Transcultural Memory projects

Students on the MA Special Subject on Transcultural Memory are asked to submit a creative project as part of their final assessment.

In recent years, the students have opted to organise exhibitions of their works which imaginatively engaged with the encounter of different memories and histories between and across cultures. The shows took place on campus or in galleries around London, were organised by the students themselves, and were accompanied by publications and well-attended events. During the pandemic, the group created an online presentation of their work.

Some cohorts devised extracurricular projects, which further enabled them to transform the theoretical concepts discussed in class into practice. One year, Almanac Projects invited the group to respond to an exhibition on the Brazilian musicians Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil’s period of exile in London. The students created an immersive event, ever floating, barely suspended (2013), interweaving film, poetry, music and performance on the theme of exile as an individual and collective experience. Another group was invited to host a themed dinner at Delfina Foundation, which resulted in an inventive four-course menu that explored how food, social and political crises and memory are interrelated. One year, participants of the Transcultural Memory module probed the temporality of remembering and forgetting in relation to historical and contemporary migration in an impressive audio-visual event, Rewind/Fast Forward (2018), at the Freud Museum. This year’s cohort is taking part in the research project, The Monument is the Struggle, devised by colleagues in the department, Jorella Andrews and Janna Graham. Together with community groups, they will work on the commemoration of colonialism in the public realm.