PolyVocalCity – What’s On? – Program 2024
Croydon Tour
9th March 2024 – 10-5pm
This introductory session is a chance for everybody to get to know each other and be immersed in Croydon with a tour led by the Croydon Placemaking Team. You will also have the opportunity to explore the potential of games as a tool for public participation in urban planning processes.
Workshop leaders: Hannah Martin and Katherine Riggs
Location: Urban Room, Whitgift Centre, Croydon.
What’s ON? – Creative week 17th-21st April 2024
17th April 2024 – 10am-5pm
To start off this creative week, this session will ask the participants to think about TV formats they will adopt to best communicate their ideas. A talk show? A quiz game? A cooking program? Anything goes!
Workshop leader: A—Z (Anne Duffau) & Leïla Arenou
Location: Urban Room, Whitgift Centre, Croydon.
Reclaiming the Old Kingdom
18th April 2024 – 10am-5pm
You will work to form a Roleplay group, using the format of David Blandy’s mapmaking game Gathering Storm to collaboratively survey an imagined future Croydon, mapping and subverting established infrastructure. Using writing and map-making you will document a future community’s survival in this imagined space while reminiscing about the participants’ real-life present experiences, intertwined with meditations on geopolitics and environmental change. You will develop your own domain, feeding off the excesses of the past, building a new game to invent and inhabit a new future.
Workshop leader: David Blandy
Location: Urban Room, Whitgift Centre, Croydon.
Parasite is Noise
19th April 2024– 10am-5pm
In this session you will explore the potential of parasites as noise, as disruption and resistance. You will look at how our institutions are based on parasitic relationships and what constitutes and is considered as sound or as noise and how our perception is informed by a long and violent colonial history. You will produce recordings and think together how these can constitute a soundtrack/ jingles for the TV show.
Workshop leader: Dot.i
Location: A House for Artists, Barking.
Tell Me Your Truth. This is Mine
20th April – 10am-5pm
A workshop exploring approaches to narration, rhetoric and public speaking. In this session you will explore histories and contemporary strategies of storytelling and communication. There will be an opportunity to develop short texts, soundbites and stories. You will draw from a diverse range of storytelling and public speaking traditions including: West African griots, mediaeval troubadours, Japanese rakugo and linking the power and dangers of tik tok, reality TV and Trump speak. Participants will navigate these references and devise, test and perform their own strategies.
Workshop leader: Harold Offeh
Location: Urban Room, Whitgift Centre, Croydon.
Undetected
21st April 2024- 10am-5pm
This session will explore popular dance cultures, challenges and trends and link them to technological developments. In an urban environment under surveillance, how can we make ourselves visible or invisible? Together, we will look at how online cultures manifest in public spaces and consider how they interact with anomaly detection security systems. How are our movements read by technologies and those who survey us?
Workshop leader: Nina Davies
Location: Urban Room, Whitgift Centre, Croydon.
Mentoring Sessions
May-July 2024 – 6-8pm
You will be expected to attend 4 mentorship sessions between May and July to work towards the production of your content for the TV show. These will be led by your mentor and with your group. These sessions will take place on a weekday to be confirmed with your mentor.
TV Production
22nd-28th July 2024
A production week to shoot the TV show. You will have worked with your group and mentors towards producing content for the program.
Workshop leader : A—Z, Lou-Atessa Marcellin
Location: Royal College of Art
PolyVocalCity Festival 2024
There will be public events in the fall, place and time TBC.
Workroom Conversation Series
10th April, 1st May, 29th May, 12th June 2024 – 6-7pm
This series of talks will explore how we can ‘make worlds’ together with the human and the more-than-human and how through cultural practices of making kin we can propose new narratives for our built infrastructures.
Each session opens with a guest speaker, either a practitioner or thinker, sharing their research and practice, exploring how we use acts of worlding to highlight, advance and re-address the power balance towards non-dominant narratives voices.
After the presentation the group may discuss the research covered and how the guests’ ideas around the topic feed into a broader discourse around world-building as a necessary practice for making and changing culture.
Speakers: Lou-Atessa Marcellin, Ariel Caine, Margarida Waco and John Bingham-Hall.
Hosted by: MA Cities
Location: Central St Martins, London.
