For her doctoral fieldwork, anthropologist Nazima Kadir lived and worked in a squatters community in Amsterdam for 3.5 years. As a squatter, she fully engaged in this community. She participated in public overtakes of empty houses and worked as a cook in a squatters’ restaurant. Oddly enough, her research became the basis of a ‘wacky’ sitcom that was broadcast on Dutch TV.

Come along on Saturday May 4th 2pm when Nazima will give an overview of her work, focusing on her adventures living as a squatter to understand this community better. She will also present some of her analytical findings along with clips of the sitcom.

Studio Mothership’s space

studioSTRIKE’s latest residents, Studio Mothership will be launching their website during the open studios this weekend. They’ll also be live printing their new range of stationery….everyone is welcome to have a go on their table top letterpress!

Come say hi!

You can learn more about the design team’s work here www.studiomothership.com

As part of our Open studios on Saturday May 4th come and hear talks from resident studioSTRIKER anthropologist Nazima Kadir (2pm) and artist Natasha Caruana (3pm).

Nazima Kadir is an anthropologist. For her doctoral fieldwork, she lived and worked in a squatters community in Amsterdam for 3.5 years. As a squatter, she fully engaged in this community. She participated in public overtakes of empty houses and worked as a cook in a squatters’ restaurant. Oddly enough, her research became the basis of a ‘wacky’ sitcom that was broadcast on Dutch TV.

Nazima will give us an overview of her work, focusing on her adventures living as a squatter to understand this community better. She will also present some of her analytical findings along with clips of the sitcom.

Enter through the big red double doors and find us on the top floor for the talks.

Photo courtesy of Ben Roberts

Artists space available from £80 per month. We are now accepting professional artists/creatives to take up residence in our studio community, studioSTRIKE. We have a three spaces available, one is a generous desk and wall spaces in a large studio space, sharing with a textile artist and anthropologist (rental £90 per month).

The other two available desks occupy a 4.8m x 5m space with good natural light (large south facing window), lockable storage and a small studio shared kitchenette in the corner . Rent for one desk is £80, both desks, £150 per month and include heating and business rates and exclude electricity (£7 per month) and broadband/wifi (£10 per month), both payable by standing order.

The studios benefit from 24-hour access, a kitchenette, with the additional benefits of a very large screening/rehearsel/workshop room on the first floor, and a staffed bar on the ground floor. The studios are located in central Clapham, just off Clapham high-street (towards Battersea). studioSTRIKE is a small and friendly creative space for emerging and established artists. It lives on the top floor of the Bread and Roses, a former coach house now owned by the Workers Beer Company. Our landlords are the Battersea and Wandsworth Trade Union Council. studioSTRIKE took over the disused top floor of the building in July 2010. It’s now a professional community of 13 artists from a variety of disciplines working on their independent practices and coming together on a voluntary basis for special project

In 2012 studioSTRIKE organised an acclaimed multidisciplinary arts festival with Arts Council, Film London and BFI support. Foremost as this is a creative community, we are looking for an energetic and enthusiastic artist who can see the potential of working in a friendly and supportive environment and will use the space the best to it’s advantage.

To apply please look us up www.studiostrike.com If studioSTRIKE is the right space for you please:

Email join@studiostrike.com a copy of your CV

Please include link/s to your website, and if available and press links and work related twitter and facebook page.

And a paragraph on what you could contribute to the 2013 studioSTRIKE Festival “Workers and Migration”

Please note only applications sent to join@studiostrike.com will be processed. Shortlisted applicants will be invited to a view the spaces and meet the other artists.

Many thanks
Afshin Dehkordi & Natasha Caruana
Co-Founders

EXCLUSIVE Live score of Eisenstein’s Strike. As part of the Bread and Roses Centennial celebrations, The Cabinet of Living Cinema will perform a live score to Sergei Eisenstein’s seminal work, Strike (1925), alongside Srđan Keča’s award-winning film, Mirage (2011).

Few words can prepare the uninitiated for Eisenstein’s cinema. Scenes of exhilarating editing, cinematic innovation and surreal vaudeville depict the epic struggle between proletariat and capitalist. Mirage, a calmer, but equally powerful take on inequality, depicts Dubai’s migrant workers poignantly juxtaposed with the swimming pools and golf of the wealthier inhabitants.

The Cabinet’s live score, performed using strings, guitar, hammer dulcimer, trombone, percussion and an array of foley sound effects, will feature Russian and Soviet folk and classical music alongside the Cabinet’s contemporary take on silent film scoring.

In the words of Guardian writer, Dixe Wills: “Playing instruments not often heard together … if ever heard at all … the Cabinet’s sound has unpredictability on its side”.

Click here to book tickets for Ritzy PictureHouse Sunday 13 May, 8.00pm. Standard Ritzy ticket prices apply. 

Abridged 60 min screening and live score of strike followed by short intermission and screening and live score of Mirage

STRIKE!
In Russia’s factory region during Czarist rule, there’s restlessness and strike planning among workers; management brings in spies and external agents. When a worker hangs himself after being falsely accused of thievery, the workers strike. At first, there’s excitement in workers’ households and in public places as they develop their demands communally. Then, as the strike drags on and management rejects demands, hunger mounts, as does domestic and civic distress. Provocateurs recruited from the lumpen and in league with the police and the fire department bring problems to the workers; the spies do their dirty work; and, the military arrives to liquidate strikers.

Strike
Stachka (original title)
1925
Director Sergei Eisenstein
USSR

Click here to find out more about Mirage

'What Do We Want?' A small publication on remembering protest. Courtesy of Siân Robinson Davies and Emma Leach

Performance which includes the public dissemination and interaction with a small publication entitled ‘What do we want?’ on remembering protest.

‘What Do We Want?’ is a small publication containing a collection of writings on protest in its
differing forms, thinking about how its parameters are defined, how a unified voice emerges from a
group of individuals and what it means when a protest is remembered for the wrong reasons. The
text will be disseminated within the public space surrounding Clapham Common bandstand,
inviting passersby to resurface their own experiences and (mis)recall protest.

Siân Robinson Davies makes solo performance work with an interest in language, semiotic games,
visual puns and the spatial syntax of Sign language. She also works collaboratively with the
Edinburgh Peer Group, organising interventions, discussions and workshop activities in a variety of
public spaces across the city.

Emma Leach is an artist based in London working in performance, writing and installation. Her
works have a strong focus on narrative, using play and observation to adapt an original story – often
from a news article or other ‘official’ source. Her practice engages with subjects of political,
historical and social significance through the by-products of larger, more newsworthy events.

Saturday 5th May
2:00 pm at the Clapham Common Bandstand
FREE admission

Digital still from Silo Walk, 2008-2010, courtesy of Lucy Reynolds

‘Silo Walk’ is a silent moving image work that re-visits routes inhabited by female anti-nuclear protestors at Greenham Common’s American military airbase, since transformed into a nature walk around the site. The work’s title serves an ambiguous and paradoxical purpose: acting both as a commemoration of the Common’s past, whilst at the same time neutralising the dangerous potentiality of its military ambitions by inviting the walker to absorb these implications into the pleasurable context of a walk in the countryside. ‘Silo Walk’ unwittingly suggests that this submerged history can be stirred again through the act of walking, re-treading lost ground as an aid to memory.

We will also be showing ‘Carry Greenham Home’ prior to exhibiting Lucy’s work. Lent to us generously by Contemporary Films, the documentary shows an account of life at the women’s peace camp at Greenham Common, Berkshire.

“I am excited to be a part of this project and support a new generation who face the task of re-thinking effective forms of protest and the role that art can play in this process” –Lucy Reynolds, in conversation with Amy McDonnell and Ying Tan in 2012

Saturday 5th May
8:00 pm at the Clapham Common Bandstand
FREE admission

Photo courtesy of Alice Tatge

‘A Reflection on the Idea of Free Labour in Art’ is a new performance work choreographed by Alice Tatge or a participatory protest event on the dependence of the contemporary labour market on unpaid work.

“I immediately warmed to the idea of creating a performance around the unique structure of the bandstand, traditionally a space for an organised social gathering, as my work is ‘site-responsive’ and really does emerge from the environment in which it is located”.

Alice Tatge is a performance artist, choreographer and contemporary dancer. Her choreographic and performative work juxtaposes pure dance and the emotional and physical content that it evokes with other forms of art. Her most recent performance work has revolved around her interest in the phenomenology of sense perception and the possibility of providing interactive/ close encounter experiences for audience members, both in theatrical and non-theatrical environments.

‘A Reflection on the Idea of Free Labour in Art’ has been commissioned as new choreography from Tatge. This live work is inspired by the physicality of strike, particularly the “moving picket line” technique employed by textile workers during the bread and roses strike. The work will see her responding to gatherings around the Clapham Common Bandstand in an attempt to raise new discussion on labour and cultural production. Using fabric to wind around and extend from the structure of the bandstand, the material will act as a limit and restriction of passerby movement activity in space but will also become an invitation of participation in a protest performance highlighting the epidemic of expected unpaid work in the current market.

Sunday 6th May
5:00 pm – 7:00 pm, and ongoing at the Clapham Common bandstand
FREE admission 

Monsieur Takes A Dip 2010. Commissioned for the b-side Festival, Weymouth, Courtesy of Jordan McKenzie

Jordan Mckenzie is a performance/installation artist who has worked both nationally and internationally. His work is concerned with identity politics and Queer Theory and though new research his practice critical and artistic investigations into the performative potential of drawing.

His piece ‘Feral’ ridicules the moral panic surrounding ‘feral youth’ post The London Riots of last year. Five Hoodies on white chargers will be seen “hanging out” near the Clapham Common Bandstand. Disconnected and disinterested by the events that are surrounding them, this gang exists on the periphery. Calling upon images of the Western genre, gang culture and the ‘outsider’, this performance reframes hoodies as nostalgic (and ultimately empty) emblems of freedom, dissent and opposition.

Sunday 6th May
7:00 pm at the Clapham Common Bandstand
FREE admission

Gestalt Party-Rock Cinema The Party's Over, 2011, Courtesy of Joey Ryken

Chronotopic Invocation 1: Profane Articulations of the Autosarcophagic Orchestra (BZZHHHHJT!!!) A new participatory work to disorientate political sloganing through popular viewership and performance.

“My work connects personal anecdote, occult ritual/symbology, and references to popular culture, sub-cultures and art history.” –Joey Ryken in conversation with Amy McDonnell and Ying Tan

For ‘Towards Common Ground’, a series of performance and moving-image works at Clapham Common Bandstand, Joey Ryken will present a participatory performance work entitled Chronotopic Invocation 1: Profane Articulations of the Autosarcophagic Orchestra (BZZHHHHJT!!!). The work is designed to disorientate packaged, political sloganing through highly theatricalised populist performance within public space. This act will attempt to propose new territories of the social in the radicalisation of knowledge production.

Sunday 6th May
8:30 pm at the Clapham Common Bandstand
FREE admission