Refugiados y beneficiarios

This chapter introduces the University of Birmingham Arts and Science Festival, an annual seven-day festival which is held in March and organised by the University of Birmingham. The central theme of the festival is ‘ideas, research and collaboration’ and the festival programme offers visitors an eclectic public programme of events comprised of varied cultural forms; film screenings, short plays, music, exhibitions, interactive workshops, talks, lectures and discussions.

During each of the four editions to date, the festival has presented a minimum of fifty events and exhibitions over the space of a single week. Due to its scale and the diversity of cultural forms in its programme, as well as the multiple internal and increasingly external partnerships involved in its production, the Arts and Science festival (hereafter

119 UBASF) offers a compelling site for festival research. As well as the texts and discourses in circulation at the UBASF, the experience of the University’s campus-based culture makes an important contribution to the festival’s appeal. While the festival showcases the multiple existing public programmes on campus, its organisers, the Cultural Engagement team, also elicit inter-disciplinary collaborations from within campus communities to produce unique ‘Conversation Pieces’ and they work collaboratively with a range of external cultural organisations and institutions to create additional events. The kinds of partnerships that the university enters into in the production of these festivals provide some clues to the festival’s purpose and how the University’s engagement programmes fit with its strategic objectives. A perspective on one the festival’s partnerships comes from simultaneous research into another festival in Birmingham, the Flatpack festival, whose dates have overlapped with those of the UBASF during the first three editions of the festival. Some events held over these dates have been co-produced between Flatpack festival and the University of Birmingham.

The chapter provides insights into how the UBASF represents an ongoing mediation between internal strategies at the University and the city’s wider cultural networks. Figure 3. Side by side: two promotional documents for a film screening event, March 2013.

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The Arts and Science Festival: form, document and encounter

The first edition of the UBASF took place from Monday 18th _{to Sunday 24}th _{of March 2013.}

The majority of the 70 festival events were free and didn’t require any advance booking and the venues for almost all of them were within the boundaries of the University’s Edgbaston campus, on the outskirts of the city. Some were presented in the rooms and corridors of university buildings and in outdoor spaces around campus, others took place in the University’s established cultural venues that host public programmes on campus throughout the year. Two were at another University’s campus at Selly Oak and several were held in Winterbourne House, a nearby historic building that has close ties with the University.

121 Official figures claim that in its first year the festival attracted 3200 visitors (Culture on Campus newsletter 2013). Each subsequent year, the festival programme has continued to present a diverse set of events around the theme of ‘Arts and Science’, but the events have also been loosely themed around a broad, secondary idea. For the most recent edition in 2016 the secondary theme was Memory and Forgetting, previously it has been Life and Death (2014) and Sight and Sound (2015).

122 The majority of the empirical work that has contributed to this chapter took place

between 16th _{and 23}rd _{March 2014, which was the second time the UBASF festival was} held. The front cover of the 2014 festival guide that year described it as a “festival of ideas, research & collaboration” (see figure 5).

The University published an advance press release on the news page of its website before the festival began, which included an introduction by the Deputy Pro Vice Chancellor for Cultural Engagement.

“The ambition of the festival is to keep the conversation between the arts and science alive. It is our belief that the debate is most lively not in the separation of arts and science, but in the spaces in between.”

Grosvenor 2014

The festival programme categorised events by type. Out of the fifty-nine festival events listed, by far the most popular form for organisers was that of a lecture, with twenty-one events described as lectures and another eleven being called either workshops, debates or ‘conversations’. There were six music performances and four more events that were listed under ‘performances’, although three of these were probably best described as theatre. There was one walking tour and eight film screenings, or screenings of a selection of short films. Multiple events happened every day and sometimes at the same time of day, so overlaps and clashes of events happened frequently.

Eight exhibitions also took place during the festival, most exhibitions were open for more than one day, four of these were held at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts. This is a semi- autonomous art gallery within the campus boundary which hosts a concert hall, lecture theatre and several exhibition spaces. Three of these exhibitions were also listed as part of the Barber Institute’s regular exhibition programme and appeared in their own literature. According to the 2014 festival guide, one of the exhibitions included “cancer tissue samples viewed through microscopes” (p.13) and science researchers would be on hand to discuss their work, the others were of artworks, photographs and posters made by schoolchildren. Unlike commercial festivals, there has been no festival pass for multiple events and no centrally organised box office as a point of contact.

123 As events at UBASF are distributed throughout campus venues, a festival visitor booking for multiple events has had to navigate a series of different booking arrangements and where tickets have had to be obtained, the booking process itself sometimes revealed interesting small details. Many of the free events required the visitor to make an email enquiry to a range of different addresses to book a place, although it was clear that there was a central email address for a number of events presented by the Cultural Engagement team, such as the ‘Conversation Pieces’ which were billed as talks and discussions with “academics, researchers, artists and scientists who cross the boundaries between arts and science and embrace inter-disciplinarity” (UBASF 2014 programme p.8). Out of the four music concerts at UBASF in 2014, one at the Town Hall in the city centre was priced at £15 / £10 concessions and two others were £10 / £8. Student rates of £5 or £3 were offered and one concert, a solo pianist performing at lunchtime, was free. Tickets were obtained from the Town Hall box office, the Barber Institute box office or by email to the Bramall Music box office, depending on the performance. While the majority of film screenings in the programme were free, one film in the 2014 programme was priced at £12 (£9

concessions), this was the UK premiere of a restored archive film Phono-Cinema-Théâtre with live music, presented by “Flatpack Festival in partnership with The Barber Institute of Fine Arts” (UBASF guide 2014 p.25); tickets for the event were available from the Flatpack festival website only. Upon booking a ticket through The Department of Drama and Theatre Arts box office for a student theatre production at the George Cadbury Hall, where seats were priced at £7 or £9, the online checkout form displayed an option to donate £1 to the University’s ‘Circles of Influence’ fundraising programme.

Although the credits in the back of the 2014 guide said that the festival was “conceived and developed by the Cultural Engagement team at University of Birmingham” (p.38) these booking details suggested that many University sub-groups organised and hosted festival events. The analysis of printed ephemera collected during the study showed that in the 2013 edition of UBASF, film and video works were projected onto the University’s Watson Building using a projector acquired by the University’s internal fundraising programme ‘Circles of Influence’ (Cultural Engagement Team 2013). The University raises additional funds for the development of its cultural programming capabilities by inviting philanthropic donations from its alumni and where possible from audiences too.

124 The first three festival guides contain the phrase “ideas, research and collaboration”, indicating that the festival’s basic premise had not changed. By the time of the third edition of the festival in 2015 however, other venues in Birmingham were also beginning to host UBASF events, including the centrally located main public Library, the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, also in the centre, and the Electric cinema, close to New Street station. To situate these partnerships that are part of the production of the UBASF more clearly, it is useful, before looking at the experience of some of the festival events in detail, to summarise the University of Birmingham’s history and the contributions it makes to the city’s built environment and overall cultural profile.

Context: cultural inheritance

The University of Birmingham (UoB) is a large and in many ways a very successful university. It has been a member of the Russell Group of research-intensive institutions since the group first became associated in 1994 and it employs over 6000 staff (Hiles 2014). Originally built at the start of the 20th Century as a unitary campus in “assertive Byzantine style” (Whyte p.171) the location of the University in respect to the city is representative of similar institutions in the UK that date back to the late 19th _Century.

These are the ‘red brick’ or civic universities, which tended to occupy suburban districts on the edges of the city (Charles 2011). The Edgbaston campus hosts many examples of fine and historic architecture; the red-brick Aston Webb building, built in 1900, was one of the first university buildings to appear on the present site. It is a highly decorative building with stained glass windows and over its enormous doors are nine sculpted figures, carved by Henry Pegram in 1907, representing the worlds of art, music, philosophy, literature, science and industry. Aston Webb was a distinguished architect who also created the frontage of the Victoria and Albert Museum and part of the Royal palace in London. This building performs a symbolic function, it is where student registrations and graduation ceremonies are held (UoB 2013) and is set within a crescent of similar buildings facing a clock tower, beyond which is a large, pleasant green space, landscaped with bronze

sculptures and mature trees. Until recently, this semi-circle of grand buildings appeared to have “a tooth missing” (Lane 2012), but with the addition of the Bramall Music Building in 2012, the original architectural vision was finally completed (UoB 2013 p.7) and the University gained a prestigious new, 420-seat auditorium. The University of Birmingham

125 has other public venues for arts and cultural events located on and around its campus. These “excellent place-based assets” (UoB 2015) have provided some spectacular locations for UBASF events every year. These include The Lapworth Museum of Geology, which dates back to the University’s forerunner Mason College in 1880, The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, a wealthy independent Trust founded in the 1930s, Winterbourne House and Garden, former family home of wealthy philanthropist and acquired by the University in 1944, The University of Birmingham Research and Cultural Collections and The Cadbury Research Library: Special Collections. These are not all precisely located within the original boundaries of the original campus, but they are presented together in official University communications and documents and in this way they make up a considerable cultural offer. On the Western side of the campus, where numerous rail and bus links connect the campus to the city, visitors are greeted by an enormous bronze Paolozzi statue named Faraday (2000) at the at the campus gateway, given to the University by the artist to mark the centenary of the award of the University’s Royal Charter. Engraved in the base of the Faraday sculpture are lines from a T.S Eliot poem ‘Dry Salvages’.

Fare forward, you who think that you are voyaging; You are not those who saw the harbour

Receding, or those who will disembark.

Here between the hither and the farther shore While time is withdrawn, consider the future And the past with an equal mind.

The sculpture’s subject matter reinforces the University’s line that it has “long

investigated the crossing points between science and art” (Hamilton 2011 p.3) and the frieze of figures over the entrance to the ceremonial Aston Webb building bear this out. Art works such as the Faraday sculpture are purposefully displayed in in spaces around campus buildings, set in “the very places where students and staff study and relax” (UoB 2009 p.6). A self-guided sculpture tour has been available in some form since the

production of a guide to the Research and Cultural Collections in 2009, on the back page of this booklet a map is provided to the locations of fourteen outdoor sculptures located

126 on University property but accessible to the public. Engagement with the public is

considered to be “a core pillar” (Eastwood 2014) of the University of Birmingham’s Strategic Framework 2010 – 2015. The university is a signatory to the NCCPE’s Manifesto for Public Engagement, in 2009 representatives from the university participated in the original Action Research programme organised by NCCPE and in 2013 the University hosted the first of the NCCPE’s ‘Engaged Futures’ discussion workshops.

Context: a city perspective

The University’s Edgbaston campus lies well outside the city’s main ring road and the journey by bus or train between the campus and the city centre takes a few minutes. The city of Birmingham is unique in the UK, it is the largest city after London (Parkinson 2007) with a population of over a million residents. The city’s population also has a higher proportion of ethnic minorities compared to England as whole. Some areas of the Greater Birmingham metropolitan district are among the most deprived places in England, with persistently high levels of unemployment and social problems and there are parts of the city have been in that bracket for decades. In the 1990s the city was accused of lagging behind its rivals in the “battle for investment” and “failing to attract research and

development, high-tech industry and producer services” (Hubbard 1995 p.245). A recent review of local governance in Birmingham suggested that a mismatch between skills and jobs was acting as a “brake” on the city’s economy (Kerslake 2014 p.56).

The city’s leaders promote it as an international city, pointing to its central location and transport links (Birmingham City Council 2013). In development strategies, the city’s universities and cultural assets are both described as “world renowned” (Birmingham City Council 2013 p.10) but due to the prevalence of concrete buildings and large scale road infrastructures, Birmingham has suffered from ongoing problems with its image. Corbett (2004) has suggested that in the 20th _{century, the city “suffered greatly through war} damage, post-war redevelopment, and highway engineering that had little regard to wider environmental or social issues” (p.132).

127 In 1988 the Council invited planning consultants to redefine the city and turn it into a major European destination. This ‘Highbury Initiative’ resulted in the production of the Birmingham Urban Design Study and City Centre Design Strategy in 1990 in which a number of ‘quarters’ in the city centre were identified for improvement. The Jewellery Quarter was already designated as a heritage district (Hubbard 1995) and the application of the quarters concept, which was incorporated into Birmingham’s Unitary Development Plan in 1993, led to improvements to the quality of pedestrian routes and civic spaces within the western parts of the city centre. Other Council-led strategies for improving the city’s image for business and leisure have utilised public-private partnership approaches to place promotion. Flagship projects such as the development of a Convention Centre, a new arena and luxury hotels, aimed to improve the city’s international profile as a

European destination city, while the Bullring, one of Europe’s largest shopping centres, was remodelled and updated.

The demolition of an inner ring road and the pedestrianisation of a formerly inaccessible area around the Bullring shopping centre have allowed new opportunities for growth to spread eastwards (Corbett 2004). Birmingham’s Creative City strategy in 2002

acknowledged the direct and symbolic contributions made by two formerly industrial areas, now badged as urban creative districts. One of these was the aforementioned Jewellery Quarter and the other was a renovated set of buildings in Digbeth in the East of Birmingham known as the Custard Factory. This was previously a derelict factory which had once employed 12,000 people (Landry, Greene, Matarasso and Bianchini 1996) but a private entrepreneur-led regeneration project, which had also come out of the Highbury Initiative and backed by central Government and the local authority, had led to the establishment of a hub for creative industry production and specialist retail. The Creative City strategy designated the surrounding area, an underused part of the city with many factory buildings and railway viaducts, as a creative-industries development zone and re- labelled it ‘Eastside’. Original proposals for this area set out in the Eastside Development Framework were based on the themes of learning, technology and heritage (Porter and Barber 2007), some developments at the north of Eastside’s Millennium Point site opened in 2001. Not all of the plan’s aspirations were achieved however, another major strategic report several years later suggested that “Eastside and Digbeth is a major opportunity to

128 do a different kind of urban development” (Parkinson 2007 p.52). With culture as a city marketing tool now a mainstay of urban planning, it inevitably called for more creativity, connectivity, culture and consumption. The Big City Plan, launched in February 2008, urged that the cultural identity of these areas should be developed further, but a Cultural Strategy published in 2010 recognised that there were still mismatches between cultural provision and access and participation.

“Many residents would like to engage more in cultural activity but encounter a range of barriers including time, transport, price, availability of information and familiarity. In a young and diverse city, access to forms of culture relevant to the local population is important.”

Birmingham Cultural Partnership 2010 (p.8).

Recently, the Digbeth area has come to be seen as a very hip district. Digbeth hosts the popular First Friday, a monthly micro-festival that celebrates the area’s arty and bohemian