MENACS blog

In its inaugural year, the Sussex Festival of Ideas celebrates the brilliant work of the newly formed School of Media, Arts and Humanities, and aims to highlight the importance of these subject areas in a wide range of exciting events.
 
The festival starts on Wednesday 9 June with the following events:

• BISC-MAH: Experiential Learning and International Collaborations at 11 am gives an introduction to the opportunities for collaboration with the Bader International Study Centre, with a focus on Experiential Learning and Online International Learning.
• We Are All Intellectuals from 11.30am will feature a number of individuals associated with Vivienne Westwood’s Intellectuals Unite who will share how literature has helped negotiate the world. This event has been organised in collaboration with Vivienne Westwood’s Intellectuals Unite, The Subcultures Network and The Museum of Youth Culture.
• In Sussex Humanities Lab – past, present and future from 12noon there’ll be a live Q&A with the members of the Sussex Humanities Lab chaired by Laurence Hill, SHL Visiting Fellow and Digital Art Curator.
• Our first workshop takes place from 2.00 – 3.30pm with Welcome to Sussex Writes which offers the opportunity to find out about their work with local schools and explore your own creative impulses in a creative writing workshop.
• From 4.30 pm in Everything is Happening, Jemma Deer, former Sussex PhD student now based at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich will introduce and chair a discussion with Timothy Morton and Nicholas Royle about their collaborative work on what’s been happening in and to the world since the start of the pandemic.
• The first day concludes with a keynote talk at 6.30 pm by our Stuart Hall Fellow in Residence, Rebecca Omonira-Oyekanmi. In The Stories We Tell Ourselves Rebecca will discuss her career in journalism and her Stuart Hall Fellowship followed by a Q&A on storytelling, journalism, access and inclusion in times of challenge and inequality.

Day two of the festival (Thursday 10 June) features:

• In Rave Today! a panel of Sussex students and scholars including Dr Ben Burbridge, Dr Malcolm James, Professor Lucy Robinson, and Dr Chris Warne will explore the rich and varied relationships between UK rave and academic research.
• At 11.30 am we’ll be exploring the language and art of protest in Powerful protest: how does language enhance activism? with a panel including Prof Margaretta Jolly and Dr Christopher Warne.
• Our second creative writing workshop, Algorithmic Autobiographies (and Fictions): Writing with your Digital Self at 1 pm allows participants to meet, greet and get creative with their digital and algorithmic selves.
• Also at 1 pm a panel of industry experts from some of our partner organisations, Towner Art Gallery, Charleston, Audio Active, Photoworks and What Next? Brighton and Hove will be exploring the possibilities and challenges that face the cultural sector in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic in The Cultural Sector after Covid.
• At 3 pm Sussex History alumnus Adam Sisman and author biographies covering a range of historical and literary figures will explore biographical topics and issues in Living with my Subject: Dr Johnson, Hugh Trevor-Roper, John le Carré, and Me.
• Also at 3 pm Wasi Daniju, Tendai Lewis, Jade Hylton and Rebecca Omonira-Oyekanmi will be sharing personal journeys and insights from their respective crafts to discuss the meaning of representation, identity, loss and hope in art, photography, journalism and community organising in Finding Home: How do black communities find spaces to thrive, create and survive?
• Our final panel discussion of the day will be Considering a Life of Artistic and Political Liberation looking at the life and work of the surrealist photographer Lee Miller whose archive is located at Farley Farm in East Sussex. This discussion at 5 pm will feature the festival artistic director Professor Mary Krell along with academics from Queen Mary and Cardiff Universities chaired by Professor Martin Evans from Sussex.
• Day two concludes at 6.30 pm with an evening of performances and sharing of practice-based research from the Music department. Sounding Spaces, Technologies and Each Other will present work that explores core research threads in Music at Sussex including feedback systems, performance technologies, sounding objects, live coding, pop music performance and songwriting, space/place, and improvisation

Day three of the festival (Friday 11 June)

• Starts with an invitation of show and share stories and photos of your youth with Putting ourselves into the Museum of Youth Culture at 11am.
• From 12 noon in Distributed Device Screening (Simupoems) there will be guerrilla and multiple device screenings of one short film (a ‘simupoem’) selected from a number submitted from an open call to students earlier this month.
• We’ll hearing the effects on UK higher education language teachers of the Brexit Referendum in “…I have woken somewhere else”: Personal Brexit narratives from Language Teachers in a UK University from 3 pm featuring Yolanda Cerda, Rachel Cole, and Jules Winchester from the Sussex Centre for Language Studies.
• Also at 3 pm in Practices of Community in the Arts and Humanities, a panel of academics and students from Drama and Music, and local community arts practitioners will explore collaborative drama and music-based practices as spaces for inclusive academic and cultural communities in a creative and pedagogic landscape fundamentally reshaped by the pandemic.
• At 4 pm Dr Ambra Moroncini will give a joint talk with Dr Olivia Santovetti from the University of Leeds on their recently published book Resistance in Italian Culture from Dante to the 21st Century.
• Lee Miller – Attic to Archives at 5 pm will be an online talk from the Lee Miller Archives to celebrate ongoing collaborations between the School, the Lee Miller Association and Farley Farm.
• The final event of day three at 6.30 pm will be a live improvised performance from feedback music quartet, Brain Dead Ensemble featuring Alice Eldridge (feedback cello), Chris Kiefer (feedback cello), Thanos Polymeneas-Liontiris (feedback double-bass) and Thor Magnusson (threnoscope).

 
The final day of the festival (Saturday 12 June) includes:

• A Creative Practice Symposium hosted by the Centre for Research in the Creative and Performing Arts which will bring together artists and artist-scholars from the Festival of Ideas to share and discuss their creative and research practices. Those participating include Dr Jason Price, Professor Lizzie Thynne, Dr Danny Bright, Dr Evelyn Ficarra, Dr Alice Eldridge, Professor Thor Magnusson, Dr Roberta Piazza, Dr Emile Devereaux, and Dr Lisa Peck. This starts at from 10 am.
• At 1 pm, in Punk women: Memoirs and biographies a panel will discuss how punk women have and can write themselves into punk’s history.
• A Pocket Film Festival will run from 2 – 6.30 pm featuring a range of  short (5-15 min) student films shot on phones, tablets, or other such “pocket”-sized devices. Expect totally original work, or 10-minute re-makes of classic films.
• At 3 pm in Decolonial Perspectives on Museums and Curricula, a panel of activists, curators, researchers and educators will share experiences, insights and expertise in a wide-ranging discussion about approaches to decolonialism. This event has been organised in collaboration with The Royal Pavilion and Museums Trust, Brighton.
• Poetry South East will launch their 2020 anthology of contemporary poetry with readings from poets resident in Kent, Surrey and Sussex at 5 pm.
• The festival concludes with a special keynote presentation from Professor Kate O’Riordan, Dean of the School of Media, Arts and Humanities at 6.30 pm. Kate will share some of her reflections on the festival, and discuss the importance of celebrating the work of staff and students in the School. This will be followed by a Q&A.

Also taking place throughout the festival there will be the opportunity to view screenings of films I Get Up which reflects the collective work of clients at a day centre for people experiencing homelessness and attempts to give voice to these often silenced people, and on Friday 11 June only The Disappearing of Vincent Gambini which was made entirely in lockdown, this new film combines sleight-of-hand magic with the search for contact at a time of isolation.

There is no need to register, you can watch all of the events live on the Sussex Festival of Ideas website.

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