The Barnfield Video Archive Project is a series of participant-led workshops. that started in March 2023. We have been viewing and editing archive videos filmed on the estate and the local area from 2008-2010 for the Well London programme.
Since the initial launch of this project 5 months ago, we’ve watched and analysed a great deal of archival footage and discussed how to get good results when filming with your phone. If you would like to learn more about filming and editing it’s not too late to join the group.
Barnfield Estate Sign 2010 and 2023
All are welcome and it’s free! If you are interested in or have a connection with the local area and its history, this project is for you. We have many upcoming workshops as well as a public screening at the end that will showcase the results from filming during the in-person sessions.
If you are interested in joining us please sign up using this link, and feel free to watch our archival footage here.
As part of our continuous effort to explore our extensive video archive with communities interested in its content, Spectacle Media has been working on a workshop-led participatory video archive project around the history of Rectory Gardens, a squat-turned-housing-cooperative in Clapham’s Old Town
In collaboration with Studio Voltaire, Spectacle has facilitated a series of online workshops to explore, discuss and select video archive material, collaborating with participants to create a very successful exhibition that was launched at Studio Voltaire on Saturday 20 May 2023.
“All Good Things: A Video History of Rectory Gardens”, exhibited the results of a 5 months long journey undertaken by former Rectory Gardens residents and new Clapham residents who met online for participatory video archive workshops to watch, research and select content from 10 years of video documentation that Spectacle has produced in collaboration with former Rectory Gardens residents.
Hundreds of visitors joined many members of the dispersed community on a sunny afternoon to explore the incredible history of the once squatted street that hosted artists, musicians and a progressive community from the 70s throughout the early 2000s until it was evicted and dispersed by Lambeth Council for questionable market-led housing policies. The exhibition, opened from Wednesday 24 May until Sunday 28 May, gave visitors the opportunity to dive into the extensive Rectory Gardens Video Archive and learn about the history of the unconventional community that from the 70s contributed to culture, art and social life in Clapham and beyond.
Spectacle Media has curated the digitalization and facilitated the access to almost 15 hours of video archive and facilitated 6 online workshops in which the video documentation became catalyst for discussions on the cultural and social changes in Clapham. The workshops resulted in a creative collaboration among participants who contributed to the installation and to collective art making through participatory video archive practice
Installation images, Good Things: A Video History of Rectory Gardens, Studio Voltaire, 2023. Credit: Zoë Maxwell
The exhibition, hosted in the main gallery of Studio Voltaire, gave visitors the opportunity to attend a live research project, where it became possible to interact with memories, testimonies and ideas produced in the workshop. Curated selections from the archive were looped on 5 TV sets in the centre of the gallery speaking to big themes like Community, Memories as well as the relation between community, the politics of evictions and short term housing policies. Old residents also contributed with examples of the art that they made on and in the street, memorabilia and photos that populated the walls of the gallery.
The exhibition has attempted to open a dialogue between the audience and the video archive material by letting the public choose from a vast catalogue of rough archive footage: full interviews with long term residents, residents who were born and grew up on the street, public figures, supporters of the co-op, artists and hours of visual archive collected from 2014 to present, documenting the street, clapham old town and key places in and around Clapham. Visitors have also contributed to the archive, sharing their own memories that filled the gaps of a big collage representing the complex history and outcomes of squatting and short term housing in London.
Visitor’s memories of Rectory Gardens
The Rectory Gardens video archive project has been part of Unearthed: Collective Histories, a project supported by Historic England’s ‘Everyday Heritage Grants: Celebrating Working Class History’ and Hartfield Foundation.
Spectacle Media
Growing out of Spectacle’s decades of pioneering participatory video practice, Spectacle Media is a non-profit Community Interest Company specifically championing community uses of digital media. Spectacle Media uses new technologies to empower groups and individuals through learning video-making skills, working collaboratively on community-led media production and engaging with online participatory filmmaking and editing.
Spectacle Media also has access to Spectacle’s production equipment and thousands of hours of Spectacle’s unique video archive on themes including urbanism, human rights, social justice, utopianism, alternative media, top-down vs. bottom-up regeneration, housing and more. Spectacle Media aims to develop projects to open and explore the video archive with communities interested in its content.
Studio Voltaire
Studio Voltaire is one of the UK’s leading not–for–profit arts and education organisations. Championing emerging and under-represented artists, Studio Voltaire commissions and produces exhibitions, collaborative projects, artist development programmes, live events and offsite projects
Studio Voltaire is a registered charity and part of Arts Council England’s National Portfolio.
Read more about Spectacle’s participatory model and past projects.
We are delighted to announce the launch of the Barnfield Video Archive Project. In a series of participant-led workshops we will be viewing and editing archive videos filmed on the estate and the local area 2008-2010 for the Well London programme.
frame grab from walking tour of Barnfield estate 2010
The workshops are both online and in-person at the HUB Herbert Pl, London SE18 3BD.
Our aim is to explore these archives and for participants to film new videos to show the changes of places and people over time. The workshops will include training in how to get good results filming with your phone. In the summer we will publicly screen the results of the project at the HUB . Date to be announced.
All are welcome! Residents past and present, young and old, people with an interest in or a connection to the area, people with an interest in local history or community development. Please share this with your friends, family and colleagues.
Frame grab from a sample of video of the feast event 2010 Barnfield Estate
Workshop dates are as follows:
Tuesday 23 May 2023 – 6:30pm-8pm
Tuesday 6 Jun 2023 – 6:30pm-8pm
Tuesday 20 Jun 2023 – 6:30pm-8pm
Tuesday 27 Jun 2023 – 6:30pm-8pm
If you are interested to join us please sign up using this link. Alternatively, if you would prefer us to contact you via phone, feel free to include your contact details, and Mark will be in touch.
We are pleased to announce that we are meeting at the Lewington Community Centre (9, Eugenia Road, London SE16 2RU), on the Silwood Estate, on Monday May 23rd 2022 to watch with residents extracts from the Silwood Video Archive. The screening event will start at 6.30 pm and will be both live and online.
The event is open to anyone who lives or lived on the Silwood Estate, or is just interested in its history.
The Silwood video archive contains footage shot on the estate since 2001 to the present by Silwood residents and Spectacle, documenting the impact of the regeneration on the local community and everyday life and activities on the estate. Sections of this archive have been digitised and discussed with residents in online workshops as part of the Digitally Democratising Archives project, funded by the National Lottery and The Audience Agency.
It will be possible to attend the event remotely by joining this zoom link.
If you want to join the Silwood Video archive project and have access to future workshops and to the video archive, please sign up to the group by using this link
The Silwood Archive project is supported by The Audience Agency’s Digitally Democratising Archives project thanks to funding from DCMS and the National Lottery, as part of The National Lottery Heritage Fund’s, Digital Skills for Heritage initiative.
Except where noted and excluding company and organisation logos this work is shared under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0) Licence Please attribute as: “Silwood Archive Project (2022) by Spectacle Media CIC supported by The National Lottery Heritage Fund, licensed under CC BY 40
Participatory Archive Video Project exploring the regeneration of Silwood Estate, Lewisham
Summary
In March we have wrapped up the final stages of our Digitally Democratising Archives project, funded by the National Lottery and The Audience Agency.
The aim of the project was to open the Silwood archive, for the first time since filming began, and to invite the Silwood community to watch, comment on, and hopefully begin a participatory editing process which will draw out the story(ies) of Silwood.
Our project has gone largely as planned. All the aspects of workshops that we envisioned have happened. Participants have enjoyed watching and discussing the archive. Rather than stopping after 6 workshops we decided to maximise momentum by running a workshop every week for the duration of the project.
Online archive based participatory video workshops
Outcomes
Exploring the Archive
From the Silwood Archive – Residents shooting on Silwood Estate during a workshop with Spectacle
As part of this project we digitised and uploaded 392 clips from the Silwood archive. These clips covered a variety of themes including: the destruction of the estate, location shots of buildings which no longer exist, planning meetings which showcased spaces and buildings which were never built, promises made and not fulfilled, the desire for a youth centre and community centre, fly tipping, poems, and interviews with former residents.
Archive based participatory video, missing sculpture on Silwood Estate in Lewisham and Southwark
As part of the project Spectacle published a short edited video on the theme of the missing statue Neighbourly Encounters. This statue was made by the artist Uli Nimptsch and specially commissioned for the estate.This short film brings together interviews of the model for the statue, bringing a historian on to the estate to discuss the missing statue, and the community’s memories of the statue itself. It continues to be unclear when and why the statue was removed, and where it is now.
Community Engagement
This project had three levels of potential engagement. The most shallow level was through likes, views, clicks, engagement on social media, or blog posts. We regularly shared public updates about the project, and occasionally posted public edited clips or videos from the archive. At this level Spectacle’s posts on Facebook about the DDA project reached 1660 individuals and had a total of 456 engagements. This is an average of 138 reached, and 38 engagements per post. Public videos received a total of 427 views on Youtube.
Youtube playlist of videos concerning Lewisham and Southwark Silwood Estate residents
The second level of engagement was through subscription. Each blog post offered the opportunity to subscribe to a mailing list to access the archive. 26 unique participants subscribed and were given access to the 392 never before seen clips from the Silwood Archive that were uploaded during the project. Between them these 26 participants generated 1,354 views of private vimeo videos from the Silwood archive.
The third and deepest level of engagement was through participation in workshops to view, discuss, and make selections from the archive. A total of 10 participants participated in 17 workshops over the course of 4 months.
A view of a visit to the Silwood Video Archive page
We received very positive feedback from participants. Participants remarked that they felt this archive was “vital to the history of their community.” There was great enthusiasm to share the archive with new or younger community members who would not be aware of the history of the estate.
Spectacle Skills
This project has been a useful opportunity to test and develop our cataloguing, digitising workflows and our archive-based participatory workshop model.
We developed our archive-based participatory model to run online archive-based workshops using a variety of platforms, and found ways to teach participants to use these platforms effectively. Through this process we have developed our workflows and explored the best use of accessible digital tools.
Through this process we have developed workflows to transfer archive footage from tape and other legacy formats (MiniDV, DVCam, DVDs) to digital, to be uploaded to online platforms.
Image from the archive – residents edit footage shot in participatory video workshops
We have developed practices for platform sharing of video archives. We have learned how to organise clips so that the archive is easier to share with participants, and explored how to balance file-naming systems for archiving versus user-friendly labelling.
Expanding the Archive
Spectacle visited the Silwood estate on Monday the 29th of December and filmed locations and activities including ongoing construction, fly-tipping, the location where the youth club bus arrives, the new community garden, and general location shots around the streets of the estate.
Adding to the archive – going back to shoot location views with Silwood Estate residents
This footage will be added to the archive as part of the ongoing documentation of the Silwood estate for the past 20 years during the regeneration of the area.
Plans to Continue the Programme
We plan to continue working with the Silwood community on the archive. We have been involved with the Silwood community for over 20 years, and that relationship is one we are eager to continue.
A view of the Shard from Silwood Estate
Further, this experience has given us confidence to push forward and expand the model. We are eager to use this archive-based participatory model to explore some of our other archives, and the skills gained in this project are easily transferable. We are keen to continue running archive-based participatory workshops with various communities drawing on our numerous other video archives.
The Silwood Archive project is supported by The Audience Agency’s Digitally Democratising Archives project thanks to funding from DCMS and the National Lottery, as part of The National Lottery Heritage Fund’s, Digital Skills for Heritage initiative.
Except where noted and excluding company and organisation logos this work is shared under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0) Licence Please attribute as: “Silwood Archive Project (2022) by Spectacle Media CIC supported by The National Lottery Heritage Fund, licensed under CC BY 40
Working with the Audience Agency’s Opening archive programme – Spectacle has been taking the time to explore our historical Silwood archive. One thing that we have recently started to focus on is the paper archive that is associated with the hours of videos of the Estate. These papers detail what is in the 200+ hours of footage, they show the themes that we were thinking about at the time, and include footage logs and shot lists.
Come explore the archive with us – everyone is welcome.
It’s so helpful to have this paper archive because it gives us a sense of what we will find in these tapes, without having to watch each tape individually. This gives us the ability to dig up the kinds of footage the members of our archive video group might want to see relatively quickly.
Cataloguing footage themes
This archive sits in the cross digital-paper time, and leaves us pondering what it will mean for video archives of the future that might only have digital records. Will they be more or less fixed? At Spectacle this experience has made us think carefully about digital archive preservation!
Images of the catalog of Silwood Video Archive
We have a paper archive of the themes we have shot dating back 20 years.
Images of the catalog of Silwood Video Archive
We have still images of the estate dating back generations.
Scan of planning proposals Paper archive includes fliers distributed by development groups.
We are digging into the archive, we’d love you to join us! Sign up for updates, new archive releases, and to have a say in editing new material.
The Silwood Archive project is supported by The Audience Agency’s Digitally Democratising Archives project thanks to funding from DCMS and the National Lottery, as part of The National Lottery Heritage Fund’s, Digital Skills for Heritage initiative.
Except where noted and excluding company and organisation logos this work is shared under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0) Licence Please attribute as: “Silwood Archive Project (2022) by Spectacle Media CIC supported by The National Lottery Heritage Fund, licensed under CC BY 40
The sculpture was commissioned from the artist Uli Nimptsch for the new GLC Silwood Estate and stood on the estate from 1964 until it disappeared some time in the 1980s or 90s.
Local historian visits the site of the missing statue
If you have memories of Silwood, and would like to watch more Archive footage please visit this link.
Uli Nimptsch’s 1964 statue is missing
If you are interested in joining us in selecting parts of the Archive to edit into short videos such as the one you have just watched, please subscribe here.
For more on the Silwood Video Group and the story of the estate since 2001 visit the Blog
As part of our on-going Silwood Archive project, Spectacle has been hosting weekly meetings of the Silwood Video Group (SVG). Often as SVG watches archive footage together themes emerge. In the past month these have included: youth clubs, community centres, fly-tipping, and the lack of a community centre, youth facilities, green space and communal areas on the estate.
Youth facilities are lacking on Silwood Estate
The group wanted to film some locations to accompany the themes that had been coming up in the meetings. Spectacle visited the Silwood estate on Monday the 29th of December and filmed locations and activities including ongoing construction, fly-tipping, the location where the youth club bus arrives, the new community garden, and general location shots around the streets of the estate.
December streets in Silwood Estate
This footage will be added to the archive as part of the ongoing documentation of the Silwood estate for the past 20 years during the regeneration of the area.
Silwood Community Garden is just beginning
All are welcome to join our Silwood Video Group – watch original archive – help select material for publishing-get involved in filming.
We are delighted to announce that Spectacle CIC has received funding from the National Lottery Community Fund to restart the Silwood Video Group with an archive-based film project.
Map of the Silwood Estate, from the archive
Since 2001 Spectacle has worked with the Silwood Community in Lewisham and Southwark setting up the Silwood Video Group. Spectacle has run over the years hundreds of video workshops documenting daily life and changes created by regeneration. The collaboration has resulted in many short films published in DVDs, added to a few web episodes in the Channel 4 series Unteachables, an ICA exhibition, as well as further exhibitions at the Musee du Beaux Arts in Brussels.
The National Lottery grant allows members of the Silwood community to gather together around the video documentation that has been produced during the regeneration of the estate, aiming to revitalize the Silwood Video Group and equip the community to make use of video archive and video tools to reflect on their own history and future. Spectacle is running a series of online workshops, watching back and commenting together on what were the issues documented by the Silwood Video Group in the early 2000s. The project culminates in a workshop on the Silwood estate to collect oral histories and reflect on how to use the video archive to support the local community.
Community Video Work shop from the archive
The Project
The Lottery funding has allowed us to re-start the Silwood Video Group, initially in an online setting through an archive-based film project.
Workshops for SVG begin online
Putting the Silwood Archive online has been an aim for many years. Spectacle has been uploading archive selections for the community to watch and discuss online. If you want to watch the available archive, sign up HERE.
Meeting every Thursday at 7, the SVG group watches selections from the archive and discusses the material, drawing out themes and topics of interest. If you would like to join this meeting, please sign up and we will send you the Zoom link. This is leading up to meeting in person with up to 12 participants to record oral histories in the community and add new perspectives on the archive.
Our Archive-based video project aims to bring together a variety of different groups and generations of the Silwood Community to review and add new oral histories to the Silwood Video Archive. We hope participants will build community bridges, connect to the past, engage in creative practice, and learn filmmaking skills.
From the Silwood Archive
We are very excited to be providing a space where isolated members of the Silwood Community can come together in a fun and educational environment to talk about history and film.
Archive-based Participatory Film Projects
Spectacle CIC is very excited about the tool of archive-based film projects. We see that they have the power to reduce loneliness by bringing people together, creating connection through shared creativity and learning, and anchoring residents within their own history.
Silwood Community video workshops, from the archive
These workshops foreground the wisdom of an older generation that is too often sidelined and isolated, while also sparking the joy in technology of younger generations. They offer an outlet for art and creativity in connection with others, as well as skills for future employment. It enable older community members to pass on knowledge to younger members or newcomers, and offer practical tech literacy and filming skills to participants.
Silwood Video Group and the Future
For 20 years, the Silwood Video group has built relationships across generations, ethnicities, and cultures through filmmaking. This extraordinary and unique group has been open to anyone in the community and in that time has benefitted approximately 200 people aged 6-70 constituting an unusually diverse range of people in terms of race and religious background.
Silwood Community planning meeting, from the archive
Spectacle’s relationship with the Silwood community stretches back 20 years. Spectacle created the Silwood Video Group because the community wanted to have a voice in the proposed regeneration plans for their community. Placing the tools of filmmaking in the hands of the community empowered people to actively shape the future of their community through media activism.
The idea for this archive project is based on the community’s desire to reconnect with the places that existed before the regeneration. Many are getting older, and they want to share their stories with their grandchildren. They also see it as a good opportunity to build connections with newcomers to the community who don’t know about it’s history.
Walk through of Silwood construction site during regeneration process, from the archive
The Silwood Archive project is supported by The Audience Agency’s Digitally Democratising Archives project thanks to funding from DCMS and the National Lottery, as part of The National Lottery Heritage Fund’s, Digital Skills for Heritage initiative.
Except where noted and excluding company and organisation logos this work is shared under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0) Licence Please attribute as: “Silwood Archive Project (2022) by Spectacle Media CIC supported by The National Lottery Heritage Fund, licensed under CC BY 40
For 40 years, Spectacle has pioneered community led video projects and collaborative filmmaking, aiming to give groups and communities the tools and the skills to document what matters through collaborative video projects. Spectacle has led, co-led, and facilitated participatory film groups and workshops of all shapes and sizes.
We have delivered our affordable and enjoyable courses in participatory filmmaking to hundreds of researchers, journalists, and community groups.
Over the last year Spectacle has successfully developed ways to facilitate participatory video workshops remotely, working with researchers from UCL, Oxford, and LSE, and community groups ranging from Colombia to London to Malawi.
This remote Participatory Video project, called Reinventada, was based in Medellin, Colombia. The research project was funded by the London School of Economics (LSE) Knowledge Exchange and Impact Fund (KEI). Through weekly workshops, displaced and migrant women learned the skills of filming and editing and documented their lives as mothers and heads of household, living in disadvantaged neighbourhoods of Medellin, during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The film that came from this research premiered in October 2021 at The International Documentary Film Festival of Bogotá.
OVERDUE – University College London, UCL
Photo by: Sulaiman Kamara, 2020 Image from https://overdue-justsanitation.net/
Spectacle is running a series of training workshops for researchers at UCL working on the OVERDUE project, which is tackling sanitation inequality in three fast-growing African cities: Beira (Mozambique), Freetown (Sierra Leone), and Mwanza (Tanzania).
Our training in participatory video method offers an excellent resource for disrupting dominant narratives and cliches, or for understanding the impact of a project such as OVERDUE, by asking the beneficiaries to document the impact in their daily lives.
GemDev – University College London, UCL
Lima, Image from GEMDev.net
Tracing the story of where we get our energy is one very important way to understand a society. For researchers from UCL’s Grounded Energy Modelling for equitable urban development in the global South (GEMDev) project – tracing community’s energy use using oral histories and visual storytelling is key to understanding what energy means in impromptu communities.
In June 2021, Spectacle had the opportunity to work with Dr. Michelle Nicholson-Sanz and provide video training for the participants in her innovative Young Ecovisions project.
The Silwood Video Archive Project marries participatory methods with video archive material in a series of narrative building workshops supported by The Audience Agency’s Digitally Democratising Archivesproject thanks to funding from DCMS and the National Lottery, as part of The National Lottery Heritage Fund’s Digital Skills for Heritageinitiative.
In June, Spectacle began an online participatory video workshop series for a group of residents and community leaders in Greenwich. This programme of 8 half day workshops was designed to build the skills and capacity of the diverse Greenwich communities to co-produce media.
In January, Spectacle ran a bespoke training course for The Oxford Centre on Migration, Policy, and Society (COMPAS). Spectacle’s training will give these researchers the skills to film with a more professional production quality and edit with an eye for narrative flow. Going forward, this will enable them to make short videos to effectively communicate their research to a larger audience.
Book your Training Workshop
Spectacle offers bespoke training either one-on-one or to groups. These can be arranged to fulfil your specific needs. Bespoke training can be built around your project so you can book sessions at your convenience and get the advice you need.
Spectacle Media bespoke training courses
We work in any time zone globally. Browse our courses, or email training@spectacle.co.uk for information on bespoke workshops.
