowerment is a will hopefully have legacies beyond the
feeling that individuals learn to cultivate duration of the collaborative process.
when their power is compromised-to- But when the art stops, other, more
nonexistent”. iv powerful and better-funded institutions
need to be willing to continue the work.
The question now is: how will they?References
i Benny Wheeler, via email
ii Keren Weitzberg, ‘Machine-Readable Refugees’, London
Review of Books, 14 September 2020: https://www.lrb.co.uk/
blog/2020/september/machine-readable-refugees
iii Claire Bishop, ‘Participation and Spectacle: Where Are
We Now?’, Creative Time, 2011: https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=CvXhgAmkvLs
iv Tavi Gevinson, ‘Britney Spears Was Never in Control’, The
Cut, 23 February 2021: https://www.thecut.com/amp/2021/02/
tavi-gevinson-britney-spears-was-never-in-control.html?__
twitter_impression=trueYou can also read
