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UCL and east London’s Dash Arts collaborate for the Great Get Together
14 August 2019
UCL researchers and east London based cultural arts organisation Dash Arts worked together to deliver an activity at the London Flagship Great Get Together.
On the 23rd June, 13,000 people descended onto (QEOP) for the third annual London flagship Great Get Together – a celebration of our different communities, inspired by the life and values of MP Jo Cox. UCL has had a presence at the Great Get Together since last year, as part of our ongoing commitment to establish an active role in the local community in preparation for the new UCL East campus in East Bank - a brand new cultural district for London with world-class culture and education institutions.
Through our participation in the Great Get Together we aim to host a programme of creative activities that raise awareness about UCL East and showcase academic research at UCL. This year, UCL researchers Leah Lovett and Valerio Signorelli from The Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis worked with creatives from east London arts organisation, Dash Arts to plan and curate UCL’s activity at the Great Get Together. Inspired by Valerio and Leah’s work on other projects (including Playing the Archive, and The Listening Wood) where they sought to use technology to allow visitors to interact with objects and archives in a new and exciting way, the team came up with an activity that would capture the stories of certain objects and allow people to listen to and respond to these in an immersive environment – ‘The Memory Safe’.
Through the use of live music, storytelling, activities where visitors could create their own objects (creative writing, audio recording and clay making) and interactive technology that allowed visitors to hear stories linked to objects from all over the world, The Memory Safe explored the themes of memory, migration, place and their relationship with objects.
You can find out more about the process behind The Memory Safe and the experience of it on the day through reading this blog post and watching the following video.