Wednesday 14 June, 6-7.30pm BST, online, no need to book. Click here to join.
In session 2 of the Loosen up! series we will discuss perspectives on methods of analysis with Catherine Grant, Ana Laura López de la Torre and Pablo Martínez, with reflections from Ben Gidley.
Catherine Grant will introduce her practice research which explores the possibilities of remix techniques and the creation of video essays in film and television studies in order to perform analytical acts in the very process of experimenting on the objects of study themselves. She will explore this dispositif based approach and show a couple of video essay examples of it: Retourne-toi (3 mins) and Semblance (4 mins 30).
Ana Laura Lopez de la Torre will introduce a project she has been working on in a neighbourhood of Montevideo, Uruguay, as an example of collaborative and participatory art practice in higher art education. She will explore what happens to practices of documentation and reflection of collaborative and participatory arts practice, when they are carried out within an University framework, intersecting and colliding with established academic practices of data gathering, analysis and results sharing.
Pablo Martinéz will talk about his current research about working conditions. He will introduce how practice based research and political and personal events can shape our research (with reference to his dismissal from MACBA and how this event activated a thread of autoethnographic research). He will use visual materials and talk as well of different activities/programmes he has developed in the past around the issue of working conditions.
Biographies:
Catherine Grant is Honorary Professor at Aarhus Universitet, Denmark, Honorary Research Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London, where she was Professor of Digital Media and Screen Studies until 2020, and Senior Research Fellow at the University of Reading, UK. She was elected a member of the Film, Media and Visual Studies section of Academia Europaea in 2020. She carries out her film and moving image studies practice research mostly in the form of analytical remix-based video essays. She also runs the Film Studies For Free social media platforms, and is a founding co-editor of the award-winning peer-reviewed journal [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies.
Ana Laura Lopez de la Torre is an artist, educator and researcher based in Uruguay. She inscribes her practice and research in the field of socially-oriented art practices, with a particular focus on cooperative and participatory processes at neighbourhood level. She is currently Professor at Facultad de Artes, Universidad de la República and has previously taught at Universidad Católica de Uruguay and University of the Arts, London. As its first Coordinator, she helped establish the first posgraduate programme on Cultural Management in Uruguay, where she still teaches, and was Director of Centro Cultural Florencio Sánchez, a public cultural centre in the periphery of Montevideo. She is the coordinator of the interdisciplinary Research Group ACTO (Arte, comunidades y territorios organizados), Universidad de la República and also heads Nature, Society and Art, an interdisciplinary team exploring human-non human dynamics in Malvin Norte, a neighbourhood with mixed urban and rural characteristics that is characterised by long-term dwelling of urban waste collectors.
Pablo Martínez is a researcher and educator whose research focuses on educational work with the body and the potential of images for constructing political subjectivity. His institutional work has explored the possibilities of an eco-socialist museum. He worked as Head of Programming at the MACBA from 2016 to 2021 where he also directed the Center of Studies and Documentation, the Independent Studies Programme and the et al series of essays (Ed Arcàdia). He worked as Head of Education and Public Activities at CA2M (2009–16), and Associate Professor of Contemporary Art at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (2011–15). He’s part of the editorial board of L’Internationale Online as well as the journal of art and visual culture #Re-visiones. He is a founding member of Las Lindes, a research and action group working on education and cultural and artistic practices (2009 – today).
Ben Gidley is a Reader in Sociology and Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck., He studied Anthropology as an undergraduate and Urban Studies at MA level and has a PhD in Sociology (on citizenship and belonging among East London Jewish radicals in the early twentieth century) from the University of London. Before coming to Birkbeck, he worked in interdisciplinary research centres on urban studies and migration at Goldsmiths University of London and at the University of Oxford. During that period, he was involved in several policy-engaged research projects on topics around migration, integration and diversity, funded by research councils, charitable trusts, the European Union and government departments. He is currently working on projects to do with antisemitism and Muslim-Jewish encounters, as well as teaching psychosocial studies and sociology at undergraduate and postgraduate levels