WORKSHOPS: Conversations about Keeping, with Manchester Art Gallery

• Jennifer McKellar: Curator (Craft and Design), Manchester Art Gallery
• Kate Day: Learning Manager, Adults and Young People, Manchester Art Gallery and Platt Hall
• Fabrizio Cocchiarella: Unit X Lead
• Dr Gavin Macdonald: Art Theory and Practice Senior Lecturer
• Dr Kai Syng Tan FRSA PFHEA: MA Creative Arts Leadership Senior Lecturer, Department of Art & Performance EDI Co-Lead
• Dr Hannah Singleton FHEA: Art Theory and Practice Lecturer, Department of Art & Performance EDI Co-Lead
• Victoria Dahl: Collaborative Projects Support Manager
• Marcus Lord: External Liaison Manager

• How can stored objects in our museum collections gain new relevance for communities those institutions serve? How can they be made to speak, and on what subjects? ‘Conversations about Keeping’ is a course as part of Unit X for Level 5 (second year) students across art and design disciplines at Manchester School of Art, in partnership with Manchester Art Gallery (MAG). The course looks at particular objects from MAG’s furniture collection currently stored off-site in Lowry Mill, Swinton. The objects we will be looking at are ‘borderline objects’ – not seen as essential to retain, but also not yet identified for disposal. Can some of these objects be kept and made relevant for Manchester’s contemporary communities?
• The course looks at particular objects from MAG’s furniture collection currently stored off-site in Lowry Mill, Swinton. The objects we will be looking at are ‘borderline objects’ – not seen as essential to retain, but also not yet identified for disposal.
• Like all museums, has to make difficult decisions about the future of the objects it holds in its collections. Much of the furniture collection was originally obtained by the Gallery to dress grand houses in Manchester’s public parks (e.g. Heaton Hall, Wythenshawe Hall): stage setting for public amenities informed by – and reproducing – ideas of class, tradition and history.
• If these objects aren’t currently seen as worth keeping and displaying because they don’t meet conventional museum criteria (rarity, aesthetic or historical worth), what other value might they have? How can artworkers and designers facilitate these conversations about value, history and society?
• In groups from different arts and design disciplines, you will be assigned an item of furniture from Manchester Art Gallery’s collection to research and creatively respond to.
• Students will be asked to think about possible connections to Manchester’s communities, and to develop a collaborative creative outcome. Outcomes may be or involve objects, images, texts, performances and other public events. Students will be able to take part in the Open Studios on the 30/03/2023 to showcase their collaborative creative outcomes.
• Learning activities include:
  • Visit to MAG’s Furniture collection store (Lowry Mill, Swinton
  • Talks and workshops in MAG working spaces with MAG professionals from curating, conservation and education. Particular focus on community involvement and participation
  • Lectures on relevant topics at Manchester School of Art: working with institutions, institutional critique, gallery interventions, researching material culture

• Pre-session task: Bring one object into the space that evokes an element (look? smell? from similar historical era? function?) of the furniture that you saw during our field trip that you were most intrigued by.
• 5 minutes: Getting all bodies and minds into the space
• 30 minutes: Warming up:
  • Safe(r) space
  • Film clips + provocations
  • Initial responses (+ introductions, pronouns)
• 5-10 minutes: Short break
• 60 minutes: Exercise I:
  • 30 minutes: Break into groups for discussions about creative interventions, with at least one museum worker in each group. Groups should activate object(s) that were brought in to space.
  • 30 minutes: Sharing findings; other groups provide feedback
• 15 minutes: Cooling down Kicking Off:
  • Closing thoughts on learnings and findings
  • Actions (individual, collective): What next?

Tuhiwai Smith’s arguments put forward in her Decolonizing Methodologies about the fundamentally colonialist structures that underpin research and knowledge lend a powerful framework for our exercise here in interrogating how western institutions of knowledge and culture work. See highlights in this thread by social designer Sarah Fathallah, a ‘non-binary Moroccan Amazigh turned American’, and below:

• Book description for the 2012 2nd edition (point form truncation and bold mine):
  • To the colonized, the term ‘research’ is conflated with European colonialism; the ways in which scientific research has been implicated in the throes of imperialism remains a painful memory for many of the world’s colonized peoples.
  • Here, an indigenous researcher issues a clarion call for the decolonization of research methods in an attempt to reclaim control over indigenous ways of knowing and being.
  • […] This book critically examines the bases of Western research, while also suggesting literature which validates one’s frustrations in dealing with western methodologies, all of which position the indigenous as ‘Other.’
  • The author explores the intersections of imperialism and research – specifically, the ways in which imperialism is embedded in disciplines of knowledge and tradition as ‘regimes of truth.’
  • Concepts such as ‘discovery’ and ‘claiming’ are discussed, explicitly in terms of how the west has consistently incorporated the indigenous world within its own web.
  • This book sets a standard for emancipatory research, brilliantly demonstrating that ‘when indigenous peoples become the researchers and not merely the researched, the activity of research is transformed.’
• ‘Research is one of the ways in which the underlying code of imperialism and colonialism is both regulated and realized.’
• Part of the project of this book is researching back, in the same tradition of writing back’ or ‘talking back‘ that characterizes much of the post-colonial or anti-colonial literature (10). It has involved a ‘knowing-ness of the colonizer and a recovery of ourselves, an analysis of colonialism, and a struggle for self-determination. Research is one of the ways in which the underlying code of imperialism and colonialism is both regulated and realized. It is regulated through the formal rules of individual scholarly disciplines and scientific paradigms, and the institutions that support them (including the state). It is realized in the myriad of representations and ideological constructions of the Other in scholarly and ‘popular’ works, and in the principles which help to select and recontextualize those constructions in such things as the media, official histories and school curricula. Ashis Nandy argues that the structures of colonialism contain rules by which colonial encounters occur and are ‘managed‘.
• The different ways in which these encounters happen and are managed are different realizations of the underlying rules and codes which frame in the broadest sense what is possible and what is impossible. In a very real sense research has been an encounter between the West and the Other. Much more is known about one side of those encounters than is known about the other
• ‘Imperialism frames the indigenous experience. It is part of our story, our version of modernity. Writing about our experiences under imperialism and its more specific expression of colonialism has become a significant project of the indigenous world. In a literary sense this has been defined by writers like Salman Rushdie, Ngugi wa Thiongo and many others whose literary origins are grounded in the landscapes, languages, cultures and imaginative worlds of peoples and nations whose own histories were interrupted and radically reformulated by European imperialism. While the project of creating this literature is important, what indigenous activists would argue is that imperialism cannot be struggled over only at the level of text and literature. Imperialism still hurts, still destroys and is reforming itself constantly, Indigenous peoples as an international group have had to challenge, understand and have a shared language for talking about the history, the sociology, the psychology and the politics of imperialism and colonialism as an epic story telling of huge devastation, painful struggle and persistent survival. We have become quite good at talking that kind of talk, most often amongst ourselves, for ourselves and to ourselves. The talking about the colonial past is embedded in our political discourses, our humour, poetry, music, story telling and other common sense ways of passing on both a narrative of history and an attitude about history. The lived experiences of imperialism and colonialism contribute another dimension to the ways in which terms like imperialism can be understood. This is a dimension that indigenous peoples know and understand well.‘
• ‘The globalization of knowledge and Western culture constantly reaffirms the West’s view of itself as the centre of legitimate knowledge, the arbiter of what counts as knowledge, and the source of ‘civilized’ knowledge.’
• ‘Knowledge (and thus research) is something discovered, extracted, appropriated, and distributed.’
• ‘The knowledge gained through our colonization has been used, in turn, to colonize us in what [Kenyan theorist] Ngugi wa Thiong’o calls the colonization ‘of the mind.’
• ‘If you’re not on the table, you’re on the menu’
• ‘Colonialism wasn’t just about collection. It was also about re-arrangement, re-presentation and re-distribution.’
• ‘Whose research is it? Who owns it? Whose interests does it serve? Who will benefit from it? Who has designed its questions and framed its scope? Who will carry it out? Who will write it up? How will its results be disseminated?’

• Unit X brings together students from different disciplines to work on live project briefs created by a wide range of partner organisations working with academic staff of Manchester School of Art.
• It equips students to work confidently and professionally, as they collaborate, experiment and realise creative responses to briefs.
• Throughout the unit, students share, develop and acquire skills – an experience that enriches their learning experience and broadens their understanding of industry.
• The unit brings the best of Manchester’s creative industries to work with our students including MIF, HOME, the BBC and Bruntwood. By experiencing how creativity works outside of the School, students learn vital skills for their future careers.
• Unit X provides diverse projects that reflect the distinctive, creative approaches our students undertake as they research, explore and develop creative outputs. From live, client-centred projects to placement options, students respond to a given brief that serves to reinforce a creative and professional approach.
• A professional lecture programme also supports the unit, providing a broad context of practice.
• See 2020 Unit X showcase here.