Recent IASH Postdoctoral Fellow, Dr Catriona McAra, reflects on organising and delivering a public-facing Luminate Festival event at the Institute last month.
Boxes of Delight: Surrealism at 90 was a one day public engagement event generously hosted by the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) and part of Luminate: Scotland’s Creative Ageing Festival 2014. The event was based on research conducted during my recent postdoctoral fellowship at IASH, with a project entitled: ‘Memory Box: Post-Surrealist Heirlooms in Contemporary Practice’ which aimed to develop my doctoral research on the late objects of centenarian surrealist Dorothea Tanning (1910-2012) towards greater societal impact. Boxes of Delight also intended to contribute to the University of Edinburgh’s civic mission of democratic intellectualism and widening participation.
October 2014 marks 90 years since the inauguration of the surrealist movement when the Bureau for Surrealist Research was opened to the public on 15 rue de Grenelle (11 October 1924) – a fact which has been surprisingly little reported. That said, increasingly I find myself conflicted about the objectifying sensationalism which tends to accompany such anniversaries – topicality often being exploited for commercial ends. This complimentary event hoped to challenge the celebrity of such extreme birthdays through the notion of gift economies, and by returning to the collaborative, playful and unexpected aspects upon which the surrealist movement was initially founded.
I was, therefore, delighted to be able to invite and collaborate with special guest, Dr Michael Eades (Cultural and Public Engagement Research Fellow at the School of Advanced Study, University of London and curator of November's Being Human Festival (the UK's first National Festival of the Humanities) who provided the practical focus and greater social relevance to the notion of the memory box as less of an introverted, personal possession and more of a concerted community chest. A self-confessed ‘closet surrealist,’ Eades has also published research on surrealism and is interested in the potential of arts into dementia care.
18 audience members attended this lively, interdisciplinary event including: carers, healthcare workers, curators, artists, students, academics, hobbyists and even some practicing surrealists! Participants were instructed to collect ‘found objects’ from their journey as well as other ephemeral ‘memories’ from the day (flyers, bus tickets, detritus, etc.) which we hoped to juxtapose. We began with a quick demonstration of the potential of surrealist principles for collaborative practice – a game of consequences also known as the exquisite corpse! Working in groups of three, participants drew successively the head/top, torso/middle, and feet/lower limbs of their figures, folding their paper secretly and swapping after each stage. Some strange and curious beings emerged from this experiment and many were delighted with the results.
Eades then gave an illuminating talk in which he defined ‘ethnographic surrealism’ and presented his recent research project ‘Bloomsbury Festival in a Box: engaging socially isolated people with dementia.’ He led a series of practical sessions on ‘how to make a festival in a box’ documenting experiences and memories of Luminate 2014 so far on pre-prepared questionnaire sheets. One exercise involved sharing ‘an interesting story about your day’ including sensory snapshots to fill in (What do you see? What do you hear?). Another saw us storytelling our first memories of Edinburgh to a partner or small team, then feeding them back to each other on postcards and luggage tags. For these ‘show and tell’ segments, Eades displayed his archival Festival in a Box in the centre of the table. This provided a useful focal point and was at the heart of discussion throughout. Described as ‘a cultural meals on wheels,’ the Festival in a Box was designed to take the annual festival to members of the Bloomsbury locale who may face mobility issues and/or cognitive impairment. New creations and tangible memories from Boxes of Delight were later added to a special Luminate drawer; a time capsule of the afternoon.
Overall, Boxes of Delight demonstrated the potential of interpersonal narrative dialogues and historical art forms as models for mnemonic retrieval. Eades and I hope that this will form the basis for a co-authored research paper, building on existing scholarly literature regarding the benefits of repetitive craft and performance (e.g. singing and knitting). We were also able to share best practice concerning well-being measures, and how objects might be applied in care contexts to optimum effect. We would like to thank all attendees for their marvellous contributions and hope they will make use of their parting gifts – favour box nets to be used interactively.
--Dr Catriona McAra