Working with Private Media Materials in the Public Realm

A collaboration between Herbert Media, Val Hill and Shaun Hides from the Department of Media and Communications, Coventry University and Nirmal Puwar, from the Methods Lab at the Sociology Department of Goldsmiths, University of London. Funded by the AHRC.

Old boxes and trunks in households act as stores of media, objects, photographs and amateur film footage. This inter-disciplinary and cross sector initiative will enable academics, new researchers, artists and practitioners to consider the issues involved in the transition of private media materials to the public realm. Public conversations, collections and archives, as well as exhibiting, curating and representation will be the focus of three workshops scheduled to take place at the Herbert in Coventry, organised on the basis of materials:

(1) cine film (30th Jan 2007 (organiser n.puwar)
(2) photography (organiser n.puwar)
(3) material traces of travelled objects (organiser s.hides@coventry.ac.uk)

The workshops will thread together a set of core questions through intellectual debate and practice-based sessions. How we deal with autobiographical and collective pasts condensed in media materials and artefacts when we attempt to work productively through mourning, melancholia and nostalgia, will be key considerations across the sessions. Questions of memory, time and loss will allow exploration of the difficulties of working with, or even relinquishing to scrutiny, materials gathered by, or memoralising, those who have passed away. Temporal and spatial distance, engendered by migration will further complicate the relationship to the precious qualities of particular media materials.

The workshops will take place at the Herbert in Coventry (link opens a new browser window).

For further details, please contact the respective organisers.