War, Revolution and Design: exploring pedagogy, practice based research and costume for performance through the Russian avant-garde theatre

This article recounts an edited conversation that took place at the V & A symposium ‘Russian Avant-garde Theatre: War Revolution and Design’ held on the 24 January 2014, which accompanied the exhibition of the same name. Fashion historian Amber Jane Butchart (V&A and London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London) led Melissa Trimingham (University of Kent) and Donatella Barbieri (London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London) in a conversation discussing the relationship of Russian costume design with the avant-garde in early Modernism across Europe

The affective Bauhaus 1919: 2019

Bauhaus artists László Moholy-Nagy and Oskar Schlemmer dominate the opening exhibition of the year-long celebration of ‘100 Years The Bauhaus’: ‘Licht. Schatten. Spuren’ (Light. Shadow. Traces) (Kunsthalle, Berlin, January 2019). The curators cite these artists as driving forces behind the contemporary visual art and performance pieces, many specially commissioned. This suggests that both artists demand a more nuanced appraisal 100 years on than they have hitherto enjoyed. Part 1 of this article re-evaluates the history of the Bauhaus ‘gestalt’ thinking in relation to creativity; part 2 asserts the absolute modernity of Bauhaus thinking within contemporary performance. The two artists’ work and ideas in every medium were so far ahead of their time that only now are their ideas able to be (if only partially) realised, exploited and developed to create a strong and affective art for the twenty-first century

No such thing as invisible people : toward an archaeology of slavery at the fifteenth-century Swahili site of Songo Mnara

This paper seeks to challenge the notion of the invisible slave in the archaeological record and investigates the way in which material culture may reflect the movements and practices of enslaved labourers on the East African Swahili coast. Archaeological approaches to enslavement have revealed the nuanced and complex experiences of a group of people often under-represented or absent in historical records, while also grappling with the challenges presented by the ambiguity of the material evidence. This paper presents a case study from the fifteenth-century Swahili site of Songo Mnara in Tanzania, an architecturally and materially wealthy stone town in the Kilwa archipelago. It focuses on the context, use, and spread of beads across the site, and considers the possibility of interpreting some classes — such as locally made terracotta beads — as proxies for the underclass and enslaved in an otherwise wealthy settlement. It presents a key study towards the aim of building a highly necessary methodology for the archaeology of slavery in East Africa and beyond, and suggests that certain types of material culture might be used to explore the activities of enslaved and/or underclass individuals

Mapping the Archaeology of Somaliland: Religion, Art, Script, Time, Urbanism, Trade and Empire

FdA – Publicaties zonder aanstelling Universiteit LeidenHeritage of Indigenous People

An Embodied Approach in a Cognitive Discipline

Academia can be an uncomfortable place to work. Academics are examples of professionals who have multiple stresses and pressures. Being an academic is often a fundamental part of someone’s identity. Academia can be a cerebral, critical, competitive and judgmental environment. This chapter draws from a study using creative research methods with academics who self-identified as having an embodied practice. There are different definitions of embodiment. I use embodiment to mean both a state of being and a process of learning about the self, and so embodied practices are ways of bringing conscious self-awareness to and about the body. The academics reflected on the meanings they attributed to these embodied practices, tensions with their embodied identity, and how they used them to impact on their wellbeing