Working with Private Media Materials in the Public Realm

These workshops are concerned with how we work with private media materials when we seek to bring them in to the public realm. It has increasingly been acknowledged that our museums and galleries need to widen their collections. Often though, trunks, attics and garages continue to store cine film, photographs, documents and other artefacts. The three proposed workshops are organised on the following basis: (1) cine film (2) visual and written artefacts and (3) traces of travelled objects. In all three sessions the skills of academics, new researchers, artists, curators and archivists will be pooled together to consider (1) ethical and theoretical issues and (2) creative practices that currently exist and how they can be innovated futher through future projects. The style of the workshops will infuse high theory with practice-based sessions, including work in progress.
Questions of memory, time and loss make it difficult to have public conversations of records of the past. These workshops will reflect on some of the difficulties inherent to materials from autobiographical and collective pasts. They will also engage with creative methodologies that work with the difficulties. Ethical aspects of collecting and representing will be explored with the contrasting responsibility to remember and document. Innovative methods for using new media in thinking through the connection between collecting, curating and exhibiting will be fore-grounded. As will be the opportunity for generating new collectives in public conversations of private media collections within the domain of galleries beyond the more predictable ways of hearing and telling stories and accounts.
All of the workshops will be organised by a collaborative team from Herbert Media, Goldsmiths College and Coventry University. The sessions will be held at Herbert Art Gallery in Coventry. Essential background readings will be sent to participants in advance of the events. As participants will draw on work in progress, a 'live' aspect to research will operate alongside theorisation. Theorists will speak at all three of the sessions, as will practitioners, artists and active members of different 'community' groups who want to explore innovative ways in which cine film, photographs, videos, diaries, letters and travelled objects can be brought into the public realm in a sensitive and engaging way.

The three workshops will be on:

1. Cine Film

Theoretical interventions that impact on all the workshops will be presented here, with attention to the specific case of cine film. This session will include an academic specialist who has interpreted non-professionally produced cine film, as well as staff from galleries and museums who archive amateur cine film of local scenes and events such as the workplace and political meetings. A small selection of cine films will be transferred to DVD so that screening of work in progress can be safely conducted.

2. Visual & Written Artefacts

This session will illustrate how 'invisible' narratives and histories can be (re)constructed using photographs, video, letters and film from the past to create new narratives of engagement. The workshop will involve both academics and practitioners and students involved in producing artefacts of their own historical routes. A small selection of student projects will become the focal point of the workshop. The students will be assisted in their preparations for the presentations.

3. Material Traces of Travelled Objects

The session will examine the meanings of treasured personal possessions brought to the UK by those who have journeyed here. It will enable an exploration of the significance of private relics and mementos within narratives of remembrance, identity and belonging. The multiple pathways of travelled objects and the traces they bear will be introduced through examp