Clothes, Cloth and Culture Group. 25 September 2014 'Saga Bwoys and Bedouin Women’

Bani Hamida Weaving Project, Makawir Centre, Jordan. Photo: Sue Jones

Three Jamaican immigrants (left to right) John Hazel, a 21-year-old boxer, Harold Wilmot, 32, and John Richards, a 22-year-old carpenter, arriving at Tilbury on board the ex-troopship 'Empire Windrush', smartly dressed in zoot suits and trilby hats. Photo: Douglas Miller/Getty Images

Join us on Thursday 25th September 2014 at 6:30pm - 8.30pm to hear presentations by Dr Michael McMillan and Dr Sue Jones followed by an informal question and answer session. The meeting will be convened by Dr Christine Checinska, the 2nd Stuart Hall Library Animateur.

  

What the Bedouin women taught me - re-connecting with my mother's craft skills - Dr Sue Jones

I went in the opposite direction of my mother's life as a housewife and home-working seamstress - non-domestic, professional, university educated, without children and travelling around the world doing consultancies.
But my work always related to my background - concerned with poverty, income generation and women's lives and empowerment. I made a particular connection with a Bedouin women's weaving project in Jordan.
It is only by reflecting on this very long term relationship with the older Bedouin weavers and their daughters - that I can see how they helped me re-focus on my mother and her craft skills.
It leaves me with current questions to share here - about women's involvement in craft work now and how far their work can be seen and acknowledged as creative or is it just a source of income? What was it like for my mother?

Dr Sue Jones: As an anthropologist and professional urban planner, Dr Sue Jones has been involved, since the 1980s, in consultancies, lectures and writing textbooks about poverty and community projects around the world, including Africa and the Caribbean.

In 2006, she completed a 20 year longitudinal PhD thesis of Bedouin women and their weaving project in Jordan. Since 2009 she has been a Visiting Research fellow at Goldsmiths, focused on Material Culture in the contemporary context. This has included: (2011) an exhibition about the weaving project, (2013) a special Issue of the journal Textile -Materialising voices from the Middle East and (2014) a film with the Bani Hamida women. She is currently researching textile case studies around the world.

‘Saga Bwoys and Rude Bwoys': Migration, Grooming and Dandyism - Dr Michael McMillan

I have been always struck by how men of my father's generation were so well dressed in those iconic black and white documentary photographs depicting their arrival after a three-week transatlantic journey by sea. Their neatly pressed suited with and a white breast pocket handkerchief, polished brogue shoes, white starched shirt with throat straggling tie and a trilby hat cocked at an angle. In Eastern Caribbean vernacular, they were ‘Saga Bwoys' or ‘Sweet Bwoys', a masculine persona who in my rite of passage from being short pants ‘coloured' boy to a black British young man I saw as an exemplar of ‘good grooming' in his sartorial attention to detail as words for the ladies danced off his tongue like Lord Kitchener's Calypso. These ‘Lonely Londoners' would later become Jamaican ‘Rude Bwoys' swaggering as if to a Ska or Reggae beat in their two-tone mohair suits with the attitude and creole chat of the best dressed chicken on the street. In my camel Crombie coat, suede trimmed Garbicci cardigan or ‘yardie cardie', pleated Farah slacks, Bally shoes with shiny buckle stepping out like a ‘Rude Bwoy' in a ‘Causal Style' to ‘rave' at a Sound System dance. ‘Saga Bwoys' and ‘Rude Bwoys' are constituents of the contemporary ‘Raggamuffin' geneology that as subcultural black masculine practices have been self-fashioned in the rhizoid network of racial, transcultural and diaspora exchange and transfer.
Yet there has been a limited focus on how and what postwar Caribbean migrant men contributed through the material culture and performativity of the ‘Saga Bwoy' and ‘Rude Bwoy' to a diasporic understanding of black dandyism. Using Carol Tulloch's ‘style-fashion-dress' amongst other conceptual framework: this presentation will begin to explore the ontology and materiality of a process that saw the aesthetic embodiment and reconstruction of diasporic ‘Caribbeanness' in a British context of the dressed black male body; a body that would come to reconfigure the streets of urban Britain with fresh dynamic masculinities in motion.

Dr. Michael McMillan is a writer, dramatist, artist/curator and scholar of Vincentian migrant parentage whose recent play includes: a new translation of Bertolt Brecht's The Good Person of Sezuan (Trenchtown) (MAT tour 2010 & 2012) and curatorial work includes: My Hair: Black Hair Culture, Style & Politics (Origins of the Afro Comb, Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology 2013), I Miss My Mum's Cooking (Who More Sci-Fi Than Us, KAdE Kunsthal, Amersfoort, Netherlands 2012), The Waiting Room (Stories & Journeys, Gwynedd Museum & Art Gallery, Bangor, North Wales 2012), The Beauty Shop (198 Contemporary Arts & Learning 2008), The West Indian Front Room (Geffrye Museum 2005-06), The Front Room: Migrant Aesthetics in the Home (Black Dog Publishing 2009) www.thefrontroom.org.uk/ He has an Arts Doctorate from Middlesex Univ. 2010 and is currently an Associate Lecturer in Cultural & Historical Studies as well as Associate Researcher RAS project at London CSM/Wimbledon CSM, UAL.

Pan on the road! Pan on the road! [1]

Late August bank holiday Monday in London is synonymous with two things: the end of the summer and Carnival. Carnival is the vernacular and official shorthand for the Notting Hill Carnival.

As the recent BBC documentaries on Carnival note, the date of the first event is anything from 1962 to ’64 to ’65. Similarly there are a number of theories on precisely how it started and by whom. So, according to some calculations, 2014 marked its fiftieth anniversary. To coincide with this Tate Modern staged the event Up Hill Down Hall: an indoor carnival.

Up Hill Down Hall showcased Give and Take a new performance piece by Hew Locke with Batala Samba-Reggae band and Marlon Griffiths’ piece No Black in the Union Jack – the title of which was not only a reminder of Paul Gilroy’s great early work but of course the Rock Against Racism era of protest marches populated by youth. These works were presented against a backdrop of cut ‘n’ mix improvised sounds created Dubmorphology, (Gary Stewart and Trevor Mathison), and an architectural design by Gia Wolff. An intervention orchestrated by Sonia Boyce in conjunction with students and recent graduates from Central Saint Martins completed the afternoon’s events.

Sadly I arrived at the tail end of the day. But there were still streamers on the ground and a thumping beat in the air, still crowds moving through the Turbine Hall and congregating in chattering groups up on the mezzanine; a reminder of the temporary nature of the freedom that carnival affords in London, in the Caribbean, now and back then, way back then, prior to the 1960’s moment that sparked the Notting Hill original.

Carnival in the Caribbean  - as physical space, theoretical trope, as metaphor - has always represented a site in which cultures, ideas and concepts collide. It represents the destabalisation of everyday boundaries, be they rooted in class, gender, wealth, sexuality, race and, to use Kobena Mercer’s term, the ‘pigmentocracy’ that grew from the hierarchies based on skin tone prevalent in Caribbean plantation slave society. Carnival is in a sense a ‘borderlands space’. It is a place of possibility and newness. And it is also the place where the spiritual and the secular meet. In my paper Reconstruction Work, presented at the July Clothes, Cloth & Culture Group meeting, I discussed the creolised aesthetics of the enslaved on the Jamaican plantations, arguing that individualised clothing became a means of articulating something of the self that broke free of the then societal constraints. I suggested that that which could not be articulated verbally was articulated through the dressing and styling the body, through the performance of identity. Carnivals such as the Jamaican Jonkannu festival, provided a space in which these refashioned creolised identities could be experienced and displayed; in a sense, the boundary between the inner and outer self could be transgressed. Both performers’ and spectators’ presentation of self could, in my view, be regarded as forms of vernacular street theatre. I touched on the rude bwai fastidious self-styling – the clothing, the accessory, the walk, the pose – suggesting that this too might be seen as a form of strategic resistance. Each example reflects the transformation that is characteristic of Carnival. But these transformations, these creolised cultural expressions, come out of contention not blending. Creativity here emerges from the friction that occurs as differing and hierarchical cultures, ideas and concepts clash and rub against one another, generating something new that is unfamiliar yet familiar. Within this Carnival space there is freedom, albeit a temporary one.

Shango and ZeZe Harpp performing. Photo: Christine Checinska

This week my creative practice as a design consultant took me to Munich to search for cloth for the new collection. Serpentining my way through the exhibition hall, I found myself in a tin structure at the centre of the denim forum, having been drawn there by a hypnotic drumming that had more than an echo of a steel pan, but with a more muffled ‘dirty’ sound, a spare sporadic beat bouncing up against the rhythmic strumming of an acoustic Latin guitar; familiar yet unfamiliar… certainly unexpected in a fashion environment. I was in the midst of an accidental ‘up hill/down hall’ carnival in miniature! This wonderfully creolised soundscape was the result of a creative collaboration between Emoriô Faô, Brazilian guitarist and leader Shango and the German percussion artist ZeZe Harpp. (Shango, of course, is the god of thunder, lightning and fire in the Caribbean… and a character often present in carnival masquerades and certain religious ceremonies) The artists themselves describe their unique sound as a coming together of African and Indian influences – perhaps because of my own cultural background, I heard traces of the Caribbean: vintage Afro-Creole mento, cumbia, jazz. After all, remembering Edouard Glissant, the Caribbean could be regarded as the home of syncretism.

 Ju Mu at work. Photo: Christine Checinska

Whilst Shango and ZeZe Harpp played, the contemporary artist Ju Mu scribbled intricate drawings of mythical creatures directly onto the walls of the structure; white chalk onto black surfaces. Again, to see this is remarkable in a rag trade setting. Further, a small team of designers printed and stitched together oversized t-shirts right there in the space. Unusual. The invisible boundaries between visual art, music, fashion and textile design were momentarily blurred within this tin room within a room. The invisible boundaries between my own compartmentalised creative practices collapsed.

One of Ju Mu's drawings. Photo: Christine Checinska

Coming back to the title of this article, there is an affinity between the essence of carnival highlighted above and our approach to the Clothes Cloth & Culture Group. Our aim is to bring together voices from across the spectrum of artists, designers, writers and ‘thinkers’ working with cloth. We actively seek out cross-cultural perspectives and the viewpoints of those who are seldom heard. We are continually inspired by the new debates that emerge from globalisation’s multi-layered yet still at times hierarchical entanglements. So as the summer closes and we gear up to launch our programme of autumn events …

Pan on the road! Pan on the road!

© Christine Checinska September 2014

[1] ‘Pan on the road!’ traditionally shouted at the start of a carnival procession.

Links:

www.tate.org.uk/file/hill-down-hall-2014

www.shango-music.de.vu

www.zezeharpp.de.vu

ju.mu.monster.tumbler.com

Clothes Cloth and Culture Group, July 2014

The African-Caribbean presence in Britain

A full house and a fascinating evening at the last CCC Group meeting before the summer break.

The presenters were Dr Christine Checinska and Dr. Denise Noble.

Family artefacts from Christine Checinska
displayed as 'conversation pieces'  for the Group

Dr. Christine Checinska is the Second Stuart Hall Library Animateur. Christine's ideas and enthusiasm were hugely important to the foundation of the group. The title of her presentation, Reconstruction Work refers to the lack of representation of African-Caribbean creative output in fashion and textiles. Christine talked about the influence of Stuart Hall's writings on her research into cloth, culture and race. She brought along some family objects which are both powerful personal mementos and tangible records of a time, place and culture.
Read more about both presentations on the webpage.

Dr. Denise Noble of Ohio State University. Denise was brought up nearby in Shoreditch. It was strangely appropriate for her to return to the area to talk about the home-making of her mother and friends who came to Britain from the Caribbean in the 1950s and 60s immigrant women. She talked in particular about the colourful doilies handcrafted by the women, now almost impossible to find. Denise offered her thoughts on the wider societal associations of these bright artefacts. You can listen to her presentation below.

Library closure week 1-5 September

A reminder that the library will be closed next week, from the 1st to the 5th of September, for our annual stock take and housekeeping. We will reopen on Tuesday the 9th of September.

You can still contact us during the closure period on 020 7749 1255 or email library (at) iniva (dot) org

Stuart Hall Library Research Network Meeting
Thursday 18 September 2014 6:30pm. Free event.

Taey Iohe 'Restless 2 ', 2013                                                    Isabel Pinto, 2014

Join us for an evening of presentations followed by informal discussion and the opportunity to socialise over refreshments.

Artist and writer Dr. Taey Iohe will present her artwork and research around 'Sleep, Space and Motion'. She will show work from 'Flux of Sleepings'  a photographic series, video installation and performance project about the spatiality of sleep.

Dr. Isabel Pinto will present on 'Eighteenth-century censorship: the historical dynamics between cultural identity and imagined communities'. European censorship at this time not only relied on educational, moral and religious grounds, but also pursued the edification of a unique cultural identity

Read more

Stuart Hall Library, Iniva
1 Rivington Place
EC2A 3BA London
U.K.

Clothes, Cloth & Culture Group
Call for presenters

Iniva, Rivington Place,
London EC2A 3BA

The Clothes, Cloth & Culture Group is a monthly forum for creative practitioners and thinkers across the spectrum of artists, designers, curators, writers and activists working with cloth. Setting cloth into the wider contexts of material and visual culture, the Clothes, Cloth & Culture Group provides a space for conversations about the politics of cloth from a distinctively cross-cultural viewpoint. We are looking for exciting and engaging ways of uncovering your research. This might include individual presentations, presentations in pairs, in conversation/dialogue, or presenting a group project.

The meetings will take place in the Stuart Hall Library from 6.30 -9.00pm. Each presentation will be 20 minutes long (2 presenters per session). Suggested themes include;

-cultural translation and difference
-post-coloniality and globalisation
-movement and migration
-Diaspora; social and cultural perspectives
-cultural, racial and gendered identities
-social action and ethical concerns

We welcome contributions on these and other under-represented views and issues within textile cultures and fashion theory. If you are interested in presenting at a future Clothes, Cloth & Culture session, please send a 200 word proposal outlining your topic to the Library Manager.

All contributors will also be invited to contribute a reflection on a cloth based object, image or text that is both meaningful at a personal level and responds to the core themes of the group. These conversations or ‘textile narratives’ will be disseminated via the Iniva website. Where possible artefacts will be displayed in the library vitrines, alongside accompanying texts.

Co-convened by Dr. Christine Checinska, Iniva's second Stuart Hall Library Animateur.

More information                 Library@iniva.org

Stuart Hall Library
Closed week : call for volunteers

1 - 5 September 2014

One for your diary- the library will be closed to users for a week to enable us to carry out essential housekeeping, from 1-5 September 2014.

We are calling for volunteers to help us with stock-taking and other library-related tasks during the week.

If you are interested in volunteering, there is more information on our webpage.

Grayson Perry, the Vanity of Small Differences and the weaving of a community tapestry …

The last Clothes, Cloth & Culture Group meeting focussed on the theme of ‘Cloth and Social Action’. Françoise Dupré spoke of her work during the 1980s in collaboration with the Brixton Art Gallery, in particular the Patchwork of Our Lives banners created with a group of Soweto women at the height of the anti-Apartheid campaigns in 1986. She also spoke about Women’s Work, an arts organisation that she co-founded. She recalled the annual banners that they made, drawing on earlier political banner making traditions, for example, those worked by the Socialist Movement and by the Suffragettes. This stitching, piecing and embroidering was of course happening around the time of Rozsika Parker’s Subversive Stitch and the subsequent show at the Cornerhouse and Whitworth Art Galleries. This was the era during which the barriers between craft and art began to be torn down and the domestic space was shown to be the political space that perhaps it always was, particularly for working class women. Dupré went on to discuss her current work concerned with cosmopolitanism, with the plasticity and the sociability of textile crafts, with the use of textiles as a ‘portal’, and with the crafting of space through collaborative participatory social practice, that binds the haptic to the making of socially meaningful art objects. She reminded us of Stuart Hall’s notion of  ‘home’ as process; a concept that rests on ongoing engagement, i.e. something that needs to be ‘worked’.

The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine
Rozsika Parker. Cover Image © I.B. Tauris

These points were brought to life by Victoria Khur, Ruth-Marie Tunkara, the QSA ‘Knees Up’ knitting and crochet club ladies and Derek (currently the only male member of the club). Through a ‘vox-pop’ style film, Khur and Tunkara relayed tales of newly formed relationships that cross generational, economic, racial and cultural divides, stories of the sharing of knowledge and expertise, and accounts of the empowerment of the residents that attend the club. A project of Quaker Social Action, situated in London’s, Bethnal Green, ‘Knees Up’ uniquely promotes a belief in the possible by focusing on what is strong in communities, rather than what is wrong with communities. The title of their presentation, ‘Weaving a Community Tapestry’, neatly sums up the common ground between the two presentations and the content of the discussions that followed. At a certain level, Dupré, Khur and Tunkara’s talks were underlined by this notion of possibility, which is aligned to the idea of unity through difference.

Earlier on that Thursday, I had visited PROGESS at the Foundling Museum, Brunswick Square, London. Set out over three floors, the exhibition marks the 250^th anniversary of William Hogarth’s death by showcasing the responses of four contemporary artists - Yinka Shonibare MBE, Grayson Perry, David Hockney and Jessie Brennan – to his infamous series of etchings A Rake’s Progress, (1735). Grayson Perry’s the Vanity of Small Differences occupies the basement.

Grayson Perry, The Vanity of Small Differences, The Adoration of the Cage Fighters, 2012. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro Gallery, London © The artist

Perry’s the Vanity of Small Differences consists of six tapestries charting the progress of Tim Rakewell. These densely woven and richly coloured tapestries provide Perry with a means through which to explore issues around class and taste as the exhibition catalogue tells us. But, in my view, these intricate hangings also speak about today’s rapidly changing urban landscapes, or ‘social fabric’, to reference a previous Iniva project. Rakewell’s progress tells the story of not only the demise of a man but also the breakdown of communities that we all too often witness in this contemporary moment. Today’s fast-paced social upheaval could be said to parallel that of the 1980’s noted above: the unstable economic climate, the gentrification of former working class areas coupled with a dearth of affordable housing, the rise of far right political movements, the growing fragmentation of society. Biblical references, compositional strategies reminiscent of religious paintings and narrative structures based on Hogarth’s original Rake collide with recognisable symbols of wealth and lack of wealth in Perry’s series: a cafetiére, an allotment, a young ‘baby mother’, a smart phone, a copy of Hello magazine. The viewer is taken through the various stages of Rakewell’s journey from his working class roots to his rise to the upper classes. The last tapestry #Lamentation depicts our protagonist’s violent passing at the wheels of his Ferrari. His body, pulled from the wreckage and surrounded by capitalist markers of success, lies motionless at the centre of the scene. The whole is tweeted by onlookers positioned in the background of the piece, hence the Twitter hashtag in the title. Might this final act represent the ultimate rending of a community tapestry?

 

Grayson Perry, The Vanity of Small Differences, The Annunciation of the Virgin Deal, 2012. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro Gallery, London © The artist

Progress: William Hogarth, Yinka Shonibare MBE, Grayson Perry, David Hockney, Jessie Brennan

The Foundling Museum

6^th June – 7^th September 2014

Christine Checinska

Clothes Cloth and Culture Group, Stuart Hall Library 26 June 2014  Cloth and Social Action

Françoise Dupré, blouses de travail

Many thanks to our presenters Françoise Dupré, Victoria Kuhr,  Ruth Marie Tunkaraand  Knees Up members and to convenor Dr.Chistine Checinska for a very enjoyable and informative meeting last week. There was a lively question and answer session and the audience seemed reluctant to leave! Audio recordings are available at the bottom of this post.

Françoise Dupré

Françoise Dupré makes textiles-based sculptures and temporary installations for art and non-art spaces including shops, hospitals and libraries. Françoise talked about how her cross-disciplinary approaches to making and her multicultural and social art practice. She described how crafting practice can be transformative for people in the contexts of migration, post-conflict and health. Françoise brought along her mother's worn the blouses de travail apron/dresses. They were associated with the working-class and Françoise found similar aprons worn by women in Russia.

Françoise Dupré

Edna from Knees Up

Knees Up: Victoria Kuhr and Ruth Marie Tunkara are part of a team of staff and residents from Knees Up a community-building project in Bethnal Green, London. Victoria and Ruth explained how the project had been instrumental in bringing neighbours together. 

Ruth Marie Tunkara from Knees Up

Leyla from Knees Up

Victoria Khur from Knees Up

Communal space and activities have given residents the opportunity to exchange their skills in knitting and crochet and to make new friendships. In a film made by the project organisers, the residents shared their memories, and described how Knees Up has made a difference to their lives. 

Three audio recordings of the event 

PAUSE: Selected drawings by Barbara Walker

12  June – 13 July 2014 Curated by C&C Gallery, London

Reviewed by Dr. Christine Checinska

Barbara Walker, Pause, exhibition installation view, 2014,
 C&C Gallery. Photo. Liz Evans

Artist Barbara Walker makes drawings of people. She makes drawings of people using charcoal and a soft pencil. She makes drawings of men; huge, larger than life, floor to ceiling drawings rendered directly onto the wall. Each fold, crease, line and blemish of her sitters’ bodies and the clothes that enfold them are sensitively transcribed in the smallest of detail. But we never see her sitters’ faces. And each wall is wiped clean at the end of every show.

Barbara Walker,  Show and Tell : Subject G and Subject H, 2008
charcoal on paper. Photo. Liz Evans

Pause presents selected portraits from Show and Tell, the Dichotomy of Kenny, the Dichotomy of Sean and one new wall piece. It is impossible to view Walker’s work without first being astonished by the sheer scale and by the craftsmanship, by the quality of lines seemingly etched into the wall, or the paper, or the canvas, creating a three-dimensional, almost sculptural effect. It comes as no surprise that she sites Giacometti and Rodin as amongst her influences. Yet these soft charcoal drawings are deeply political. In Walker’s hand the methodical making of lines on a wall and the erasing of them is a form of quiet activism.

The untitled C&C wall piece – a portrait of Izzy, a dancer – heralds a turning point in Walker’s work. It is as though Walker’s voice is manifest with an unmistakeable boldness in the tension between the palm of Izzy’s outstretched hand and the silent snarling mouth of his printed t-shirt. The viewer is allowed a glimpse of the artist’s inner thoughts. Izzy’s hand is outstretched with the palm face up, but his fingers are not flexed in a manner one might expect if being signalled to ‘stop’. Instead his hand reaches out in an act of near supplication, yet read against the dog’s glistening teeth the viewer is forced to pause, to do a double take, to listen to what Walker is saying. Izzy’s gesture is not about pleading to be heard. It is about demanding to be heard. This metaphorical drawing in the sand shouts ‘enough’!

Walker elegantly explores issues around identity, voice, personhood, power and visibility through her practice. She understands the importance of clothes and cloth; the way in which each has the potential to bind and separate us to and from one another; the way in which clothes and cloth have the potential to speak and to signify, to reference Henry Louis Gates Jn. The aesthetic and the political gloriously meet in her soft pencil portraits.

Characteristically, since process is of equal importance as the finished piece, Walker will be removing the portrait of Izzy at the close of the C&C show.  See more drawings on Barbara Walker's website

Barbara Walker, Untitled, 2014, wall drawing.
Photo. Liz Evans