ARCHITECTURE + PHILOSOPHY PUBLIC LECTURE SERIES 2006 SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN, RMIT UNIVERSITY
MAKING CREATIVE PLACES
Dr Anna Hickey-Moody (Education, Monash University) Thursday, 12 October 7:30pm in RMIT Theatre 8.11.68 (Enter via Swanston St: Bldg 8, level 11, theatre 68 - to the right of the lifts)
This lecture explores the work of two UK based organizations, each of which looks to develop a creative society and foster creativity in young people. I take up Deleuzian concepts of spatiality to explore the work of two UK arts companies which seek to foster creativity in young people. In contemporary cultural formations, such creativity is often reduced to a social, economic and subjective signifier of health or wealth. As Deleuze and Guattari (1994: 10) wryly note:
concepts [like creativity] are products that can be sold. the one who packages the product, commodity, or work of art has become the philosopher, conceptual persona, or artist¹.
Consider a circumstance in which a creative thought¹ is one that heals the wounds of a distressed youth, or which yields advertising dollars. Such situations are easy enough to find, as are members of Florida¹s (2002) creative class¹: those who profit financially from the cultural capital of minoritarian communities. If creativity as the differential becoming of the world (Deleuze 1994) is to be nurtured through social formations, then new distinctions and connections must be made between artistic technique, innovation, cultural capital, and social and economic value. Via Deleuzian notions of creativity and territory/territorialization, striation (Deleuze & Guattari 1987) and spatial folding (Deleuze 1993), I look to open up conceptualizations of such politico-aesthetic assemblages.
I begin this trajectory with the work of Creative Partnerships; an initiative that brokers placements for arts practitioners in socially and economically disadvantaged schools. I focus on a site in Margate, a coastal town in Kent: a place with an ethnically diverse population. The neighboring town of Dover is a primary entry point for asylum seekers and illegal immigrants to the UK. Creative Partnerships explore issues of identity, tolerance and social equality¹ as articulated in the social fabric of Margate. The text I examine is one in which the public art organization Artangel collaborated with filmmaker Penny Woolcock in staging The Margate Exodus¹. As a contemporary re-working of the Biblical tale, this film explores a community¹s search for a Promised Land¹ and the social pressures that such journeys can produce. The work offers a mediation of macro and micro social movements, as biographies, landscape, culture and traditions are pleated into one text through filming live performance. The Margate Exodus¹ was made in conjunction with the display of a photography project called Towards a Promised Land¹, in which banner photographs hung across the centre of Margate. This involved twenty-two young people who migrated to the UK from places affected by war, poverty or political unrest. With photographer Wendy Ewald, the children re-conceptualized their diverse experiences of moving. The photographs produced were shown on the walls of buildings in public spaces across the city, re-territorializing the de-industrializing architectural space of the town. Buildings became canvasses, and the faces of minoritarian children were accorded new levels of visibility. Folding this re-inscription of town space into the social politics surrounding migration in Margate, The Margate Exodus¹ is a now a major feature film created with, and featuring, the people of Margate. Across the film text, the contention that social policy on immigration needs to be rethought is articulated through the moving image and community involvement.
I move on to discuss an institutionalized example of macro and micro scales of social value being re-imagined through a place-based ¹, Newham Sixth Form Arts College at Stratford Circus. The Circus is a centre for the performing arts andmoving image, managed by NewVIc in collaboration with five professional arts organizations . The Circus is a thoughtfully deigned, well-equipped building in East London. It is run by an education provider (NewVIc) as a site of arts education, yet also houses professional dance, music, theatre and new media studios, and facilitates a range of adult education programs. Through the Circus, local community members, artists and educators are supported in becoming a creative community. I examine how social policy and political climate has striated, and been folded in to, aspects of the Arts Centre at Stratford Circus. NewVIc¹s work at Stratford and Creative Partnership¹s Margate Exodus¹ project might respectively be considered forms of, what I term, making creative places¹.
FULL DETAILS INCLUDING BIO AND RESEARCH PROJECT: http://www.architecturephilosophy.rmit.edu.au/
For Further Information Contact, Esther Anatolitis: estheranatolitis@letterboxes.org Dr Hélène Frichot: helene.frichot@rmit.edu.au http://www.architecturephilosophy.rmit.edu.au/
Dr Hélène Frichot Lecturer Program of Architecture School of Architecture and Design RMIT University Victoria Australia +61 3 9925 2667 helene.frichot@ems.rmit.edu.au
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