My project with students from Central Saint Martins Uni in London 2022/23 a report.

 

In December 2022 I had the chance to meet a group of first year students in May Day Rooms.

With the help of Anthony Davies as mentor ( tutor at Central Saint Martins) I found some students interested to meet me in response to my book STARTING FROM SCRATCH.

THE STUDENTS

Six students turned up in MDRs (May Day Rooms archive from Below: Historical studies) in the late afternoon. They introduced each other as “rat people” who create performances. They were not directly related to my book that possibly had encouraged them to bring out their ideas and performances as their own Start from scratch.

I was surprised by their play on words that led you to think and rethink meanings.

I took me a while to understand the musical connections. They talked about recordings that could have been real or totally absurd. They said their purpose was to lose your ‘humanous’ in order to spread the rat ‘paraphernalia’ and to provide ‘rat therapies’.They talked about the ‘queer cob scene’, ‘weed sound recordings through touch’, ‘non sensital things’, ‘pantacising’, ‘plantacising’ and, and …leaving it open what they think their studies will result in or are going to be and if they are a group or team or friends or just stay together performing for the next 3 years.

Then our conversation turned to earning money ie in Costa, exploitations to students, to strike actions, students struggles, and to the distinction between humanitarian and corporate law, and finally to talks about work that has no meaning but is fun…

Anthony Davies then showed them part of my work around the film “WHERE IS THE GAIETY’,

photos that I did on an Adventure Playground in 1972, collected in 3 books and archived here in MDRs.

He then talked about Ron Peck and his film NIGHTHAWKS (1978), the first film in Britain openly dealing with gay people. He showed a video clip of this film were the gay teacher facing a class questioning him.This provocative scene portrait the coming out of the pupils and the teacher. It is a well rehearsed and strong piece of filming.

I suggested to run a workshop on the comparison of two classroom film clips, a kind of cross cutting between Ron’s and my own approach to filmmaking with young people acting.

Ron and me had both been creators of Four Corner Films in the 70s.

Two days later I met the student Amy with other students, about 16 of them in a corner of CSM sculpture department sitting on benches in front of a huge screen within a separate area. She had arranged to download my film from Vimeo and so it was that we looked at ‘DON’T THINK SO’ the Super 8 film made by young Skinheads and Mods with me in 1980.

I spent 2 hours with these students and really liked the encounter. I thanked them at the end that they gave me the chance to come out in this way, my way, that is, because I am uncertain about myself. To reveal some of that I felt the need to add a surprise to my visit.

I showed them the photo you see on this page, a sculpture with a head and two hands in opposite directions appearing between the relief of a stone wall.

I asked them to respond. There was a silence.

Then I tried to explain that this sculpture has more than one meaning to me.

Back home I realised that I should have asked them to respond with keywords. And, on the next page, I tried to do this myself.