Concrete & the Immaterial Symposium I

INFRASTRUCTURE STUDIES - MATERIAL CULTURES - POLITICAL ECONOMY

In extended conversation with the research-led art exhibition Concrete and the Immaterial, this first symposium includes contributions by Grzegorz Stefański, Ksenia Rybak, Jess Rowley, and Ishbel Tunnadine.

Locusts — Grzegorz Stefański
Film screening
Commissioned by the Imperial War Museum in partnership with The Brickworks Museum, this film brings together real-life testimonies from the local community in Southhampton about WWI. Looking into the past, it investigates dysfunctional parent-child relationships and the burden of post-war traumas as hindrances to psychological growth. It features a daughter and father striving to overcome historical burdens by creating a new home in the woods, encouraging the daughter to move forward
independently.

Complexities of London's Urban Future — Margaret Jennings
Introduction

Margaret Jennings is a social activist who is currently organising a resistance against the development on a community park. This introduciton will speak to concrete’s roles in providing a gathering space for civic life in tension with the need for urban development and growth to sustain those very public spaces.

Songs of Cite-ation — Jess Rowley

Lecture performance

During this interactive lecture, Jess Rowley will piece together early histories of wax cylinders, singing stone circles and the lost recordings of Black British artists. Examining wax and stone as tactile vessels for sonic (re)memory. Moving between archival fragments, absent recordings and the material histories of sound. As a final offering, audience members will be invited to listen to a compilation of stone circle songs accompanied by refreshments.