Explore newly digitised footage from the Silwood archive, add your voice, and help shape short films that reflect the community’s real history.

Built in the 1950s on a bombed-out patch of South East London, it became home to a tight-knit, multicultural community of dockworkers, newcomers, and families. Despite being split between Lewisham and Southwark in the 1980s, and being labelled a “bad neighbourhood,” residents built a vibrant community, creating youth clubs, nurseries, and resident-led projects.

When regeneration hit, things changed. Lewisham chose demolition, Southwark renovation. New buildings replaced green space. Long-time neighbours were relocated. The heart of the estate was fractured.

Since 2000, Spectacle has been working with Silwood residents to document this transformation capturing over 350 hours of footage in the process. Now, we’re inviting Silwood residents to help shape what happens next.

Together, we’ll…

• Learn how to film, edit, and catalogue using simple digital tools
• Learn smartphone filmmaking techniques
• Co-create archive – based short films that preserve the community’s legacy
• Share personal stories, memories, and perspectives
• Revisit and reflect on Silwood’s history through never-before-seen archive footage

If this sounds exciting – please register your interest down below:

Through our continous efforts to work with the local community, we would like to introduce The Battersea Places Video Archive Project, its a series of participant-led workshops, exploring the Battersea area throughout the years. 

Battersea and the riverside industries once had some cohesion but its identity, landscapes, political boundaries and demographics have been impacted by waves of industrialisation, land reclamation, bomb damage, mass house building, modernisation, de-industrialisation, demolitions and gentrification.

A series of workshops will be held on Wednesday evenings (at our Lavender Hill Studio or Online) from January through to the end of March where, as a group, we will create a collective visual representation of the local communities and places. Through the use of archives and their new found filming and editing skills, the group will produce a short film, exploring the community’s heritage. The group’s final projects will be shared at public screenings and made available online. 

If this sounds like something of interest to you, then don’t worry, it’s not too late to join in. Luckily for you we record our meetings, so catching up is a possibility. If you would like to join us in our upcoming meetings and become a part of the project, please sign up here. 

Workshop Sign up Form

Jack in the Green is a May Day celebration with disputed origins. Many believe the event to be an amalgamation of ancient pagan customs with a 17th century urban tradition originating from milkmaids, and later picked up by chimney sweeps and other neighbouring guilds. According to this theory, milkmaids would carry pyramid-shaped garlands decorated with flowers and silver household objects upon their pails during May Day celebrations, collecting payments from residents. In a bid to outdo them, the chimney sweeps made bigger garlands, expanding them until the figure of “Jack-in-the-Green”, an all covering structure made up of leaves, branches and flowers, was created. While the tradition died out in the late 1800s, the 1970s folk revival led to it reappearing in many regions across England, each with its own intricacies. Deptford’s Jack was revived in the 1980s by members of the Blackheath Morris Men and has been running since then.

A range of mystical characters can be observed taking part in the 2024 Fowler’s Troop Deptford celebration. Firstly, Jack in the Green is at the centre of the procession, draped in garlands and flowers. He is followed by musicians, performers and ‘Bogies’, his attendants, who are dressed in rags and covered in green paint. Costumes that can be spotted include milkmaids wearing headdresses covered in silverware, a dancing pink ‘Obby ‘Oss and a group of ‘gut girls’ carrying baskets of gizzards during their day off from Deptford’s Foreign Meat Market. Further participants include Morris dancers, clowns and processioners, many adorned with flower crowns and carrying along walking sticks and banners, with others wearing more elaborate summer and folk themed costumes.

The colourful festivities include dance and music performances as well as an extensive procession. They conclude outside a local pub, “The Dog and Bell”, with the ‘slaying’ of the figure of Jack. In a final celebratory moment, the Jack’s leaves and branches get pulled off from his wooden frame and thrown into the dancing crowd, releasing the ‘spirit of summer’. It is said that if you catch one of Jack’s leaves, you will enjoy a year of good luck.

It is believed that the Lewes Bonfire Celebrations originally stem from the failure of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, which saw Catholic conspirators attempt to blow up the Houses of Parliament and assassinate James I. Initially, the events were randomly organised and riotous, eventually getting banned by Oliver Cromwell during the Commonwealth years. They re-emerged after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, but their popularity did not return until the late 1820s, when Bonfire Boys took to the streets with blazing tar barrels and fireballs. Overtime, the event became increasingly ritualised, with bonfire societies being formed and processions being formally organised. The event also came to commemorate the seventeen Protestant martyrs who were burned at the stake in Lewes in the 1500s, and the Two World Wars. Today, the celebrations attract tens of thousands of spectators, though efforts have been made to restrict non-local visitors due to overcrowding concerns.

In this footage, a series of bonfire societies carrying banners can be seen parading through the streets, wearing distinct outfits in accordance with their societies’ dress codes. Popular costumes vary from traditional smuggler outfits, soldiers, vikings, pirates, tudors and characters from various historical eras, to Native American and Zulu ceremonial dress. The two first societies that emerged in 1853, the Cliffe Bonfire Society and the Lewes Borough Bonfire Society, can be spotted in the procession. Some of the five other local societies, such as the Waterloo Bonfire Boys Society, can also be found marching alongside some of the visiting groups, including the Hastings, Mayfield and Uckfield Bonfire Societies. They are joined by brass and wind bands, theatrical dance groups and morris dancers, all carrying or surrounded by torches and fireworks. 

Yearly, satirical effigies of the so-called ‘enemies of bonfire’- often high-profile figures and representations of Guy Fawkes and Pope Paul V- are crafted by the local societies and burnt after being paraded through the streets. In this footage, both Guy Fawkes and an effigy of Chancellor Gordon Brown and Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Mandelson are dragged by processioners in smuggler costumes. Some effigies, along with certain costumes, have caused controversy in recent years, though there have been slight changes made. In 2017, local action paired with threats of a boycott from a genuine Zulu dancer led to the long-standing tradition of “blacking-up” being altered. In spite of this, incidents have ensued, with many feeling that not enough has been done. Others have defended the original costumes and effigy burnings, stressing that they seek to amplify freedom of speech and British history.

In recent years we have developed our methods in a range of projects, using remote work environments to reach out to participants in different parts of the world and adapt to circumstances when travelling is not possible or too costly. 

We have evolved a hybrid model to merge the best of what we learned about in-person and remote training. In-person camera production workshops is the best setting for hands-on practical experience and to have access to professional equipment. Remote training is an efficient and cost effective way to learn and collaborate on video editing projects, allowing participants to acquire new skills from home. 

We have recently been asked to design a hybrid bespoke training programme for the Hutton Institute in Aberdeen, where we have delivered a 2 day in-person Participatory Video workshop to a group of 11 researchers. Social researchers from the institute, all planning to include video in their ongoing and future projects, have learned how to use video to document and support investigations and explored the use of participatory video tools for research. 

Building on our 30+ years experience in community based video and thanks to our successful experience in pioneering the use of remote participatory video we have designed a hybrid bespoke training programme in two phases. 

During the first phase we have delivered a 2 day workshop: Spectacle brought to the Hutton Institute in Aberdeen our equipment, including a range of professional camera types, mics, lights, and tripods etc., to run an intensive introduction to the use of video tools.

In two days, along with demystifying the technology and learning how cameras work, we have shared tricks to work as a team, giving the opportunity to acquire hands-on experience on how to film interviews, document events and locations and approach visual storytelling in the context of research.

All attendees have really valued the way Spectacle delivered a great quantity of technical knowledge in a relatively short time, with practical exercises that are fun and illustrative of all the challenges involved in video making. The learning experience is designed so that it can be applied in any research field: assuming no prior knowledge, using transferable skills to establish a creative environment where everyone can develop new skills and feel confident that their ideas matter. 

The training programme will continue on Zoom with remote video editing sessions, a tool we have successfully included in our participatory practice as well as in our training activity. We will deliver a series of short modules exploring editing softwares, workflows, tools for editing and methods to enhance editorial collaboration and participation. 

All participants will be able to attend from their own computer and review in their own time the recordings of the training sessions in case they miss one. Our online participatory video editing, successfully applied in a range of projects, allows editorial control to be shared either among researchers engaged in the same project or with research participants.

If you want to learn more about our training courses and our offer, please visit our website or contact us at training@spectacle.co.uk. If you are a member of a research group and want to bring our training to your institution, we are happy to illustrate our bespoke training offer and discuss the content that best suits your needs. All our training can be entirely in person, remote or hybrid, and can include follow up tutorials, troubleshooting and project support as well as video editing support for participatory video projects and short documentary productions.

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We also offer a supported self-service option at our south London studio.

Please contact archive@spectacle.co.uk for a quote at our introductory rate.

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.

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.

We are very happy to present the results of a recent collaboration that Spectacle has undertaken with Luisa Enria, an anthropologist at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, helping her produce a collaborative documentary film project built around her research on epidemic management in Sierra Leone.

In January 2022, Luisa attended one of our courses for Anthropologists and Social Researchers with no prior knowledge in video-making. In just over a year Luisa and her co-directors Abass S. Kamara, a field epidemiologist, and Mohamed Lamin Kamara, a civil society activist, set up a local video advisory group, documenting with them places, events and protagonists of the epidemic response to Ebola and the more recent epidemics, including COVID-19 and measles, in Sierra Leone. 

The result was the documentary film TARMA: Communities on the Frontlines of Epidemic Response. Spectacle supported Luisa in planning, developing and editing the documentary and we are proud to share with our audience and the general public a powerful account of community response to health challenges. 

TARMA: Communities on the Frontlines

In 2020, as COVID-19 spread across the world, many of us had to adapt for the first time to pandemic living, taking measures to protect ourselves and our loved ones from the virus. In countries like Sierra Leone, in West Africa, as the pandemic hit, communities already knew what to do. They had been there before. In 2014-16 Sierra Leone experienced a devastating epidemic of Ebola. Amidst immeasurable losses, across the country health workers and citizens built systems to fight future diseases and foster trust amongst the population. TARMA tells the story of how ordinary citizens and local responders, from surveillance officers and doctors to traditional healers, chiefs, and civil society activists, came together during Ebola and subsequent epidemics to develop locally led solutions. 

Humanitarian organisations often say that “epidemics begin and end in communities”, however responses to health emergencies in practice remain too often very top-down and rely on one-way communication with affected citizens. This fails to recognise the knowledge and expertise that already exists at local level. Set in Sierra Leone’s Northern District of Kambia, the documentary centres on the experiences of local responders, as we hear their memories of past outbreaks and follow them into the field as they search for and respond to new diseases. TARMA foregrounds the storytelling of Kambians from different walks of life, without a voiceover narrative so as to offer a direct testimony of the lessons they have learned that might help people across the world to prepare for future emergencies.

Bringing together all the different voices involved in epidemic response, the documentary shows how dangerous it can be to ignore local knowledge and the transformative potential of local leadership in building trust in times of crisis. Collaboration is not always easy, however and ‘community’ is never homogenous or without conflict and disagreements. Through the narration of Morris Bompa, an experienced traditional healer who participated in the Ebola response, we also see the tensions involved when different ways of seeing the world collide. By highlighting these negotiations, the documentary is intended to stimulate debate and discussions around questions of power and the challenges involved in daily efforts to come together in times of crisis.

Making TARMA

Due to pandemic restrictions Spectacle has started developing a range of strategies to translate into a remote work environment its participatory video tools and practice. Supporting long term research projects as well as providing research groups with video making skills that can be used in their research, Spectacle’s approach is to find practical solutions to effectively transfer the skills needed to work together as a group on a film project. Spectacle, through remote workshops, has successfully trained and supported local groups as well as dozens of researchers who gained working skills in shooting and editing video. With Luisa, Spectacle developed a bespoke set of interventions that were tailored to her specific needs as her research and film project progressed.

After attending Spectacle’s video training course, Luisa contacted Spectacle’s team asking to support her and her collaborators, none of whom had any experience in video making, to document and story tell their experience of the recent pandemics in a documentary film that could work both locally and internationally, confronting policy makers, health workers, NGOs and local communities with first-hand accounts of what happened. The film would have also served the purpose of bringing the particular experience that Sierra Leone had to the wide international audience, attempting to highlight the complexity of local responses and the importance of collaboration to overcome the health crisis. 

With Mark and Michele’s precious advice, Luisa returned to Sierra Leone in March 2022 for four months of research and filming. The initial planning for the documentary drew on the experience that Luisa, Abass and Lamin had developed working together for almost a decade of research into local experiences of health crisis and emergency response in Kambia. The three of them brought their diverse perspectives as a social scientist, a field epidemiologist and a civil society activist. They decided to establish a Community Advisory Group (CAG), which met every other week in Kambia to debate ideas for the film, including selecting people to interview, deciding on locations and key activities to film. The team wanted to capture a wide range of voices and to give a flavour of what it means to do the work of epidemic preparedness every day. They travelled far and wide across the District on motorbikes and boats, joining District vaccination campaigns and measles surveillance activities or walking deep into the forest with Morris Bompa the traditional healer. 

After filming, Luisa and Sallieu Kamara, a member of the CAG with interest in filming, attended Spectacle’s Video Editing course, aiming at understanding video editing in terms of process that can, through specific workflows, be shared within a group, improving the ability to analyse material while moving forward the editorial process. Spectacle has then offered technical support in setting up the editing project, allowing Luisa to work in her own time towards a fine cut in collaboration with local partners. Working along with our Spectacle’s professional editor and anthropologist Michele de Laurentiis, and with the supervision of our director Mark Saunders, Spectacle helped Luisa and her collaborators to achieve incredible results, giving birth to an engaging and informative film that has already been shown locally to stakeholders and is now ready to begin its journey spreading its messages all over the world.

The finished film was first shown in March 2023 in Sierra Leone at a community preview screening in Kambia, attended by all who participated in the film, the CAG and the public. A week later, the CAG travelled to Freetown to present the film at the Emergency Operations Centre of the Ministry of Health and Sanitation where the preview sparked fascinating discussions about opportunities but also significant challenges of better integrating local knowledge, including that of traditional healers, in how we think about epidemics and how we design responses to them. 

The documentary is part of a larger project called “Crisis of Confidence” The Politics of Knowledge and (Mis)Trust in Epidemic Preparedness”, funded by a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship (MR/T040521/1) and conducted in partnership with the Kambia District Health Management Team and Anthrologica.

Blog post by Luisa Enria and Michele de Laurentiis

Read more about Spectacle’s participatory model and past projects.

How to contact Us

If you want to be trained in Participatory Video you can attend one of our Participatory Video Workshops or organise a bespoke programme for you and your organisation.

For more information or to chat about your project and ideas email us at training@spectacle.co.uk 

Sign up to our Newsletter for more information about our ongoing projects.

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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.

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.

How to contact Us

If you want to be trained in Participatory Video you can attend one of our Participatory Video Workshops or organise a bespoke programme for you and your organisation.

For more information or to chat about your project and ideas email us at training@spectacle.co.uk 

Sign up to our Newsletter for more information about our ongoing projects.

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To commemorate the 33rd anniversary, we are offering free access to our Battle of Trafalgar film. Click this link for the free promo code: https://vimeo.com/r/3Hoh/bU5jaXd3ZX

Eyewitnesses tell their stories against a backdrop of video footage showing the days events as they unfolded. Demonstrators’ testimonies raise some uncomfortable questions: Questions about public order policing, the independence and accountability of the media and the right to demonstrate.

The footage below was an alternative introduction to the Battle of Trafalgar.

The idea was to situate the poll tax riots within a history of protest in Trafalgar Square around democratic issues, dating back to the chartist’s demonstration of 1848. The pram rolling down the steps is a reference to Sergei Eisenstein’s The Battleship Potemkin.

Click this link for the free promo code: https://vimeo.com/r/3Hoh/bU5jaXd3ZX

Click here to order a DVD of Battle of Trafalgar.
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