Please check the booklet at the link below:

Booklet-Festival-Complete

Please register here: creativeinterruptions.net/festival

Probots are hacked robotic protestors, tele-operated to reduce the risk of activists who might otherwise receive sharp blows to the head while exercising their civil rights.

Probots become a “dissident witness” to the act of protest. Following early development by La Fábrica de Cosas Bonitas, the tele-operated self-balancing robot now reduces personal involvement in protests to a clinical and measurable effect. Mirroring military drone technology, it protects the “operator” from sharp blows to the head by angry police or drunk fascists, while at the same time maintaining some of the power of an embodied, human sized protestor that can carry a sign and produce loud chants and cheers. Built from shipping pallets, hoodies, and bullhorns, running on a single board computer, using surplus motors and a cheap android phone, the self-balancing robots can be sent on protest missions or a full day, controlled via low-latency mobile internet for two-way audio and video participation.

For the festival we will have the robots circling the Blue Room, being controlled by participants to the conference. With a cafe table the exhibit depicts an operator’s “cockpit,” in the form of the classic transient workspace of the European intellectual. The table is equipped with requisite Sartre and Proudhon texts, ashtray and Gauloises tobacco pouch, used espresso cups, and rough-and-ready control panel.

The viewer should be able to engage with the robot by sitting at the table and interacting with the robot as it rolls through the space. If viewers prove irresponsible, the artist will take that role.

Chris Csikszentmihályi is European Research Area Chair at Madeira Interactive Technology Institute, and directs the Rootio Project, a sociotechnical stack for community radio. Csikszentmihalyi has been a professor at colleges, universities, and institutes, including a decade at the MIT Media Lab, and was Distinguished Visiting Professor of Art and Design Research at Parsons the New School for Design. He cofounded and directed the MIT Center for Future Civic Media (C4), developing technologies that strengthen communities, and founded the MIT Media Lab’s Computing Culture group, which used participatory design techniques to create unique media technologies for cultural and political applications.

Many thanks to : Vitor Hugo Agiar and Victor Azevedo

By Jay Gearing and Ben Rogaly

The Gladstone Community Association (GLADCA) Annual General Meeting was as packed with graduating ESOL students ready to receive their certificates in October 2018 as it had been the year before. Ben had been invited to the 2017 GLADCA AGM by Alison Davies, herself an academic researcher in the city. Based on his experience then, we chose this as the most suitable time and place for a second public screening in Peterborough of Workers, a film that ‘shows working people in some of the broader contexts of their lives – as musicians and poets, as community activists and informal teachers… as individuals whose employment conditions are onerous and whose creative capacities persist’.

At the screening, members of Peterborough’s multi-ethnic, multi-nationality, multi-faith and multi-lingual working-class came together to celebrate and eat, showing off the city’s diversity. This at a time when a seminar was being announced to launch a new academic book that seemed to legitimate the idea that there could be ‘too much’ diversity.

As David Roediger reminds us, anti-racist struggle is a contributor to the struggle against class inequalities. Theories of racial capitalism show how capitalists have long created, perpetuated and taken advantage of racialised and other socialised difference in the workplace to enhance their power over labour by dividing workers.

When, earlier in 2018, Workers was selected for The Sociological Review’s Undiscipliningconference we were thrilled. Here was a conference organised by an academic journal that seemed explicitly to resonate with Jacques Rancière’s opposition to ‘that ancient hierarchy which subordinates those dedicated to labour to those endowed with the privilege of thought’. The conference also promised an annual lecture by Satnam Virdee whose earlier work had inspired us to think about the historical role of racialised others in UK labour struggles. And there were to be responses by Sivamohan Valluvan and Bev Skeggs both of whom, in very different ways, pioneered critical reworking of the white, male, national citizen version of the image of ‘workers’ and of the English working-class.

Our deep and intimate involvement in Peterborough – through years of research in Ben’s case and being a life-long resident in Jay’s – meant that we already had close relations with people who had worked in the city’s warehouses and food factories to build on. Both of us see listening as central to what we do. Listening to current and former workers as peoplemeant that the film would work as a series of portraits. Following on from Ben’s and Kaveri Qureshi’s interviews earlier in the 2010s we wanted to ask people about their experiences of being part of diverse warehouse and food factory workforces, and about moments when people came together across difference to resist harsh supervisory regimes. At the same time, we sought to avoid defining people according to their occupations at a particular point in their lives and used a broad understanding of creativity to ask about people’s creative lives within and beyond the workplace.

Before Jay came on board Ben had put a version of these ideas together with the rest of the Creative Interruptions team as part of a bid for research funding. It was always a collaborative process in other ways too. An early meeting about the framing of the Creative Interruptions proposal was attended by Agnieszka Coutinho, one of the narrators (Workers, Chapter 5) in the eventual film. Following a model used by Les Back, Shamser Sinha and their co-authors, we are now preparing, with Agnieszka, a jointly-written chapter for a forthcoming collection ‘Creativity and resistance in a hostile world’ being edited by Sarita Malik and the rest of the Creative Interruptions team.

In Peterborough, photographer Chris Porsz had also discussed the ideas for the film with Ben before Creative Interruptions was funded. He attended and spoke at the first of two dinners cooked and hosted for narrators and Peterborough-based digital media artists by Metal Peterborough, where Ben was writer-in-residence. The second dinner was followed by a screening for the film’s narrators of a first cut, using a cinema space secured by Jay at the back of a Peterborough wine bar. The film was greeted enthusiastically and we were urged to complete the work. We released a trailer for the film and arranged a public première at Peterborough Central Library in June 2018, three weeks before the Undisciplining conference. About eighty people attended including many current and former workers, trade unionists and other activists. It was followed by a lively question and answer session at which we were urged to distribute the film widely to assist campaigns for workplace rights.

When Ben had put out a call for proposals for Peterborough-based film-makers in May 2017 four were received. These were ranked by eight different people from a wide range of backgrounds including Creative Interruptions International Advisory Group member Fatima Manji of Channel 4 News, who grew up in Peterborough; a former warehouse worker; Peterborough-based arts commissioners; and Sarita Malik and Photini Vrikki of the Creative Interruptions team. They all considered the pitches of the people who applied and almost unanimously recommended Jay, who had previously been suggested for the work by Peterborough resident and community garden activist Sophie Antonelli, a mutual friend.

The two of us met often in Peterborough and sometimes in Brighton and communicated frequently by phone, text and email. Using Jay’s equipment and some prior technical training from him, Ben conducted audio interviews in summer 2017 – mostly at the premises of Metal Peterborough – on the basis that this would be the audio used for the film. However, when Jay listened to the recordings he decided that they were not of sufficient quality. Ben had intervened, reassured and assented too often. As an interviewer he was too audible. So when Jay, as planned, visited the narrators’ homes for video footage he also recorded on-camera interviews with each of them, listening to Ben’s interview first, and often using a similar line of questions. Jay built on the intimacy that had emerged through Ben’s relationships with narrators in some cases over a six-year period, and doubled down on this, using his own personal, emotionally aware and intimate approach. He left plenty of time to be with the people being interviewed in their own space. Our conversations before and after each interview, along with the words of the narrators, further honed the themes of the film and informed the editing process. Following an afternoon when we worked together to reduce one of the film’s chapters from two hours to five minutes of audio, the rest of the editing was done by Jay.

There were others who decided not to be part of the film, people whom we had approached and met with. Some of them even attended the Metal Peterborough dinners. At least one of these people stayed closely in touch with the work after recording an audio interview with Ben. We also met with a former revolutionary leader from south-east Asia who had been interviewed as part of Ben’s earlier research and was currently working in a Peterborough warehouse; and we had an introduction to a Sikh woman in her sixties who worked in a potato chip factory and with whom we communicated at regular intervals over several weeks. Two narrators came on board right at the end: Joanna Szczepaniak (WorkersChapter 3), whom Ben had kept in touch with since 2011 and now runs a Polish newspaper, and Natalina Cardoso (Workers Chapter 9), introduced to us by Gladstone Community Association.

After over a decade of austerity, declining real wages and worsening employment conditions, the residents of Peterborough, as of the UK as a whole, face new economic, political and cultural struggles. It is our hope that Workers will contribute in a small way towards moving away from a culture that stigmatises working-class creativity towards one that values and respects people who work in food factories and warehouses as people; and towards bolstering the prospects for collective action in the face of divisive racist and anti-migrant rhetoric and the practices of racial capitalism.

Jay Gearing is an Independent Filmmaker based in Peterborough under the guise of Red 7 Productions. He directed and co-produced Workers. Twitter: @red7productions

Ben Rogaly teaches in the Department of Geography at the University of Sussex. He researched and co-produced Workers. Twitter: @rogaly

Read a review of ‘Workers’ by Dawn Lyon here.

We are proud to present a series of contributions that address how everyday citizens and communities that have been marginalised communities use the arts, media and creativity to challenge exclusion. Alongside contributions from established academics, we are pleased that the programme for Creative Interruptions: Festival of Arts and Activism will also provide an opportunity for postgraduate students, early career researchers, independent scholars, artists and creative practitioners to showcase their work and research.

The topics that will be addressed over the course of this 2 day festival emphasise the diversity of interests within the field of grassroots creativity and processes of exclusion, and will illustrate the local and global dynamics of co-creative, decolonial, and participatory approaches.

The draft programme (subject to change) can be viewed in full by following the link below:

Programme-Final-Complete

We are greatly looking forward to welcoming you all to BFI Southbank in June, and will soon be making further announcements about how to register for workshops. For all the latest information, please follow Creative Interruptions on Twitter: @CreativeInterr

Creative Interruptions (Brunel University London) in collaboration with The Runnymede Trust, invite expressions of interest from innovative digital media practitioners (filmmakers, animators, etc.) who work across artistic media platforms, to produce and create a short film with us. The chosen practitioner will be expected to showcase work produced at the BFI Southbank this June, as part of our festival, for a live audience of artists, cultural and creative industry professionals, and policy experts.

This is a paid opportunity to commission a practitioner/collective for the production and creation of a short film. We are looking for practitioners who share the ethos of the Creative interruptions project, led by Professor Sarita Malik and Runnymede, the UK’s leading independent race equality think tank. They will be passionate about collaboration and advocate for equality in the arts, activist practices, and grassroots craft.

Themes of interest for the film can include (not limited, but must be related to these):

• inequalities and racism in the arts
• making differences between policies and practice in the art world
• engaging with the ideas of race, access, and representation
• ideas and opinions related to how art is used to tackle issues around race and/or class, and other inequalities

We would like your work to show the strengths, diversity, imagination, and innovative nature of your chosen genre: from observation to filmic essays, creative short films, animation films, 360 films, VR films. We are open to submissions on/or around the above-suggested ideas. If you think you have a great idea related to these themes, please mention this in your application.

Works should be between up to 5 minutes long and ready to be exhibited at the Creative Interruptions festival in June 2019, subject to schedule and feasibility.

The deadline for the film submission is 28 May 2019.

The commission fee will be up to £3000 depending on submitted budget.

This collaboration is between you, Creative Interruptions, Brunel University London and The Runnymede Trust. Our aim is to promote how artists and filmmakers use the arts, media, and creativity to challenge exclusion.

HOW TO APPLY

• A one-page CV
• A one-page expression of interest. This document should address, your practice and the way you work; why you are interested in this project; and how you would approach working with suggested ideas, and your initial ideas.
• Additional LINKS to your portfolio website, showreel, or online videos.
• A budget break-down (pre-production, production, post-production)
• Please combine these documents into one single file (doc. / PDF).
• The email subject line should read: Open Call App <YOUR INITIALS>.
• Send as an emailattachment to the project’s curator, Yiota Demetriou (panayiota.demetriou@brunel.ac.uk)
• Deadline of application 10th April 2019 10 am. We will not be accepting submissions after this time.

We welcome and encourage applications from those currently underrepresented in our workforce and in the arts community; particularly working-class people, people of colour, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender people, and disabled people (as defined by the Equality Act 2010).

LOVE AND DESIRE UNDER OCCUPATION AND DISPOSSESSION

Love of all kinds is put to the test as Palestinians attempt to maintain normalcy and intimacy while living under occupation and siege in the screening Love and Desire in Palestine.  Screened in Cardiff, Birmingham, Sheffield and Manchester, the programme curated by Cinema Palestino and Creative Interruptions.com was released  to roughly coincide with Valentine’s Day. The three works by Palestinian filmmakers reveal what are day to day realities for the people of their country, but remain largely unknown to the rest of the world.

Bonbonné is an unexpected portrait of love behind bars, as a Palestinian couple resort to an unusual contraception method during the husband’s incarceration in an Israeli prison. Director Rakan Miyasi highlights the de-humanising effects of imprisonment as the couple are strip searched or made to take communal showers, being touched and seen by fellow prisoners and Israeli guards instead of each other. In a particularly elegant piece of camerawork, the couple talk separated by a glass screen, their ghostly reflections superimposed onto each other’s faces.

Condom Lead has no dialogue and all takes place in one apartment, the smooth camera movements and orderly lines of the set setting a harsh contrast to the violence heard off screen. Brothers Mohammed and Ahmad Abou Nasser explore a couple’s search for intimacy in the midst of violence. Each time that the sounds of gunfire and bombing interrupt them the husband blows the unused condom into a balloon for their small child to play with. As the days of conflict wear on their lost moments of intimacy pile up in corners and float about the apartment, nothing but air.

Gaza calling, the most emotionally impactful of the films, tells the story of two young men struggling to reunite with their families after being separated by the Israeli restrictions on travel between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Nahed Awad pays particular attention to the systems of bureaucracy used to hold people in limbo, as the audience watches endless footage of documents being moved from location to location, achieving nothing. As someone who knew only a moderate amount about the Israeli/Palestine conflict going into the cinema, this film was the most eye-opening about the struggles of daily life living under the Occupation. The bureaucratic system that controls their movement is described by director Awad in the Q & A as ‘psychological torture’, and the term rings true, as Hekmet spends years trying to obtain a visa for her son to reunite with her in Ramallah, only to be constantly disappointed. Although the editing is at times confusing, as the frequent cuts between the young men and their families were somewhat difficult to follow, Gaza Calling paints a compelling and much needed picture of daily life under the Occupation.

Bonbonné and Gaza Calling include many shots of the beautiful Palestinian countryside as the characters travel through it, the lovely rolling hills adding insult to the fact that so many people cannot return to this place that is their homeland. In Gaza Calling one of Mustafa’s sisters complains that the media prefers to show Palestinians as victims not people, focusing on the parts of Gaza which are most destroyed. As the impasse in Palestine continues, these films at least do something to right that wrong.

After the screening at HOME in Manchester the audience had a chance to write postcards to young people in Gaza – a token of love in a hostile world.

If you would like to screen the films please contact creativeinterruptions@gmail.com

We recently collaborated with Runnymede Trust, the UK’s leading independent race equality think tank to to write a series of posts for our project on their website Race Matters. Our first post was posted on the 7th of February.

On the post we argued that,

Art is a catalyst. It can drive people, and add energy to advocacy and civic agency. It can reach communities and individuals on deep emotional levels, conveying through action what cannot be said with words. Art provides a space in which stories that are often overlooked or misrepresented by mainstream media find a voice.

And we concluded with an invitation to our Festival in June,

The themes of the Creative Interruptions project, which will be covered in our academic arts festival, include creativity, resistance, race and the legacies of British imperialism. They have never been more relevant. The 2016 Brexit referendum, the Grenfell tragedy, the election of President Trump in 2017, and the 2018 Windrush scandal, alongside the growth of far-right politics, have profoundly shaped the experiences of migrants. From those who have moved to the UK from Europe recently, to black Caribbean communities who have considered the UK their home for generations, no one has been safe from the latent xenophobia bubbling to the surface.

You can read the post on Runnymede Trust’s website below:

Arts and Resistance in a Hostile World

Close to 1000 people visited the Preet Nagar Mela (Feb 16-17 and Feb 22-23 2019), marking the culmination of Creative Interruption’s work in Punjab. The ‘Mela’ (festival) was held at the historical site of Punjabi literature and culture, Preet Nagar. Half-way between two of Punjab’s most important cities, Lahore (Pakistan) and Amritsar (India), Preet Nagar is located 7km from one of the most militarised borders in the world. Preet Lari, based in the village, is one of the most significant Punjabi-language magazines, running since 1933. Since its inception the magazine embraced the linguistic diversity of Punjab, publishing in Urdu, Punjabi, Hindi, and English, working across the scripts and languages of Punjab. Working through Partition and waves of political unrest in Punjab, Preet Lari represents a Punjabi culture which is inclusive, pluralistic, and which consistently imagines across borders.

The Mela was developed to exhibit work undertaken during artist residencies over October and November 2018. The artists were from India, Mauritius, Canada, and students from Srishti Institute for Art, Design and Technology (Bangalore). They worked with local craftspeople, schoolchildren, and grassroots NGOs to produce work that responded to the theme of ‘Beyond Borders’. This work was designed to celebrate all kinds of creativity, from brass making and traditional weaving, to singing and folk tales.

To make this work accessible to a broad audience, and to connect a new generation to the legacy of Preet Lari, the Mela was held in a former cow and animal feed shed that had been converted into a community exhibition space for the festival in Preet Nagar. By combining the traditional format of an exhibition with talks, performances, singing and dancing, and by using a site which is recognisable to people living in smaller rural communities (a farmhouse and out buildings), the Mela attracted an incredibly diverse audience, from people working in the creative economies in Amritsar and Delhi, to local children in neighbouring villages, and craftspeople and workpeople who had helped with the preparation of the Mela, from doing electrical work to labouring.

The Mela gave this broad audience two performances from the singer and academic Madan Gopal Singh (and Chaar Yaar) and the Punjab University (Patiala) group, which demonstrated how fluid storytelling, music and spirituality has been in the Punjab.

This work has been funded by the Punjab strand of Creative Interruptions led by Churnjeet Mahn (CI, University of Strathclyde). Along with Churnjeet, the Mela team was made up of: Ratika Singh and Samia Singh (exhibition designers), Raghavendra Rao KV (art director), and Anne Murphy (UBC, Canada). The Mela was hosted by Poonam Singh and Rati Kant Singh who edit and publish Preet Lari.

Part of the art shown during the Mela, and a VR film about the Mela, will be shown at the BFI as part of the Creative Interruptions festival in June 2019.

These groups, drawn from campaigning organisations seeking asylum-seeker, abortion, socio-economic and LGBTQ rights, culminated in a play, We’ll Walk Hand in Hand, which toured across Northern Ireland in 2018 and was followed up by a range of community-outreach activities. One of these activities—our Schools Outreach initiative—used scenes from the original play, along with community theatre techniques pioneered by the famous dramatist and campaigner Augusto Boal, to facilitate critical thinking on contemporary rights issues.

The result, documented above, suggests the power of theatre in enabling critical dialogues and debates about controversial issues that don’t always get discussed in schools. We’re planning further follow-on events this year, and are working on an education pack that will help integrate these activities into the GCSE Citizenship and Learning for Life and Work curricula, following consultation with educational authorities and feedback from students and teachers.

This programme of schools activities was part of a collaboration between Queen’s University Belfast academic Dr Michael Pierse and the playwright Martin Lynch’s theatre company, Green Shoot Productions, and facilitated by a range of actors and theatre professionals led by Tom Finlay, who discusses here the process of linking up with schools.

We hope you enjoy the film!