Lunch-time lecture "A southland museum"

The Innov8 Invercargill team would like to invite you to the next Innov8 Invercargill Pecha Kucha being held on Monday 17 August at Level 6, Kelvin Hotel, from 5.30pm for a 5.45pm start.

Presenters this month are:

Stephen Davies - the manager/curator of Anderson Park Art Gallery who will speak on the history and significance of the gallery’s collection.

Kathryn McCully –presents on Soft City: The Animation of Cultural Scenes and asks the question If Invercargill could be contextualised as a “soft city” providing the stage for the development of social scenes which intensify urban performativity, what could these scenes be and what role could they play in the revitalisation of the life of the city?

Mick Hesselin - architect with an extensive knowledge about Invercargill's heritage buildings who will talk about some of the buildings we have in the CBD.

 

For more information about Innov8 Invercargill Pecha Kucha visit our Facebook page

A Southland Museum

https://vimeo.com/135204716

a southland museum

Directed and Produced by Kathryn McCully

 

The definition of a museum in New Zealand is broad, recognising a diversity of non-profit entities that research interpret, preserve and manage collections on behalf of communities[1]. The Museums Aotearoa description of a museum’s purpose is indicative of the belief that collections are preserved for the purpose of interpreting histories, exploring ideas and creating dialogue that contributes value to communities. The majority of museums in New Zealand were relatively recently established[2] and are classified as small – employing between 0 and 5 full-time staff[3]. The most recent sector survey indicates 62% of museums identified funding, collection care, buildings, visitation/engagement and staffing as challenges in the 2013 year[4]. Performing the DIY Museum aims to establish a new paradigm by exploring the applicability of creative practice-based research methodologies alongside “critical reflection” and “reflexive action” following a progression from the “unknown to the known” to the purpose of and challenges facing a majority of New Zealand’s public museums.

 

The development of ideas as many artists will attest is not a process that can be controlled or structured “but one that starts connecting diverging elements” that explore the potentiality of new relationships. It is via the practices of the archivist that Crang suggests a process of working “through materials”[5] for example. Walter Benjamin’s affinity with collecting or the archive as a means of revealing “hidden dynamics” serves to support Crang’s argument for a non-linear practice that “reconfigures” and “recontextualises” existing relationships in order to encounter new insights.

 

 Method of this project: literary montage. I needn’t say anything. Merely show. I shall purloin no valuables, appropriate no ingenious formulations. But the rags, the refuse – these I will not inventory but allow, in the only way possible, to come into their own: by making use of them.[6]

 

Benjamin’s method of collecting, juxtaposing and reinterpreting his material would he hoped “make new truths erupt…from the conjunctures and disjunctures between elements.”[7] This archival practice of gathering “fragments and moments” he believed more accurately reflected the nature of experience, of one’s day-to-day engagement in the world. Benjamin’s thinking was in the 1920s aligned with developing surrealist and collage based practices however his intention was an attempt at more than just the clashing or and layering of disparate elements, he sought to perform the evolution of the city by allowing ideas to “emerge from and through the materials”. Benjamin’s method exemplifies the desire for a “mode of representation” that favours neither the experiential nor theoretical but allows experience in the world to be performed thereby signifying the “multiple interrelationships of material”.

 

The work has been influenced by a diversity of practices including the Life in a Day project. Seeking to celebrate its fifth anniversary YouTube approached Ridley Scott’s production company Scott Free UK and consequently began a collaborative project that would see the creation of the first crowd-sourced feature film. Inspired by the Mass Observation movement established in 1937 to study and record the everyday lives of people in Britain, director Kevin Macdonald said the feature documentary titled Life in a Day  “was a wonderful opportunity to hear the voices of ordinary people describing the world as they see it, telling us their fears and loves. I always knew this would say something fascinating about who [we] are as a species and what we value—but I never realized how emotionally affecting the result would be."[8]  Life in a Day was composited from over 80,000 video clips posted directly onto YouTube by people sharing their experience of one day - Saturday July 24^th 2010.

 

The receipt of 4,500 hours of footage necessitated a team of people to view and catalogue each submission according to production quality and content to enable the process of narrative structuring that followed.  Confining the projects scope to one day facilitated some fortuitous synergies, for example there happened to be a full moon so the documentary starts with numerous shots of the full moon before moving into scenes associated with typical and perhaps not so typical waking and breakfast rituals. Evidently the documentary does not attempt to be seamless or pretend to be anything other than what it is. Scenes are filmed by professionals and amateurs alike and the final narrative decided via a process of identifying and compositing patterns and juxtapositions. 

 

“One could always rely upon millions of coincidences and rhymes in this material,” says Walker. “Just because of the sheer volume and range of it. So when we had to move big chunks of the film into a different order, and had to lose connections we'd begun to rely upon, we knew that other connections would swiftly take their place. Some of those only dawned on us later, such as how two very different contributors utter the words ‘because I'm a man,’ or how many clips feature a space where a mother should be.”[1]

 

Further discussion and research around the development of this project can be sourced via http://diypublicmuseumnz.blogspot.co.nz/

 

Thanks to:

Martin McCully

Rachel Mann

Sandi Couchman

John Wishart

Sam Mitchell

SIT

And all the fabulous people of Southland for being so inspirational!

 

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[1] A Strategy for the Museums Sector, Museums Aotearoa, April 2005. www.museumsaotearoa.org.nz.

[2] Museums Aotearoa Sector Survey Report, Prepared by Lisa McCauley for Museums Aotearoa, March 2013. www.museumsaotearoa.org.nz.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid

[5] Crang, Mike. “Telling materials” In Using Social Theory; Thinking Through Research. Michael Pryke, Gillian Rose & Sarah Whatmore (Eds), Sage, London,2003.P136.

[6] Benjamin, Walter. As cited by Crang, Mike. “Telling materials” In Using Social Theory; Thinking Through Research. Michael Pryke, Gillian Rose & Sarah Whatmore (Eds), Sage, London,2003.P136.

[7]Crang, Mike. “Telling materials” In Using Social Theory; Thinking Through Research. Michael Pryke, Gillian Rose & Sarah Whatmore (Eds), Sage, London,2003.P136.

[8]

http://movies.nationalgeographic.com/movies/life-in-a-day/about-the-production/