What did the project involve?
This project involved researching the BECC, closely reading the records it offered, and opening up the archives themselves to new audiences through a series of community workshops and creative responses.
The first was expanding and consolidating the BECC archives and their digital access through archival visits, and the work of a dedicated archivist, who catalogued new items, improved existing cataloguing records, and provided detailed context on the collection’s provenance. As the subject matter of hunting/nature was not particularly well surfaced, the archivist also spent time with the uncatalogued parts of the collection (both electronically through the logs and physically in B Bond) with Tara Puri and Mohini Chandra to identify the key artefacts.
The second part of this project opened up the archive and its artefacts to a wider, more nuanced audience via a new accessible visualiser and a series of three focused workshops. These workshops were held with young people and adults from Bristol and objects from the archive selected by the team. The workshops collected responses from the participants to be used to create community-tagging and reinterpretation of the collection and fed into the digital catalogue and exhibition. One of the workshops was facilitated by the poet and artist Sophie Gresswell, who produced experimental poetry with the participants in response to the collection, while others were archivist-led.
Who are the team and what do they bring?
This project involved an interdisciplinary team who came to the archival material with their own expertise:
- Dr Tara Puri (Senior Lecturer in Victorian Literature, University of Bristol) is a literary scholar who specialises in representations of empire, late colonial Indian literature, and early Indian photography.
- Dr Mohini Chandra (Senior Lecturer in Fine Art, Chelsea College of Art, UAL, London/ independent artist) is an artist and writer whose work in rooted in her own history of family migrations across generations and explores the decolonising potential of contemporary art practice. Much of her work considers the role of museums and archives, in forming our ideas of history and place and in shaping contemporary attitudes towards culture and identity.
- Dr Charlotte Berry (City Archivist, Bristol Archives), Lucy Bonner (Senior Archivist, BECC), and Hector Roddan (Archivist, Bristol Archives) are deeply knowledgeable about the BECC’s collections and committed to making it more accessible to researchers, local communities, young people, and an international public audience.
In an advisory capacity:
- Isla Gladstone, Senior Curator, Natural History Collections, Bristol Museums
- Rising Arts
Also involved:
- Sarah Lea (an independent art historian and curator of modern and contemporary art, including Entangled Pasts, 1768-now: Art, Colonialism and Change in 2024).
- Beccy Strong (a filmmaker who specialises in working with social justice and environmental organisations, and collaborates with artists to produce film installations).
- Sophie Gresswell (a multidisciplinary artist, poet and facilitator who has worked with objects held in ethnographic collections, including a photograph from the BECC).