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Open to people 15 - 21 the Whitechapel Gallery youth programme gives young adults the chance to explore contemporary art and meet creative professionals.

We are currently working on our new project ‘Stories Uncovered’, an initiative led by Tate exploring what archiving means in the 21st century through the eyes of young people. We are one of six partner organisations including 198 – Contemporary Arts and Learning, Black Cultural Archives, Octavia Foundation, South London Gallery and Tate Collective.

Young people from each organisation are to devise a workshop for other young people in collaboration with an artist. We will also take part in making a film about the project. Watch this space to see how the project develops!

Introductory session, Tate Britain

On Saturday 28th Nov, two of our members, Elena and Raf along with Vicky and Renee attended an introductory session at Tate Britain.

The day involved an introduction by Tate’s Young People's Curator, hearing from their Digital and Archive team about the new Platforms initiative, a tour of Tate Britain’s archives meeting the lead artist Nina Manandhar who showed us an exciting archiving project she’s developed called ” What We Wore”. We also tried our hands at Tate’s recently digitised archives, which works a bit like Pinterest and created an album which included photographs of things we were wearing and other related images found in Tate’s archive through their very useful search tool which links items through themes.

You can check out Tate’s album feature and create your own album! http://www.tate.org.uk/art/albums/

We also had a tour of the archives with Tate’s Archivist Adrian Glew who showed us some of the unexpected stuff that you can find on archives!

We even found a film belonging to Whitechapel Gallery’s Archive!

At the end of the day we had a better understanding of what an archive is and of different ways of connecting with our own archive. And what’s more, we realised that we are part of the archive ourselves!

Elena

Wk 1: Meeting Nina and visiting Imprint 93

On Tuesday 12th April we had our first Stories Uncovered session with lead artist Nina Manandhar who introduced us to her project ‘What we wore’, an archive documenting people’s styles from 1950 to today. Her book on the project provided a fascinating snapshot of how radically people’s dress sense changes, and if you don’t document it you forget it.

We are one of several youth forums taking part in the ‘Stories Uncovered’ project, which aims to get young people to engage with London’s heritage by finding interesting material from the archive and making links between the material.

We’re also going to create our own archive project that will refer to the gallery and form our own contemporary snapshot of East London. We met Whitechapel Gallery’s archive curator Nayia Yiakoumaki, who gave us a tour of Imprint 93, the archive and current exhibition we’ve chosen to explore, where artists were invited to make work to fit inside an A5 envelope.

Inspired by a work in Imprint 93 we created the 7 wonders of the East End. We’ve decided to gather our archive digitally as it is 2016 and everyone uses social media! One idea was to create a ‘digital treasure hunt’ where participants would be sent round our ‘seven wonders of East End’ and document their journey through Instagram or Twitter. Locations are not certain yet but a definite is Brick Lane’s bagel store and they could even finish dancing at XOYO.

The other idea was to use colour as prompts for generating a digital archive. Each day for a week, people will be prompted to upload text, sound, images linked to a particular colour which will be collated onto a blog/ website. There could be options to look at only images, or just sounds or texts.

Josh

#Stories Uncovered #duchamp and sons #archive #digital archive #imprint 93 #archiving

Tate Project Day

On Saturday 16th April we went to the Tate for Stories Uncovered Project Day where we met the other 5 youth groups and discussed our ideas for the archive project with artist Nina Manandhar.

To get started we had to brainstorm around three themes: Inspiration from blogs/websites we usually visit, Best # and Audience, what kind of people would attend our event.

We also visited the Tate archives and at the end one lead young person from each group went up on stage and spoke about their idea and what they were going to be doing next. Here’s a shot from the session:

Elena

Wk 2: Future of Archives

Last week we had our second session with Nina and Whitechapel Gallery’s archivist Pamela Sépulveda on the theme Future of Archives. Pamela gave a presentation on the changes to archiving and how archival material is displayed or exhibited - having seen Imprint 93 in vitrines, as an exhibition in our Archive gallery it was surprising that we were actually allowed to touch and handle the same material during the tour of the archives at Tate Britain. We learnt there is no right way to display the material and that this is an ongoing discussion in museums and galleries.

She also spoke on challenges faced in archiving the immaterial and digital work as modern artists’ practices involve them. Our favourite part of the talk was on Visualisations which are new creative ways museums and galleries are using to share their archives on digital platforms. This inspired us to think on how we will display our digital archive. Here are some examples:

This one also tells you how many women and men are in their collection

Nina showed examples of artists who are using text messaging as material for their work. Check out Banrei’s Opera Performed via Text, Allison L Wade: Break-Up Texts and Rora Blue’s The Unsent Project.

She also asked us to search the words “east” and “west” in our phone text messages which we then compiled into 2 pieces. Here are are East and West compositions.

We’ve finally found a way to combine both ideas as they’re both good! Our workshop will focus on both digital and physical archives but can’t give too much away yet as there will be an element of surprise on the day. All we can say is there will be a colour walk around the East End, printed photographs, type written material, sounds and videos, and a souvenir to take away at the end.

Stay tuned!

#Stories Uncovered #duchamp and sons #archive #digital archive #physical archive #whitechapel gallery #archiving

Wk 3: Meeting Lucy Steggals

Last Wed 15th June we had our first session with artist Lucy Steggals who we’ve invited to collaborate with us in devising the workshop. She uses colours as prompts to create archives and collect information about places. Check out her Colour Mining website.

After we watched her film on the colour yellow, we visited the new Mary Heilmann and Keith Sonnier exhibitions in the gallery searching for colours and our personal associations with them. The exercise highlighted the subjectivity in how we perceive colour and the subconscious decisions we make. Take a look at what we came up with.

We spoke about the colours we associated with the East End and came up with a number of answers. Red/ Brown for the bricks, grey for gentrification, vibrant colours (pink, red, yellow, green, blue) for the markets, yellow for Bengali sweet sold on Brick Lane; orange and blue for the overground, red, green, yellow and pink for the underground lines. Wild guess did you know some of the tube stations in East had colours in their names? Blackheath, Bethnal Green, Redbridge, Limehouse and Whitechapel!

More thoughts on colour:

Linking to the 7 wonders of the East End, our next exercise was to think about 7 colour tasks we could potentially explore East End during the week. In three groups we came up with:

Record/ draw/ photograph/ film or write about

7 hidden white things in Whitechapel 7 things that are the colour of Now A yellow feeling, place, memory, thought, mode of transport, text message and sound

Wk 4: Colour walk

Last Wed 22nd June, we went on a colour walk around the area with Lucy in search for the colour yellow. Prior to this we reviewed some of the photos we’d taken for the ‘7 things’ task last week and decided to go looking for yellow, documenting our findings with our phones.

We also talked about the language we use when asking people to participate in an activity. In the last session we had created rules to govern what we collected however in our discussion it came out that the word ‘rules’ although sometimes are good could equally be unappealing to some.

Walking around Brick Lane we quickly realised that the things that first stood out to us were warning signs, lines on the road, number plates etc. After collating a number of these we decided to change tactics and look the unseen yellow, something which didn’t carry a symbolic association. We walked a bit further on, then turning left we headed down to Commercial Street and then back to the gallery. Take a look at what we found.

What was really interesting were the conversations we had on the walk. Raf described yellow as a mild warning sign, not too harsh like red but still very effective in carrying an instruction across. We also talked about what yellow would taste like, and is the sun really yellow?

Back at the gallery, we described yellow in words and recorded this as a sound piece. It sounds very poetic, perhaps we can incorporate that into an activity for the workshop.

Having done the colour walk, we came to a collective decision to stick with yellow and have now come up with a hashtag for people all around the world to submit their thoughts and feelings. Drum rolllllll #yellowpagesds

The session ended with Lucy showing us how to use a really cool machine which turns iPhone photos in to Polaroids.

Wk 5: Analogue Archiving + Planning for our workshop

We went back to Imprint 93 for the first 20 mins to see how artists in the 90s responded to the challenge of creating art that could fit inside an A5 envelope with very few materials. They had very little access to the digital means or readily available to us so it was good to see what they achieved within these parameters.

We each had to pick some works that stood out to us. Some had personal associations to their choices, for others it was the aesthetic of how it was presented, or the content.

Back in the Creative Studio we fed back our ideas and discussed what our workshop on Saturday would look like. The first thing was to create an ‘invitation’ for participants on what they would do. After brainstorming Nic’s caption was selected and he had the task of typing it on yellow paper using a typewriter.

James developed fun and bright yellow posters for the workshop. Asiah and Raf worked on the structure of the workshop and layout of the room. Josh looked into our outfits for the day and developed the photographs we took on the Colour Walk last week into prints, hanging them on a yellow line.

There’s yellow everywhere! We have yellow post its, yellow marbling paints, yellow papers, yellow envelopes, yellow rope! Exciting to see the space transformed.

We ended the session with our three- part invitation! Stay tuned, all will be revealed soon.

Stories Uncovered Workshop: #yellowpagesds Sat 2 July, 2-4pm

Last Saturday we held our workshop for other young people to find out about archiving. Our aim was to invite people to explore the East End though the colour yellow and create digital and analogue archives of their findings.

On arrival people were given a yellow envelope with invitation ‘Please can you send us something yellow, connecting to East London’ either to the D&S email or tag their posts with #yellowpagesds so they could be collated digitally. Inside the envelope contained two handwritten questions - ‘What do you know about archiving?’ and ‘What do you know about archiving now?’ They had to answer the first by writing on our glass windows before going on the colour walk and second at the end of the workshop.

We also publicised our invitation to send something yellow on D&S’, Lucy’s and our own Twitter, FB and Instagram accounts and before the workshop begun we’d received our first post which was very exciting! We ended up receiving responses from all around the world, Brazil to East London in South Africa.

Take a look at the day.

Meeting new people in the Creative Studio.

We led other young people in a walk around Brick Lane documenting through photography and texts things that connected to East London and posting on social media. We photographed objects, people and had conversations about the colour yellow in shops. The walk and material we captured was very subjective, it was interesting to hear the personal connections we had to the area or to some of the objects. This was an important part, using the walk to draw out information, memories or histories.

Our analogue archive

At the beginning we asked people ‘What do you know about archiving?’ Their answers were:

“Huge underground cavern of filing cabinets / Time capsule of the past / Long racks of books and items in a basement.”

At the end, we asked ‘ What do you know about archiving now?’ Some great responses here:

“The difficulty of deciding what goes into it / How similar it can be to curation / Can be current / It’s fragmented, incomplete, random and eclectic / It preserves a personal and collective appreciation of culture / It can be used through modern trends, social media, compiling to organize a collection or materials / Things can be archived physically and virtually.”

We’ll share a digital fanzine with some of our favourite our images next week and everyone who took part in the project will receive an analogue version in the post in the spirit of Imprint 93. If you can’t wait till next week, you can see some of the images here.

T H E Y E L L O W S Q U A D

Photo credit: Ollie Harrop

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