We are excited to have been able to award seed funding from our Creative Industries Programme to two innovative partnerships with the creative sector.
Demons Land: Intermedial Experiments
Professor Simon Palfrey, Faculty of English has teamed up with Dr. Liz Swift, Co-Founder of Void Projects, to explore methods of digital and live technologies that can be used in an installation exploring the ongoing encounter between European and indigenous cultures in Australia. Working in close collaboration with aboriginal artists and leaders, this project explores indigenous ‘Dreamtime’ narratives through digitally engineered reconfigurations of space and time. This is a new iteration of Simon’s Demons Land project, which explores the colonisation of Australia through a creative encounter with the greatest and guiltiest poem of British imperial history, Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene.
The project aims to enter the experience of all participants in the story: the invading whites; the original owners; and perhaps above all the land itself, understood as sentient and responsive, a repository of stories old and new. The hope is to create an international immersive installation which will bring these stories alive to new audiences, finding new ways of bringing the undead past(s) to the forefront of minds in both the UK and Australia as a matter of urgent public policy. These are stories that are forever repeating in new places and times – Australian history is our history; the past is not past.
For more information, please contact Professor Simon Palfrey or Dr. Liz Swift, Void Projects.
Photographing the Jewish Country House
Professor Abigail Green, Faculty of History, is working with Ruth Ur, founder of the international arts consultancy urKultur, to open up a new dimension of the TORCH-incubated Jewish Country House project. The project aims to establish ‘Jewish’ country houses as a focus for research, a site of European memory and a significant aspect of European Jewish heritage and material culture. The project involves close collaboration with heritage partners (including the National Trust, Waddeston Manor, Strawberry Hill House, the AEPJ and the Centre des Monuments Nationaux) and has been awarded a major four year AHRC collaborative research grant.
The Creative Industries element of the project involves commissioning one of the world’s leading architectural photographers, Hélène Binet, to photograph up to six of the project’s participating country houses, rendering it more attractive to the public as well as to a scholarly readership. These images will feature in the book that will be the flagship academic output of the project.
For more information, please contact Professor Abigail Green or Ruth Ur, UrKultur.
