Livingmaps Network

Dreaming of a Post-Covid World

(Creative partners: Sol Perez-Martinez and Kimbal Bumstead)

Dreaming of a Post-Covid World was a curatorial project devised by Sol Perez-Martinez and Kimbal Bumstead, which sought to explore the practice of map making as a form of visual storytelling within the context of the global pandemic. Via an open call, people were invited to send handmade maps of their quarantine experiences and their dreams for the future. Participants were invited to map or draw their ideal place, a place they dreamed they could visit in a post-covid world, a place they wished to live in, or perhaps a local place they wanted to transform. This task could be interpreted as abstractly or concretely as they wished, it could be mundane or absurd, real or utopian, simple or complex.

The responses were diverse and playful, embracing a range of media and visual languages from drawing and mark-making, through to collage and even a map baked as bread. The maps speak as much of inner worlds and re-readings of reality as they do of political proposals and calls for community action. They capture some of the dreams, hopes and internal discourses of people during the lockdown period of 2020. A curated selection of the maps and participant responses is presented in Livingmaps Review Issue 9, along with an accompanying text: https://www.livingmaps.org/dreaming-of-a-postcovid-world

ENERGY IN STORE

(Creative partner: John Wallett)

In the AHRC funded project ‘Energy in Store’, (2017-18) external researchers have been working with Science Museum Group curators and conservators to explore the potential of the Science Museum Group stored collections. 

The Group’s collections include around 425,000 objects, and in total seven million items including books, archival records, photographs and other media. Although some of these are on permanent display in the museums, and others will feature in special exhibitions and loans to other venues, most of them will remain in the stores for the foreseeable future.
In Energy in Store a small working group of curators and researchers was brought together, united by an interest in the history of energy production and distribution. 

Over the last year that working group has met on a regular basis to exchange perspectives and explore new ideas. We held workshops and visits taking in Blythe House in West Kensington, the Library and Archives at the Science Museum, the Collections Centre at the Museum of Science and Industry, and the National Collections Centre at Wroughton. 

During those meetings the group have discussed around 150 different objects that relate to energy generation and distribution – ranging from a fossilised tree, to dummy nuclear waste, domestic gas meters, early batteries, engines, and models of power stations.  

Visiting the stores and focusing on objects has allowed us to tackle a series of questions How could SMG offer access to the object collections which is better adapted to the needs of external researchers? Where might researchers benefit from a greater understanding what happens ‘behind the scenes’? We have also discussed issues of concern shared by all parties – how could the historical knowledge that external researchers are producing about the objects be more systematically integrated into the museum records? How can volunteer organisations, interest groups and museums avoid intergenerational loss of expert knowledge? What benefits (or hazards) does the digital present to object-based research?

The project has been facilitated by information designer and community arts expert John Wallett, and recorded as a documentary film by Aura Films.

At a final symposium in June we brought some key topics, debates and ideas from Energy in Store to a larger audience of interest groups, the voluntary heritage sector and professional museums staff. We will screen the film, and use the findings from Energy in Store as a provocation for further debate with the audience. 

We will also be publishing further material in the form of a printed publication and an archive of stills photography, audio interviews and supplementary video footage.


AHRC Funding and Delivery
The project is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (grant ref: AH/P013678/1 official title: Integrating Forms of Care: building communities of practice around reserve collections).
It is being delivered by Dr Anna Woodham, King’s College London, Jack Kirby, Group Head of Collection Services, SMG, and Dr Elizabeth Haines, Research Associate, Science Museum, London, between July 2017 and July 2018.

Energy in Store page on the SMG website:
https://group.sciencemuseum.org.uk/project/energy-in-store/

Lecture series: Our Kind of Town 

A series of occasional public lectures by leading figures in the movement to rethink what London means to its citizens, drawing on its historical record, its contemporary social geography and its future. Lecturers have included Michael Edwards, Anna Minton, Ben Campkin and Emma Spruce. 

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Rethinking the Legacy of 1968: Left Fields and the Quest for Common Ground

The Art of Mapping

These workshops are run by Kimbal Bumquist annd Jina Lee, two artists who have developed innovative approaches to creative mapping . Further workshops are planned and  details will be posted shortly.

Speaking out of place 

Speaking out of Place was a series of community mapping and research projects carried out between 2013 and 15 in and around the Olympic Park, East Village and Stratford, London E 15 and E 20.  The projects were devised and delivered in partnership with The Building Exploratory and received funding and support from the London Legacy Development Corporation.  The work formed the basis of a conference in 2015, London’s Turning, a community photography project and a number of publications.

Community Photography Project - MyPlaceYourPlaceE20

MyPlaceYourPlaceE20 was part of the Speaking Out of Place research in East Village (formerly the Athletes’ Village), London, E20.  Debbie Humphry took ethnographic photographs of East Village residents and the wider Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park development in E20. She worked with East Village residents as they took photographs of their experiences as pioneers in the new development. The project culminated in 2015-16 in the first major photographic exhibition about the East Village, which was displayed in the Sir Ludwig Guttman Health Centre and Stratford Library. 

Youth Video

A video was produced by Aura Films which explores the perceptions of young people living in East Village. It is based on a series of workshops in which participants learnt techniques for video film making. The video explores what it is like to grow up in East Village as a major site the Olympic legacy narrative, focusing on issues of place, identity and belonging, youth representation, policing and public amenity. The video can be viewed on YouTube.

THIS IS OUR EAST 20: The Young Persons Guide to the Olympic Park…

Two groups of Year Nine students in the Chobham Academy school in the heart of East Village took part in a creative mapping and environmental exploration project about their experience of place. Visit a new version of the project website at: https://www.oureast20.com/wordpress/.

Ethnographic Research: Living The Dream?

Livingmaps carried out an ethnographic study examining patterns of inhabitation and meaning amongst incoming tenants of East Village. It forms the basis of two chapters of London 2012 and the Post Olympic City (Palgrave Macmillan 2017) by Phil Cohen (‘A Place beyond belief: hysterical materials and the making of East 20’)  and Debbie Humphry (‘The best new place to Live: visual research with residents in East Village’). 

Curated event at the Museum of London: The ‘London Aftershock salon’

An evening of live performance, multimedia, debate and play at the Museum of London. Livingmaps presented two very different visions of life in London in 2049. Participants were invited to decide which they preferred – or to add their own alternative. After hearing the arguments, they had the opportunity to contribute to three rooms in the Museum of 2049, each one featuring responses to a different scenario of urban shock. The full text is available here.

WILLIAM BUNGE MEMORIAL LECTURES

Bunge’s project of expeditionary geography and in particular his book Fitzgerald: Geography of a revolution, published in 1971 was one of the chief inspirations in setting up Living Maps. 

Bunge belonged to a generation of intellectuals who believed in scientific socialism as offering a higher form of rationality in the service of the fight for social justice. He was trained as a quantitative geographer, and thought that mathematical topology would put geography at last on a properly scientific footing. In the 1960’s , while teaching in Detroit, he became  disillusioned with the Academy,  became an activist against the Vietnam war, supported the student movement, alienated  his fellow academics by his outspoken views, got fired from his university job,   and became involved in community campaigns   against the endemic racism of  Detroit’s  educational system , housing policies and city governance.  He was blacklisted and couldn’t get a job in any American university so in the early 70s’ he moved to Canada, where he lived until his death in 2013.       

It was from the vantage point of being strongly embedded in the struggles of the black and white working class communities of Detroit that Bunge embarked on the expeditionary geography that was to culminate in the publication of ‘Fitzgerald’. This remarkable book  combines elements of oral history, cultural geography, social cartography , and visual ethnography to provide a rich , multilayered account of  the past , present and future of  a suburb of Detroit which was undergoing  rapid socio-economic change , and which had been one of the centres of the uprisings which marked the radicalisation of the civil rights movement in  1960’s. Bunge not only set out capture the density and complexity of that local experience, he used it as a lens through which to focus and analysis the intersection of race and class in the unravelling of the Great American Dream.

Seminar series: Cultural cartographies

The theme of Livingmaps’ seminar series in 2017-18 was Cultural Cartographies. Maps are never simply made and put use: they are always embedded in culture, which determines how and why they are made and used. Some cultural geographies are better represented on maps than others. This series explored the many ways that culture may be represented and reproduced on maps, whilst also being implicit in the many ways that maps are used. The series brought together academics, artists and others to explore these all too often hidden dimensions of cartography.