Sunday 30 July 2023, 8pm
Please join us for an evening of analogue solidarity! This event is a fundraiser in aid of Sirkhane Darkroom a project teaching analogue film processes to displaced children living on the Syrian/Turkish border. We will be celebrating all kinds of lo-fi DIY image production.
This event is also an open invite to the analogue community and all celluloid lovers, bring your lightboxes, 8 mm, 16 mm and 35 mm projectors and share your work with us! We will have a 35 mm slide projector running so slides images are warmly welcomed.
We will also be accepting donations of 35 mm cameras and darkroom equipment to be sent to Turkey and Syria for the Sirkhane Darkroom programme. All profits from ticket sales will go towards supporting the project. To donate directly to Sirkhane click here.
If you would like to share your work on the night please get in touch with us at info@fieldnotes.site. We can offer goodwill and general support but we won’t be able to provide equipment, transport or specialised technical advice. You will need to be able to bring and operate your equipment yourself, all participants will be responsible for taking care of their own work.
This fundraiser has been organised by FIELDNOTES, a biannual arts journal, the latest issue features the work of filmmaker Margaret Tait alongside images produced by the children taking part in Sirkhane Darkroom programme.
This event has been inspired by the BYOB (Bring Your Own Beamer) format. BYOB is an international movement of DIY one-night-exhibitions where artists collaborate and experiment on site to create an installation of moving image. BYOB was started by visual artist Rafael Rozedaal.
LIGHT
Did you say it’s made of waves?
Yes, that’s it.
I wonder what the waves are made of.
Oh, waves are made of waves.
Waves are what they are,
Shimmeringness,
Oscillation,
Rhythmical movement which is the inherent essence of all things.
Ultimately, there’s only movement,
Nothing else.
The movement that light is
Comes out of the sun
And it’s so gorgeous a thing
That nothing else is ever anything unless lit by it.
Margaret Tait
from Sarah Neely (ed.), Margaret Tait: Poems, Stories and Writings (Carcanet, 2012), by permission of the publisher
PROGRAMME:
The evening will start with a screening of Behind the Darkroom, offcuts from a documentary produced by Raf Fellner and Asli Baykall, capturing footage of the Sirkhane Darkroom project and its participants.
We will then open up the space for simultaneous presentations and projections by analogue makers and enthusiasts. The artist and musician Rob Shuttleworth (alias Haddow) will be performing an open composition in response to this installation of many machines and light beams.
We will finish with a screening of Tailpiece a short film poem by the experimental filmmaker and analogue pioneer Margaret Tait.
Sirkhane is a social circus school founded in 2012 in a region where it is difficult to be a child. Sirkhane’s mission is to provide a safe and friendly environment for children, who are affected by conflicts. Children have the opportunity to collaborate and form friendships with one other, beyond gender, social and cultural differences.
Sirkhane Darkroom ( سيرك هانة داركروم) is a mobile darkroom operating in the villages along the border of Syria and Turkey. The project involves both local and refugee children, teaching them analogue photographic processes, allowing them to experiment with the medium as a form of play and a means of understanding the world around them. Led by the photographer and Syrian refugee Serbest Salih, the darkroom was founded on the belief in photography as a universal and therapeutic language. Analogue photography is explored as an alternative pedagogy allowing children to address and express themselves on issues such as migrant rights, war, gender equality, child labour, forced marriage and the environmental crisis. The darkroom offers a space of refuge in which alternative realities can be imagined and produced.
Rob Shuttleworth is an artist living in London. His work uses different media in graphic design and illustration to composition and performance. As a self-taught bass player, access to performing came via various bands ranging in style from punk-rock to pop and improvisation. Alongside discovering improvisation came the creation of his alias Haddow, a depersonalised persona for exploring sound through instrument building, field recording and performance. A central theme is to consider all sound sources as instruments to be played in various ways, directly or indirectly. Getting to know unconventional instruments allows for a more instinctive approach to music free from baggage of established forms.
Margaret Tait was born in 1918 in Kirkwall on Orkney, Scotland, where she returned in the 1960s after a career as a physician. Over the following decades she made a series of films inspired by the Orcadian landscape and culture. All but three of her thirty two films were self financed. She wrote poetry and stories and produced several books including three books of poetry.
FIELDNOTES is an artist-run publishing project that produces a biannual print journal and a public programme of workshops, radio broadcasts, screenings and readings. Founded in 2020, Fieldnotes aims to promote and support non-conforming creative practices that pioneer new cultural forms and collaborative ways of working.
www.fieldnotes.site
