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Nos Es Sencillo
Get PDFAndrea Francke: Perhaps it is inevitable that institutions in the Global North, which hold unequal power in knowledge-making and distribution, repeat colonial structures, even when well-meaning. It’s hard to escape the conditions of where thinking happens. I’m also part of that system, so this critique also includes me. Years ago, in Peru, I was speaking with the daughter of an influential Peruvian intellectual about how he would discuss having made a choice. He could either produce knowledge that is legible and intended for a Global North audience, or he could work in Peru on projects that made sense and intervene in that context. He was aware that you can’t have it both ways, and that it is not only a social and political choice, but also a personal career choice. The refusal of Global North legibility is a choice. Sara and I wanted to find a way to produce and circulate something that claimed a different type of space, that generated different relations of production. It was hard because the structure itself is not a good fit. I approached Giuliana Vidarte, who came up with the format and organized the conversation. Since the point is to map and situate the thinking, then in terms of authorship, Giuliana is more central than us. She raised the point that whenever Cordelia and Olinda, or anyone in the SOI NOMA collective, speak about their work, it is quickly limited to contextualizing and making it legible. It’s trapped in the eternal loop of producing legibility by appealing to specific codes that have been proved effective and seductive to an international art-world context. Giuliana suggested, what if we asked them completely different questions? What if we talked about their experiences travelling? What if instead of making themselves legible, they made the structures that host them and distribute their work visible? What if voices from the Global South were doing the analysis instead of producing testimony that is then analysed in the Global North
Rebellious Acts of Practice Research
Get PDFThis Practice Research SIG workshop called for short presentations of Rebellious Acts of Practice Research. Followed by a discussion led sandpit which lay the foundation for a manifesto on Sonic Screen based Practice Research.
The aim of this SIG Panel event is a call for action on:
- Strengthening the voice of our community
- Bringing existing knowledge and threads of sonic screen Practice research together
(nationally and globally)
- Identifying future goals including the archiving of existing audio-visual (sonic screen)
practice research.
- Laying down the foundation for a manifesto on sonic screen practice research
Chair: Shreepali Patel (London College of Communication) & Agata Lulkowska (University of
Staffordshire)
Contributors include: Fotis Bekglis; Lee-Jane Bennion-Nixon; Hande Cayir; Sophie Jackson; Jyoti Mistri & Nobunye Levin; Orson Nova; Funke Oyebanjo; Ella Wright; Sarah Gibson Yate
Forming Digital Futures: 3D CAD Technology Adoption Among Small Fashion Designers
Get PDF3D Computer-Aided Design (CAD) software is reshaping fashion design and manufacturing, yet its implementation among small designer brands still needs to be studied. This study addresses this research gap by examining how small fashion designers adopt and utilize 3D CAD technology, focusing on implementation strategies and barriers to adoption. Eight semi-structured interviews were conducted with London fashion designers and digital innovation experts to investigate the technological capabilities, limitations, and future potential of 3D design tools.
The findings reveal significant benefits of 3D CAD adoption, including enhanced design iteration speed, reduced physical sampling costs, and increased ability to respond to market changes. However, small designers face distinct technological challenges, such as high hardware requirements (minimum £2,000 investment in computing equipment), steep software learning curves (averaging 6-12 months for proficiency), and limited access to technical support. Despite these barriers, their organizational agility enables innovative applications of these digital tools, such as hybrid physical-digital workflows and collaborative technology sharing.
These insights suggest that while 3D CAD technology can significantly enhance small-scale fashion design operations, broader industry adoption requires addressing accessibility barriers. The study recommends developing targeted training programs, establishing technology resource-sharing networks, and creating collaborative platforms to democratize access to 3D design capabilities. This research contributes to understanding how digital tools can transform small-scale fashion design while providing practical pathways for technology adoption across the industry
‘Smart economics’ as gendered racial capitalism: a critique of corporate capitalism’s co-option of gender equity frameworks
Get PDFThis article highlights how ‘smart economics’ as a paradigm for gender equity reflects a continuum of the gendered and racialised history of capitalism’s appropriations of equity and social justice. By focusing on the example of one corporation, Unilever, and its co-option of social justice and equity discourse, the article aims to put into perspective the limits and ideological meanings of gender equity as ‘smart economics’ when understood as being on a continuum of gendered racial capitalism. Our aim is to highlight how a company with its roots in colonial commodity racism has not only segued into the contemporary global context by commodifying social justice issues but is actively utilising gender equity within its narrative of progress through ‘smart economics’. Rather than holding to account such corporate entities which have profited from colonialism and commodity racism, gender equity frameworks have enabled gendered racial capitalism as can be seen in Unilever’s corporate strategy
What is even real anymore? – The case for personal agency being at the forefront of what it means to be literate
No full textThis is an audio-with-slides recording of my keynote for the European Conference on Information Literacy, given on the 24th September 2025
Admiration for the “fuller figure”: The “outsize” fashions of Linda Leigh Ltd. in the 1950s and 1960s
No full textA 1954 article in The Daily Mirror suggested that there were 5,000,000 “outsize” women in Britain (approximately ten per cent of the population at the time). This represented a significant market for fashion manufacturers; however, the history of British “outsize” fashion has received scant attention. This paper focuses on the specialist “outsize” fashion brand “Linda Leigh” during the 1950s and 1960s. Utilizing British newspapers and magazines from the period, it examines the designs produced by “Linda Leigh” and how they were marketed to “outsize” women across Britain, particularly emphasizing the slenderizing discourse the company employed. Linda Leigh was renowned in Britain for its innovative fashion parades and gained notoriety for its “Large Girls Club,” founded in 1958. Here, I question whether these were merely marketing tactics designed to sell more garments or whether they actively supported the “outsize” woman. Overall, this paper demonstrates why Linda Leigh was at the forefront of “outsize” production in the 1950s and 1960s and, more broadly, why the history of the British “outsize” industry deserves further academic consideration
Units of Attention
No full textDavid Batchelor, Shila Khatami, Daniel Sturgis, Hayley Tompkins
Curated by Daniel Sturgis
Units of Attention brings together the work of four artists who use the language of abstraction.
Each of these artists employs abstraction in a provocative and contemporary manner. Unlike much of modernist abstraction, their work seeks to directly engage with — rather than retreat from — the world around them. They subtly reposition the visual characteristics of past modernist abstraction — such as the primacy of color, gesture, and form — to reflect on contemporary life. In doing so, these paintings and sculptures challenge traditional hierarchies. This is not an abstraction rooted in purity, exclusion, or certainty; instead, these works subversively embrace doubt and casualness, interwoven with the bold colors and forms of contemporary design and the painterly traces drawn from today’s urban environment.
Raw saturated colour seems to impregnate the rough brittle concrete forms in David Batchelor’s (b.1955) Concreto-Concreto 2025 sculptures. Physically balanced, these imperfect blocks of concrete act as an armature to bring together resolutely contemporary colours. Batchelor’s concrete fragments have none of the certainty of modernist architectural forms, but they are not distressed or ruined. Rather like the monochrome sponge-reliefs made by Yves Klein in the 1950s seem to elevate the pure physical - life-affirming - experience of seeing saturated colour. Colours which are drawn from a contemporary palette of spray paint and physically and conceptually transform their concrete supports.
Shila Khatami (b.1979) sometimes uses commercial spray paints to make her paintings. In works such as Window 2025 gold paint has been sprayed though a stencil and sits on a canvas substrate. There is a real delicacy in the way Khatami handles her materials, many of which she sources from decorating and hardware stores, such as the grilled stencil in Window, or the hardboards, pegboards or paint rollers that she might use in other works. Through her handing of such materials, she imbues in her work a loose unstable fragility wonderfully at odds with the toughness one might assume her material choices embody.
Daniel Sturgis’s (b. 1966) hard-edged paintings fuse the intellectual rigour and material discipline of formalist traditions with the visual languages of contemporary popular culture and strategic informality. Paintings such as Daniel Sturgis, How To Be Together 4, 2025, reimagining the optimistic and utopian impulses of modernism through playful, often off-kilter geometric configurations. At once humorous, media-literate, and compositionally egalitarian, Sturgis’s paintings reposition the legacy of twentieth-century abstraction within a framework attuned to twenty-first-century cultural conditions and visual sensibilities. Meticulously constructed through the gradual application of multiple layers of thin paint, these works intentionally efface visible traces of the artist’s hand. The resulting surfaces are smooth, controlled, and refined—emphasising precision while subtly questioning traditional notions of authorship and expressive gesture in abstract painting.
Hayley Tompkins (b. 1971) frequently employs the leaves of notebooks, diaries, and day-planners as supports for her small, intimate acrylic paintings on paper. Within these works, an orchestrated vocabulary of painterly gestures overlays the faint ruled lines of the cream paper, establishing a dialogue between the formal language of painting and the material specificity of the everyday. This approach aligns with Tompkins’s broader practice, in which she applies paint to found objects such as sticks, white shirts, and paper grocery bags. Through these interventions, painting is invited to cohabit with the contingent material world that surrounds the artist. The gestures within each composition oscillate between decisiveness and provisionality, producing works that appear both spontaneous and deliberate—compositions that are at ease within, and responsive to, their contemporary condition
Decoding Robin Hood: Towards a Palimpsestic Method - Reading Layers of Meaning through the Costumes of the Cinematic Robin Hoods, 1938-2018
Get PDFDecoding Robin Hood studies the way in which the costumes of cinematic Robin Hoods in Hollywood have changed between 1938 and 2018, and how these costumes and changes convey meaning through context. Evolving from medieval folk tales and ballads through pageantry and plays with a green-clad hero who lives in the forest, the cultural presence of Robin Hood has become fully mythical further aided by his international appearance in cinema. It has informed and provided limits for cultural language (verbal and pictorial), with myth being embedded, active parts of everyday social and cultural life (Barthes, 1972), as well as determining cultural in-groups and possible expressions within that group (Dundes, 1969). The cinematic texts are approached chronologically through close readings of the costumes (Corrigan and White, 2012), whilst also considering their materiality and the social and cultural context within which they appear. Through the re-presentation of the image (Hall, 1980), the costume exists in relation to previous images, and functions intertextually through the image’s layers of cultural palimpsest (Hutcheon and O’Flynn, 2013). In this process, it becomes a distilled image of the ideal as the assumed and specific characteristics of Robin Hood are dressed in what is considered to be appropriate in contemporary culture.
Departing from existing work on cinematic costume (see for example Berry, 2000; Bruzzi, 1997; Cook, 1996 and 2005), this thesis studies costume as unspectacular and representative of the ordinary and expected (Street, 2001), which allows for a reading of costume as representation of myth, where gender is one layer through performance (Butler, 1990). This informs the hypothesis of Decoding Robin Hood; images function as palimpsests where the layers of the image contain meaning related to cultural myths. Studying costume is thus an effective way of cutting away the superfluity of a famous narrative, and focusing on the palimpsestic image of a mythical character as it appears in an historical moment. Decoding Robin Hood therefore makes a primary contribution to knowledge through providing a method of considering these images
Fatberg Under Barclays
No full textSymposium presentation on new research in progress, including extracts of film screenings.
The presentation departs from Weir’s previous work (Pazugoo), burying objects underground as long-term markers of nuclear waste, and writing around burial and ancestrality by philosopher Elizabeth Povinelli. It proposes a fatberg under One Aldgate as mass anonymous collective burial process, the inheritance and hidden underside of waste products of capitalism, flushed as preservation. Against an ideology of digital immateriality, it is twisted body horror as memorial practice, a more-than-human archive which may or may never be unearthed. Defined through its flows and blockages, it acts as dark mirror to financial data flows above the surface.
Weir presents work in the form of ritualistic offerings to the fatberg, paranoid mapping of offshore finance (through the figure of the Armadillo), an encounter with a discarded meteorite scrap, and a music genre (for an un-named bank) vaporising waste through generative AI