Goodnight George

Illuminate have been busy with all sorts of things lately - we've visited a few different community groups and asked them about life and times in other countries during the First World War years, we've been organising our trip to France to look at some of the sites we have heard about, and we've been planning what our final exhibition pieces will be like. All really exciting!

But we're not the only people who are working on First World War stuff... Here's a link https://www.facebook.com/goodnightgeorge to a really interesting schools project in Staffordshire about the life and times of a local man who fought in the war. Some lovely ideas here!

IWM North

Yesterday I went to visit the Imperial War Museum North in Manchester, in preparation for our group visit there next Sat. I wanted to get an idea of what we could especially look out for with our project in mind.

In the main gallery, things are arranged broadly according to a timeline - plenty of material on WW1 - but there are also little pods on different subjects, where material from different wars is brought together. Check out the one on Empire and war! We should also look at how audio and video material is used; I noticed that most of it is not on headphones, and I thought it worked quite well - what do you think? Is that something we could do, if some of our material is woven into the main "Trent To Trenches" exhibition? Also worth thinking about how it's structured overall - does it makes us feel that there are lots of different narratives and voices, or do we come away with one overarching message, and a sense that there is only one "story" being told?

For us, I think the temporary exhibition, "Catalyst" (about contemporary art and war) is perhaps even more relevant. Look out particularly for two video pieces in the exhibition. Ori Gersht's short film Will You Dance For Me is interesting for us - it uses oral testimony, like we will be doing, but goes far beyond just recording someone talking. It might give us some ideas. Think especially about:

• Idea of creative collaboration between artist and interviewee, and of looking at the emotional response of the interviewee, and the act of actually telling the story, as well as the story itself
• The use of 2 screens in a small space, and interaction between the screens
• Using material spoken in a language other than English
• The way sound is used
• Slowness - not trying to cram in a ton of testimony, but just using one resonant story and giving it space

Then Kerry Tribe's video piece The Last Soviet is interesting from the point of view of:

• Restaging things that happened (not necessarily realistically) as a way of commenting on them
• Weaving two different narrators together as a way of highlighting how a story is constructed
• Mismatching words and images, as a way of commenting on the (un)reliability of history and memory
• Again, using languages other than English.

Looking forward to visiting next week!  Vanessa x

Where we are now... Interpretation

So we've been working hard on pulling together all the different parts of the exhibition. The Interpretation team (Leanne, Amy, Helen and Stef) have been researching all the objects on display, finding out about their uses and origin as well as some interesting stories about how the objects came to be in the Museum's collection.

The next stage was to take all the research and turn it into interesting and readable panels. The team had already decided to group together the items into a number of themes, they were...
The stories and symbols with in the textiles,
How the objects came to be in the collection,
What the objects said about the wearer and when they might have been worn,
Objects that we used for our animation project

These also needed some snapper titles and a brief piece of information to go with them. We put out a brief for someone to work alongside the group who had experience of writing interpretation for museums and of working with groups of young people. We were very lucky to be recommended Amy Barnes who has worked with Leicester Museum's young people's panel and has an extensive knowledge of Chinese textiles.
Amy is now working with the group to write up the text. The first task was to work on the titles for out themes, after a bit of a brain storm and thinking about the key messages we came up with...

Symbols and Stories,
Collecting China ??? (still working on this one!),
Style and Status,
and
The Dragon and the Heavenly peach (which is the name of our animation)

The group have now started to write the individual labels for the objects.