The Memory Workshop Open Days | UCL Urban Room

Podcasting is an important medium for storytelling. It is used as an oral history and a place to redress historical injustices. Creatives and academics are increasingly using podcasts to produce discourse and archive the voices of those not normally present in the official record.  

This session will bring a full studio podcasting suite into the UCL Urban Room to show students, academics, and creative collaborators how to use the medium as a tool for workshopping histories.  

As an open session, we invite participants with entry-level skills and who are interested in historical, heritage and urban issues that relate to social-cultural storytelling.  

This event is now fully booked. 

The Urban Room and Memory Workshop are invested in collaborative co-production for research, archiving, and exhibition making. This type of work is often challenging and requires a certain ethical framework to ensure that memories relating to urban, cultural, or political injustices are meaningfully understood.  In this session, Dr Kara Blackmore will present the new ethics framework for the Memory Workshop. She will share her experiences as a curator with four different collaborations to date with the Urban Room.  Ethics statements and risk assessments will be shared in detail to empower students, artists, academics, and community organisers interested in doing work together.  

Archival materials such as films, photographs, oral histories and, objects possess a material, affective and sensory dimension that brims with possibility. Far from being inert objects only used as a simple representation of the past, archives are 'active' in a myriad of ways, creating an imaginative link between the past and present.

In this session Caterina Sartori and Ishbel Tunnadine will lead participants to reflect on the relationship between documentary filmmaking and the archive; facilitating discussions about approaches, aesthetics, methods, ethics and access. Using a presentation of examples drawn from a wide range of documentary and experimental films that incorporate / rework / interpret archival materials. 

The aim of the session is to inspire participants to develop inventive ways of working with archives and film, which make the most of the material, affective and sensory qualities of archives and of the moving image’s affordances. The session will include a presentation and discussion of film examples, followed by a hands-on session for participants to to develop and workshop ideas for their individual projects, and receive feedback from the workshop leads and their peers.

Come join us at the Urban Room, UCL East (One Pool Street) for the launch of the new National HIV Story Trust project - HIVstory. Explore the complex and moving history of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and explore the stories that have shaped our understanding of this important issue. This in-person event promises to be a memorable experience filled with insightful discussions and the launch of a dedicated website and touring exhibtion. Don't miss out on this opportunity to be a part of HIVstory.

This project is supported by The National Lottery Heritage Fund.

Architectural practices and research on unsettlement, which uses film, coding, exhibition and collaging. The discussion will focus on the platform, topological atlas and the considerations that researchers and web designers make in co-producing open-access resources. Throughout this session, participants will understand how to relate between lived experiences and map-based digital platforms.

Nishat Awan is Professor of Architecture & Visual Culture and the departmental tutor of Urban Lab's Global Urbanism MASc. Her research focuses on the intersection of geopolitics and space, including questions related to diasporas, migration and border regimes. She is interested in modes of spatial representation, particularly in relation to the digital and the limits of witnessing as a form of ethical engagement with distant places.

This event has been postponed due to unforseen circumstances. Please look out for an email from Eventbrite with more details. 

Join us for a fun and interactive workshop where you'll learn about using our Memory Workshop facilities to archive, podcast and more!

Memory is transacted nearly every day. What is remembered and what is forgotten is central to the negotiations around regeneration and development. But how much does memory cost? Does documenting and archiving have a specific line item on the balance sheet? This session invites audiences into a difficult conversation about money and memory. It will look at the real economy of memory and the relationship between community-based knowledge systems and academic ones.

This conversation is inspired by the work of Toby Laurent Belson who has moved between roles as an artist, activist, board member, educator, and policy maker. Operating from a perspective that ‘power speaks to power’ Toby will share his experiences across these various positions and recent collaborations with UCL to inform the creation of a social justice archive in North Kensington.

Toby Laurent Belson is a multidisciplinary community artist and designer working in West London. He takes inspiration from the grassroots communities in North Kensington where he grew up and still lives. In his work, Toby explores ways in which people’s lives can be improved, especially through self-organisation, participation and pushing boundaries. Toby has run arts group, Brownbaby, in North Kensington since 2007, producing mosaics, murals, zines and public artworks. Between 2015 and 2020 he supported four local campaigns to protect and enhance community assets, each of which led to significant changes and strengthened provision for local communities. Since 2017 Toby has led creative community responses for Grenfell, including Green for Grenfell illuminations and the production of artworks across Notting Hill Carnival. Toby is the curator of the 2024 exhibition Generations: figures and Visions which is an intergenerational exhibition of 6 West London artists of the African Caribbean diaspora, connecting artists, artworks, and life journeys.