Studio 17: Souvenir

Studio 17: Souvenir

Dr Lesley Stevenson

This studio is concerned with those objects that are lent a particular enchantment because of their relationship with the past. It considers the role of memory and how it is embodied in cultural artefacts (postcards / photographs / war memorials / landscapes / gardens / tourist trophies / Victorian hair jewellery / mementos / family heirlooms / eBay bargains), and seeks to address the gaps between those private, small objects – the ephemera of everyday life which are often associated with the intimate spaces of the body – and the grander projects of the public body, often artefacts of enduring commemoration. Souvenirs are both traces of highly personal experiences and part of a growing nostalgia industry that is fed by the acts and artefacts of collective remembering.

Films to watch

Terence Davies (dir.) Of time and the city, 2008.
Grant Gee (dir.) Innocence of memories, 2015.

*
Studio image by Lesley Stevenson. Banner: Hans Op de Beeck, Staging Silence (3), video still (detail), 2019

Details

Tutor	Lesley Stevenson

Dissertation Studios 2020–21

1/2

Studio 01: Another Place

Ektoras Arkomanis

Out of a direct treatment of place, whether subjective or objective, emerges another place. It is neither new, nor fixed in time, but it has remained unexplored, scarcely documented – piles of lime and useless cicadas.

Studio 02: Feminist Approaches

Edwina Attlee

The Dissertation Studio 02 seminar series will address feminist practices within architecture, history and activism.

Studio 03: Narrative and Storytelling

Jon Baldwin

This studio focuses on modes of storytelling and narrative conventions. We will particularly consider how narrative intersects with, and informs, identity.

Studio 04: The Conquest of Joy

Aleks Catina

This studio encourages dialogues around the cultural production at a time when narratives founded on certainty have ceased to make sense.

Studio 05: This is my truth; show me yours: Post-truth, propaganda and bulls**t

Jeremy Collins

This studio will look at the emergence of the notion of "post truth" and explore links between other ideas around propaganda and Harry Frankfurt’s argument about "bulls**t". We will consider the usefulness of these ideas, and how they can be explored in creative practice.

Studio 06: The Practice of Space – Writing Atmospheres in Art and Architecture

Nico de Oliveira

Dissertation Studio 06 looks at space as practice, since each location is a mutable entity framed as a moment in time, populated by individuals and shaped by their actions as artists, musicians, curators, designers, architects, writers and spectators.

Portrait of Frau Fiber, a textile worker and activist

Studio 07: Meaningful Work

Paul Harper

This studio will consider the value of making in itself, independent of the product or outcome, exploring the idea of craft as meaningful work.

Studio 08: Speak, Form.

Andrew Hewish

Dissertation Studio 8 asks: How is it that form might speak? This studio looks at the power of rhetoric, of the medium as message, of the figure as discourse.

Studio 09: Thinking with Ruins

Danielle Hewitt

This studio pays heed to these cultural forms and persuasions but asks, how might we productively think with ruins in the present?

Studio 10: Sport and Aesthetics

Ajay Hothi

Dissertation Studio 10 will examine the concept of aesthetics as applied within that most everyday activity: sport.

Studio 11: Le Marteau Sans Maître (The Hammer without a Master)

Joseph Kohlmaier

In a networked world where knowledge and information seems to be accessible everywhere and in any form; and where people in distant places appear to speak to us in real time from our computer screens, Studio 11 tries to imagine an ‘immediate’ and performative experience of the world – outside language and not shaped by our intellect and will.

Studio 12: Material Culture and Transcultural Exchanges

Wessie Ling

Dissertation Studio 12 is concerned with the increasing complexity of the material and symbolic flows of fashion, textile, artefact and commodity.

Studio 13: B(read)

Harriet McKay

Focussing on two of life’s key ingredients, reading and bread, this Dissertation Studio offers sessions that will encourage you to experience and experiment with both.

Studio 14: Rewilding

Gabriele Oropallo

In this Dissertation Studio, we will examine some of the many ways in which art, architecture, and design connect to the discourse on rewilding.

Anonymous stencil of a quotation from a letter from Leopold 1 of Belgium to his niece, Queen Victoria

Studio 15: “If I stay silent nothing will change”: Identity, Politics, Social Change and Creative Culture(s)

Christina Paine

This cross-disciplinary studio considers how power, culture, politics, identity, representation, activism, social media, and mass culture theory intersect with a range of arts practices, including photography, architecture, design and fine art, film studies, fashion and music, sound, pop art, and theatre.

Studio 16: A Material World

Gina Pierce

This Dissertation Studio will be based on the processes that are intrinsic to the design and making of textiles, however it will also be looking at the materiality of these textiles as objects.

Lesley Stevenson

Studio 18: Modes of Human Exchange (Being-with and without)

Nicholas Temple

This studio considers the current (exceptional) conditions of human exchange in a broader historical/social context, highlighting how facial/bodily gestures and the decorum of their physical/ambient surroundings have provided essential clues to the way we respond to, and interact with, the ‘other’.

Studio 19: Paths of Desire

Heidi Yeo

“Design needs to be plugged into human behaviour. Design dissolves in behaviour.” Naoto Fukasawa

Studio 17: Souvenir Dissertation Studios 2020–21