Know your Bristol on the Move: Archaeology, participatory mapping and community moving image archives
Event details
In this seminar, I will discuss the AHRC Connected Communities project, Know your Bristol on the Move. This is a collaborative project between the University of Bristol, Bristol City Council and several Bristol community groups. The project aims to enable people to explore, research and co-create Bristol history, heritage and culture using digital tools. I am working with Knowle West Media Centre, the National Film Archive, Bristol Records Office and scholar Peter Lewis to explore how communities can use film and video archives to tell their own histories of place. Film and video can show people how landscapes have changed over time. More than just recording what might be called an ‘archaeological’ landscape, however, these film and video archives are swiftly becoming part of the archaeological record. So, film and video archives both show archaeology and are archaeological artefacts themselves. In Know your Bristol on the Move, we're exploring two categories of moving image archive.
First, we’re digitising 20 hours of video from Peter Lewis’s pioneering Bristol Channel community cable TV experiment from the early 1970s. Inspired by the National Film Board of Canada’s ‘Challenge for Change‘ programme, Bristol Channel adopted a community access approach to programming, aiming to democratise media production but somewhat at odds with the commercial motivation which led Rediffusion, at the time the UK’s largest cable company, to launch the service on its Bristol network. (Peter Lewis, 1976, ‘Bristol Channel and Community Television, London: Independent Broadcasting Authority). Knowle West TV was developed to test a decentralised media model and some 40 hours of broadcast were produced and transmitted between 1973 and 1975. We’re working with people in Knowle West who participated in KWTV or who’ve lived in the community for long enough to recognise participants and locations. Place-based information will be registered through the Know Your Place & Map Your Bristol tools in order to involve this community archive in the planning process. Secondly, we’re organising home movie workshops. These are public events specifically for residents of Knowle West who will be invited to bring their home videos (VHS, Hi-8, miniDV) and film (Standard 8 and Super 8).
Key to these events are questions about the role of people’s personal archives within the public sphere of planning and local history and archaeology. What does it mean for family records to enter the public domain and to be accessible in new, distributed ways? How might sharing these archives benefit communities? Equally, how might such sharing throw into question older understandings of the role of neighbourhoods and the city? Finally, how might moving image archives present new and challenging questions for archaeologists with interests in media forms and contexts?
Angela Piccini is a Senior Lecturer in Screen Media in the Department of Film and Television at the University of Bristol. Her PhD (2001, Celtic Constructs: Heritage Media, Archaeological Knowledge and the Politics of Consumption in 1990s Britain, supervised by Professor Mike Parker Pearson, Sheffield) focused on an anthropological account of the performative spaces of archaeological heritage media, including documentary film & TV, museum display, and open air sites. She has spent the past 13 years working in Bristol, first as a Research Associate on 'Practice as Research in Performance and Screen' (2001-05) and then as an RCUK Academic Fellow on the University Research Theme 'Performativity, Place, Space' before taking up a Senior Lectureship in 2009. She recently co-edited the Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of the Contemporary World with Paul Graves-Brown and Rodney Harrison (2013) and publishes on video art and the archaeologies of urban screens and mega-events.