HOME: Learning & Engagement Catalogue by Mosaic Rooms

Home Learning & Engagement Showcase

Introduction: The Mosaic Rooms Learning & Engagement Programme

The Mosaic Rooms’ learning and engagement programme responds to our multidisciplinary programme of exhibitions, screenings and literary events, providing an opportunity for creative engagement with the ideas explored by exhibiting artists, and encouraging active participation in artist-led projects that investigate contemporary society in the UK and MENA region. An annual research theme inspired by the exhibition programme enables projects to extend beyond the exhibition timetable and provides a framework for projects developed with diverse audience groups — the local community, young people, specific Arab communities and the wider adult public. The exhibition Home: Contemporary Architectural Interpretations of the Home in the Arab World (The Mosaic Rooms, 20 June–6 July 2012) provided the stimulus for this year’s research theme of home, and the projects showcased here. Considering the notion of home embedded in memories, personal narratives and feelings of belonging, or embodied in everyday ritual, food, objects, real and imagined places, each project sought to nourish the imagination, develop skills of self-expression and encourage the exchange of ideas. Students on the FdA Interior Design course at Chelsea College of Art & Design worked with family members to uncover childhood experiences and memories of domestic practice as the stimulus for design. Young people from across the borough explored the idea of home from the very personal to the socio-political, reflecting on the idea of feeling at home with oneself and with society. First and second generation Yemenis living in London interviewed one another to tease out individual narratives of migration and identity. The resulting objects, photomontage works and oral testimonies present a range of personal and cultural interpretations of home. With huge thanks to our partner organisations, and the artists and individuals who took part. Natasha Freedman Learning and Engagement In 2014 the learning and engagement programme will respond to the research theme ‘Disappearing Cities’ with a focus on the exhibition Mogadishu — Forgotten Pasts and on the transformation of the urban fabric on our own doorstep in Earls Court.

Contents

Memento: Exploring Ideas of Home足 A Project with Chelsea College of Art & Design

Oral histories Capturing Stories of the Yemeni Community in London

Home A Project with Young People in the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea

Reflections on Home

Credits and Acknowledgements

Memento: Exploring Ideas of Home A Project with Chelsea College of Art & Design

Introduction

During the summer of 2012, Chelsea’s FdA Interior Design course developed a project in collaboration with The Mosaic Rooms as part of an educational research programme exploring ideas of home. The project was intended as a cultural exchange between organisations of cultural management, research and education. We were interested in defining processes of individual expression by exploring how designers use personal experiences to develop, articulate and question social values within their individual design agendas. The ethos of FdA Interior Design course has been to foster this relationship between academic study (defined through the personal practices and approaches of the individual) with the contemporary practice of the discipline (defined through the collective). Applied to professional contexts, students gain insight into the relationships between the individual and the group, arranging social phenomena into an effective whole called the ‘design process’. Whilst the live project defines a set of conditions, which are real, the programme is tackled academically with skill and imagination. The learning experience becomes a trajectory between personal processes and collaborative practices and how these respective methodologies are played out into personal and professional outcomes. The project, centred-around exploring key triggers within design sensibility, where experiential elements of the process, describe a fundamental relationship to making work. There is a distinctive process of learning on the course where creative enquiry is tested and explored through an application of practice-based enquiry also described as ‘work-based learning.’ Design as proposition, is then applied to generate an outcome and not just a process- but the emphasis is always about how the outcome is achieved. The 10-week project was based around the childhood memories of over 50 undergraduate students on Chelsea’s FdA Interior Design course. Mapping the personal experience, students have created bespoke objects that tell their unique stories and their recollections of home. With over 20 different nationalities, cultural takes and domestic practices, the next generation of designers present a truly international reflection of what it is to describe a home. Tomris Tangaz Course Director, FdA Interior Design Chelsea College of Art & Design

Total Recall

Where pride is insistent enough, memory prefers to give way. Nietzsche We are all the product of our memories, dreams and fantasies. They will inevitably impact on how we perceive and experience our world. But not all memories are sweet and tender. The reader will also experience the world of the twisted, quirky, subversive, gruesome and hilarious in a domestic scenario. Memories, like dreams, are never straightforward. They not only have a strong symbolic content but they also reveal our souls through how we experience the world in which we live. Memories are triggered by symbols and sensations that we engage with in our everyday lives. They play a subliminal part in our unconsciousness. They activate an unplanned system of associations to enable us how to read and understand reality. They are triggered by our sense of touch, taste, smell, vision, hearing, orientation and equilibrium. Memories generate an autonomous and independent process with positive or negative results. We cannot control how they appear in our minds. However, they are by no means a pathological system but a supportive one to enable us to decode the world. All individual projects were based on personal experiences from the students’ own childhood. And as the mind processes its memories, some projects may lead to ideas that are beyond the grasp of reason. These projects belong to the realm of imagination and creativity beyond functionality. Most projects follow a surrealism technique that uses association and juxtaposition of unrelated objects often absurd, irrational and dreamlike.

The method of re-appropriation was employed as a way to introduce students to an effortless process of creativity and originality. True re-appropriation occurs in areas of scarcity, such as South America or the former Soviet Union where materials, goods and resources were limited. Creativity occurred in a environment of necessity in an effortless and original fashion. In Europe, re-appropriation appears in the design scene as a fetish mode. Europeans still love to over intellectualise the ready-made or “the object trouvé” such as that triggered by Duchamp’s bottle rack. Photography was employed as a research tool, a tool to reveal emotions and not to reveal truth. Students were encouraged to find beauty in the everyday practices and activities which we all see but often neglect as too ordinary or banal. Beauty is not inherent but it is to be found, discovered and captured. The aim of the project was to open up the discussion that design only excels in a world where individualisation and personal inputs express themselves freely. Otherwise, we may collapse into a world of pure pragmatism and problem solving. Fernando Rihl Year Leader, FdA Interior Design

Ethics of Invention

Our project aimed to critique the way in which contemporary design culture converses with issues of domesticity within the current social global climate and its corollary experience of belonging. It also looked at the pedagogy of design in the academic realm and the role of the design student in contributing to domesticity in the future. The project looked at interior and spatial design as a cultural practice related to the ways people live; inevitably looking into how current political practices, contemporary social issues, cultural hybridisation as well as personal choice affects what is being designed today. The project investigated global design production (mass production and homogenous design briefs) and current domestic objects and practices. The relationship between the two opens up opportunities for mis-reading the practical functions of the most mundane of domestic props and through it, to redefine (erase or nurture) the local and particular. The process of re-thinking the object is crucial to an inspired design process. It is greatly sought after by the inventive designer and yet is often practiced by the everyday user without much effort or intention. With this in mind, students researched their personal history in an attempt to re-read objects in relation to their genuine use and functional practices as well as the living culture behind them. They aimed to disassociate objects from their industrial context and strip them of their designed meaning or purpose. It is in this process of adjusting and personalising, of remembering and forgetting what objects do, that our personal and collective history and experience are revealed. Student projects included re-thinking reconstructed porcelain as a thrifty practice, critical of the disposable commodities of today. Another revolutionised the role of ice trays during electricity cuts in war time. 10

Nutcrackers were given monumental immortality and pillows were turned into emotional pacifiers to revoke today’s anxiety ridden modernity. In this adjustment, design becomes a political as well as a creative process, because it is about the ability to make a choice. ‘simple/modern’ domestic design attempts to strip objects to their bare functionality, a huge political statement of the last two centuries which outed decorative ornamentation as code for social stratification or class tracing. It became the aim of mass production to make affordable, well designed, long-lasting domesticity for everyone (a Eurocentric everyone of course). Interestingly this aim applies equally to the two opposing political spectrums, being both a socialist idea and a freemarket capitalist idea. What is ironic is that in freeing us from the prejudice of wealth, class and in part origin, the new accessible ‘global product’ has erased our national and personal identities, unified our domestic settings and limited our choices. However, if we explore the opportunities inherent in the notions of global over-exposure, in the new ‘everyone and no one’ production we see that they open up possibilities for adjustment and personalisation, they enable the democratic practice to ‘personally choose how to read or use an object’. Perhaps unintentionally these new design objects, by failing to trigger emotion through their blandness, have suggested a new take on the democratic-socialist agenda: domestic objects made with your intervention in mind. It is interesting what new hybrid objects, domestic practices and cultures have emerged as a result. What is also equally important, is that once this mind set of ‘adjustment’ is normalised, traditional objects are treated with equal inventiveness, users do not distinguish between type of object, its history or its place in time, they merely apply

the new practice of adjustment to it with the aim of creating their very own, peculiar, particular, glorious domestic setting. In Home-Made: contemporary Russian folk artifacts (Vladimir Arkhipov, Fuel Publishing, 2006), the practice of making make-shift objects is outright political boldness, illegal acts of creative invention that defy the government regulations and the scarcity created by its industrial policy. Pedagogy of the curious Thus, domestic design can validate, encourage and acknowledge but equally limit, over-ride and suppress (a person, a culture, a moment). There may be a direct link between democratic practices, current events and domesticity; the products of this project are thinking pieces that speculate on this relationship and on the way we can respond to domestic design production today by inventing new practices of domesticity. The student propositions have been serious or witty, subversive and critical, useful or useless. They have been specific to their own enquiry. They are asking questions and becoming aware. The brief demanded that students ask critical questions about what kind of designers they want to be, what their social and ethical engagement is. As the creators of the domesticity of the future, they need to become curious about the peculiarities of others and the diversity of human nature and culture. They also need to become interested in the context around which design is made possible; cultural and social commentary is part of design production.

culture and history as a source of reading the dense difference within cultural demographics. The FDA course was selected for the diversity of its student body, brining to the conversation a variety of age groups, cultures, legal statuses and ethnicities and as such, multiple genuine and natural readings of ‘home’. Interestingly, the geographic proximity to the ‘house’ proved less significant than anticipated. Home is no longer a place. Perhaps this is not surprising when thinking about the more obvious conversations of modern international mobility. What is interesting however is that its been replaced by a notion of domesticity in time: an ephemeral moment or small action. … Perec suggested the home is made up of rooms in time the “mondery” or “tuesdary” or “wednesdary”, but perhaps these remained motivated by location. This student encyclopaedia of objects can trigger the notion of home anywhere, a passing moment of domesticity. It is perhaps this temporality that has also given many of the objects their mechanical character, lying somewhere between devices, theatrical props and familiar furniture. The student work crosses disciplines within art and design, between the practical and the metaphorical, utilising different media to make the critical point. Home is where we fall apart and where we mend. Where we forget and where we remember. Where we appear and disappear. The objects of the encyclopaedia make you feel right at home. Reem Charif Associate Lecturer, FdA Interior Design

Encyclopedia of new cultural domesticity (scale) The project explored definitions of domesticity from a personal perspective, looking at personal 11

A Selection of Objects

Conor Fitspatrick Mira Borissova Daisy Oxlade-Martin

Donghyun Koo Kirsty Or Zac Morcon-Harnels Kwok Yin Ho

Harriet Birungi Elena Petriakova Nura Shire

Isha Kapur Jade Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Brien Ampika Ponnirun

Nadia Salem Marie Rola Verena Li Wai Kei Cho Ki Lau

Yuki Teraoka Chun Kiu Wong Katia Hoger

Case Studies

Theano Siarafera —Tea Set Siarafera created two tea sets that reflect on her grandmother’s personal collection of porcelain utensils, treated as cherished objects, passed down through generations. Chipped or cracked pieces were repaired immediately out of respect, loyalty, necessity and thrift. For Siarafera, this stands in juxtaposition to the disposable commodities of today where objects are made with cheap materials and expiration dates initiated at their first sign of demise. Both society and the market overlooks and undermines objects of imperfection. As a result, the personal history behind objects, their respect and importance is stripped away and erased. The tea sets attempt to express Siarafera’s belief in the Beauty of Imperfection. She searches for porcelain objects given away by their owners and gives them history by imitating damages that can occur through every day use. She combines broken pieces to create unique tea utensils specific to personal tea habits, a cup and a half, half a cup, ‘the dunker’. Through their re-assembly, the tea set objects are a testimony of their value, with their imperfections embraced.

Angelo Paterno â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Thundercrack A monumental nutcracker to immortalise a grandfatherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s habitual practice of cracking and preparing nuts for his big family. The project re-thinks the reproduction of the person (statue) as a relevant public monument through a change of scale and sphere of influence (a private monument and practical utensil).

Rola Fattouh — El Harb (The War) Ice trays transformed into war games invented to mitigate the long hours of waiting during military conflict. Fattouh accredits restricted mobility and lack of modern services such as electricity during these times for the invention of new ‘war waiting’ practices and through them, the temporary re-arranging and re-use of the domestic environment. As the ice tray is redundant it can now become a temporary toy. The game also pokes fun at the game-like political tactics of urban warfare.

Ping-Kuan Wu — Hide and Sleep Wu carried her childhood nightmares with her to adulthood. The set of pillows are emotional pacifiers aimed at revoking today’s anxiety ridden modernity.

Oral histories Capturing Stories of the Yemeni Community in London

Introduction

The Last of the Dictionary Men exhibition featured interviews with 14 Yemeni sailors, the last survivors of the first-generation of seamen from Yemen who settled in the small town of South Shields in North East England and made it their home. Collectively, the interviews create a historical portrait of this community, depicting formerly unheard migration stories that span across the British colonial and post-colonial era, and offering a timely exploration of the complexity of British-Arab identities. To accompany the exhibition, The Mosaic Rooms commissioned film director Tina Gharavi to create a new video work with members of the Yemeni community in London. 30 first and second-generation Yemenis were brought together for a weekend workshop at The Mosaic Rooms in March 2013. After lively round table discussions about Yemeni culture, community and identity, participants were invited to interview one another and tease out personal and family narratives. The oral histories captured during the weekend were edited into a new short video work by Bridge + Tunnel which was screened during the latter weeks of the Last of the Dictionary Men exhibition, adding stories from the Yemeni community in London to the voices from South Shields. Exhibition mosaicrooms.org/last-of-the-dictionary-men Workshop vimeo.com/61409060 Interviews vimeo.com/62428758

Images from the workshop 21

Fiction from Art

Author Fadia Faqir was commissioned to lead a creative writing workshop, ‘Fiction from Art’ in March 2013, in response to the Last of the Dictionary Men exhibition.

Photograph Andy Stagg

Participants were asked to contemplate the photographs and life histories of Yemeni sailors documented in the exhibition, and write pieces inspired by them. What they wrote explored so many issues, such as colour, race, identity, home, representation and gaze. Who was observing whom? And could that be reversed? And the implications of the colonial past for the younger generations? The complete texts work at the literal and metaphoric levels, disrupt the ‘master narrative’, and explore ways to position oneself on this new map and remain receptive to the other without assimilation. Fadia Faqir

‘Down there he returns to the company of his men who welcome him and shake him by the hand. “You made the right decision, Farooq Saab,” they tell him as he glances up at the hole, half willing me to join him and half hoping that I won’t. Together they fuel the fire. Sweaty arms aching, they shovel shit into the furnace. And the ship moves on. “How nice to have a new face up here.” The captain’s wife dons a smile. “I love your sari. I have cushions at home just like it. I’ve been meaning to learn about your people. Oh, I don’t mean it like that. I’m not racist. I have friends who aren’t racist.” I think about following my father. But above deck I can sail. So I stay with them. Laugh and joke for a while. I can fit in quite nicely if I swap my sari for their drab corduroys and 100% cotton shirt made in India. They’re laughing and I laugh too. But I don’t get it. How many Pakistanis does it take to shovel shit into a light bulb?’ from The Shit Shoveller’s Daughter by Sofia Salaam

“She becomes an archivist, a photographer, a free lancer — a failure in the eyes of all. And she finds, in the pile of documents coolly moulding on the floor, the memories captured in pictures she died for as a youth. She goes out with men who are invariably dark, with those tellingly long, curling lashes, bright, yet brooding, humorous, yet cool. Arab? Her friends quiz her. Arab? So much more than Arab, she answers. The word secret envelops the conversation. Her father does not know. Her mother smiles when she sees her. London, she says, stars in her eyes. The city. These men do not respect her, and she fears it is because they sense the other side of her (Welsh and flaxen and taut) will not let her embrace them — a stutter, a hesitation over every I love you.

smilingly, not wanting to be anywhere else on the entire globe. At night, in the dream world beyond the flashing lights of the city, the sea crashes over her — and she finds herself in a verdant land. There is no desert — there never was. There is Sarah, holding her every night, though they would never meet.” from Prayer on a Slanted Ship by Sumaya Kassim Read the full written pieces on the Mosaic Rooms website

She prays occasionally, now. She has no time for the whisper of memories from that distant land. The city carried her far away from family or the trailing thoughts of a “home”; everyone is a stranger, a foreigner, here. She curls against the easy definitions she learns, and easy phrases like hybridity, cultural amnesia and mimicry become her war cry — she tries hard not to think of her father coming home, kissing her mother gently, 23

Home A Project with Young People in the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea

Introduction

In July 2013 we ran a series of workshops with three groups of young people in West London. With each group, we began by showing a powerpoint of our work and some images of historical examples of collage and photomontage. We wanted to show that art can be used to express personal and socio/political feelings and beliefs and that the subject of â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Homeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; could be expressed in the widest possible way, from the microcosm to the macrocosm. All the means of production necessary to make images were brought into the youth clubs. This consisted of computers, scanners, paints, magazines, newspapers and a large-scale digital printer. We are committed to the belief that if the means of expression are available for use, it is possible for anybody to produce visual images that can cut through the bombardment of everyday imagery. By reconfiguring the images we see online and in print, by ripping them from their original context and thereby taking ownership of the image rather than merely consuming it, everybody can stamp their own beliefs on found material. The young people we worked with took up this challenge in a totally creative and spontaneous way. Some worked on the computers with Google images and image files we provided. Others cut out images and text from newspapers and magazines or used a combination of digital and printed imagery. Some drew and painted and combined this with photographic images. They worked through material while discussing their ideas with each other and with us. We advised and helped with the technical processes and gradually they all started to combine material that they see everyday but most of whom had not interacted creatively with which then, or for many years. 26

In all the workshops there was a palpable sense of excitement and a build up of concentration as the participants realised that they could manipulate imagery and by so doing, remove it from the sphere of news or advertising and use it to look at their own experience of the world and their own beliefs about home and the society in which they live. A number of them made images mocking and commenting on politicians and by so doing were able to express their take on the public world of politics and spin by putting it into their own visual language. There was a great atmosphere of creative play, working with material that in our everyday lives remains untouched and merely viewed amongst the welter of images and headlines that we come into daily contact with. The participants shared ideas and helped each other develop their work and we tried to enable their ideas to come to fruition. As people found their subject matter and understood that we were there to help rather than to judge, the work started appearing, some of it funny, some of it serious, some deeply personal, some political. We wanted people to enjoy the workshops but also to feel pride in what they could produce. At the end of each workshop there was always a few people that were so involved in their work that they had to be ordered to stop as the youth club was closing for the night. The work included in the exhibition shows all the work that was produced. It shows the potential that young people have to express their feelings about the world, beyond words. Peter Kennard and Cat Phillipps

Project film vimeo.com/70195963

Images of the workshop 27

“I really enjoyed it. It was an experience where you are permitted to express yourself without limits” “I enjoyed the fact that I was able to create an artwork based on what I believe in” “I enjoyed that the project challenged my imagination” Participants’ comments

A selection of work created 28

Reflections on Home From Workshop Participants, Exhibiting Artists and Studio Residents

Lubna Maktari

“London is where I call ‘home’ and I love it. I’d be happy to spend the rest of my life here, even though there are places far sunnier and more exciting and fashionable and beautiful around the world. Yemenis have settled in London over the years and have fused and blended seamlessly into society so that most of us don’t stand out from the crowd: we have lawyers, doctors, journalists, writers, teachers and accountants amongst us and you couldn’t tell us apart from many other first or second generation immigrants. However, when we get together, we remember our common Yemeni heritage through our language and food, music and dance. London has welcomed us into its arms and we have snuggled into its warm and soothing embrace like a child to its mother.”

Tasleem Mulhall

Photograph Abdulallah Mohammed Khan

“This image of my childhood reminds me of the fun of growing up in Aden. Surrounded by relatives and my large family, I never felt alone. I am at the front on the right hand side of the photograph. Sadly I can’t remember, what age I was. But personally I think of London as my home, where I have had the opportunity to develop to my full potential and to become who I am today.” 33

Yamou

“‘Home’ for me is a place for experimenting where connections, ideas and feelings germinate, grow, and take form. A reassuring place that breeds the desire to continue ‘making.’” 34

Mirna Bamieh

Shall I Pose or Play Dead? Video, 2013, 3:34min on loop vimeo.com/73212170 35

Lucien Bourjeily

â&#x20AC;&#x153; Home: the space where all my emotionally connected belongings gather up.â&#x20AC;?

Dor Guez

Sabir Video, 2011, 19:37min vimeo.com/33770542 37

Hanaa’ Malallah

I have left everything there thirsty “Last image taken before I left my home in Iraq in November 2006 to go into exile. There had been no water for ten days.” 38

Supper Clubs

Food is at the heart of domestic life and as part of the engagement programme exploring the theme of HOME, The Mosaic Rooms launched a series of Supper Clubs celebrating the cooking and stories that surround food from the diverse Middle Eastern cultures found in London. Comprising of a series of intimate events hosted by well-known MENA chefs in their own homes, guests were invited to watch the cooks preparing particular dishes, try their hand at some of the recipes, join in conversation around the cultural practices of food and cooking…and eat! With thanks to Sarah Al-Hamad and Lamees Ibrahim for kick-starting the series. 39

Credits and Acknowledgements

Memento: Exploring Ideas of Home

Oral Histories

FdA Interior Design Course Director Tomris Tangaz Teaching Team Fernando Rihl (Year Leader), Reem Charif, Nicola Murphy, Christopher Procter Visiting Tutors Alex Holloway, Maria Cheung Digital Support Max Marino Photography Alex Madjitey, Betty Borthwick Workshop Richard Elliott, Stef Willis, Phil Rutter, John O’Sullivan, Isabelle Tassef-Elenkoff, John Nicoll, Richard Slatter

Director Tina Gharavi Camera/Editor Jamie Korn

Students Ampika Ponnirun, Angelo Paterno, Anna Perfileva, Ashley Taylor, Charlotte Gibson, Cho Ki Lau, Chun Kiu Wong, Conor Fitzpatrick, Daisy Oxlade-Martin, Delger Naran, Donghyun Koo, Edvina Sadovska, Elena Petriakova, Georgia Lever, Haley Roach, Harriet Birungi, Hsin-Chieh Wang, Ider Naran, Isha Kapur, Jade O’Brien, Jessica Hung, Julija Grigorjeva, Katia Thoger, Kirsty Or, Kwok Yin Ho (Alex), Marie Rola, Michael Harrison, Mine Alsa, Mira Borissova, Mungyeong Jang, Nadia Salem, Nirja Shah, Nura Shire, Palak Thapar, Pargol Malekirad, Ping-Kuan Wu, Rola Fattouh, Sajeda Chowdhury, Salonee Kothari, Stephen Lennon, Tamina Ospanova, Theano Siarafera, Thitapar Pairojkijja, Vanda Vecsei, Verena Li Wai Kei, Yael Elizabeth Bidinost, Ying Duan, Yuki Teraoka, Zacharias Morcom-Harneis.

With thanks to Jameel Sayeed Abdullah, Seham Abdullah, Fatima Abdullah, Jameel Aklan, Mohammed Alasnag, Khaled Hussein Alshabib, Abdul Hakim Barakat, Hafed Burgess, Nageeb Haider, Muhammed Ismail, Zainab Luqman, Safa Mubgar, Wadah Mubgar, Ines Layal MubgarSpencer, Nadia Mubgar Spencer, Tasleem Mulhall, Galal Muktari, Waleed H Al-Rwaishan, Suleiman Ahmed-Sakhi and everyone else who joined in the round table discussion. And with special thanks to Lubna Maktari of the Independent Yemen Group whose enthusiasm and support for the project helped engage such a wide range of people from across London.

Home Developed in collaboration with Making Communities Work and Grow (MCWG), Chelsea Youth Club, Earl’s Court Youth Club, and the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea Youth Support and Development Service.

ÂŠ A.M Qattan Foundation, 2013