25. Lecture

25. Lecture

I love how Claire Steele used this prompt to reflect on how online interviews have enabled the scope of the traditional lecture format to be widened, and how online learning spaces can enable a more permissive context for taking in new ideas. She accompanied the post with a lovely photo of a big inviting messy basket of textile JOY of the sort that would rarely be allowed in a traditional academic lecture hall!

Lectures have been replaced by online interviews. I spent a dreary afternoon yesterday enjoying one of the many interviews posted by @fibreartstaketwo I’ve found many new to me artists this way. Yesterday was no exception, I came across an interview with @vanderhume and I found myself nodding in agreement with so much of the content.

The picture? I went to a very strict grammar school where stitching in class would have resulted in detention. These days I can bring the “lecture” to me, I can eat cake and drink tea and best of all I can stitch

– Claire Steele

At the weekend at @xmtr.fm festival I had another experience of how we might expand the traditional LECTURE format when Lucy Dearlove presented an In The Dark listening event at the Electric Picture Palace. Lucy produces a food podcast, Lecker, which is a two-time winner of the Fortnum & Mason Podcast of the Year Award. The New York Times says it has “an intimate feel that sets it apart from most interview shows”.

For this event we sat in the Electric Picture Palace in the dark being gently guided through Lucy’s rich and evolving thoughts on the concept of TERROIR. Lucy shared listening-as-research, plotting connections between ideas to do with place, taste, soil and food cultures. Rather than lecturing directly, Lucy had curated a collection of different sound productions speaking to these themes:

Wine and soil in France
Maple syrup and Terroir in Vermont
Aubergines and Terroir in Palestine
Acorns and oak trees and their connections to the cultures and foodways of the Ohlone people in Californa
Attempts to describe the flavours of different strains of wheat
Heirloom wheat from Palestine
The taste of smog – artists who make meringues in polluted street corners and then invite passersby to sample the flavours of the air
The Terroir of milk from the urban cows of India in Pune
Hastings Allotments and food and place here in our town
Audio work exploring synergies between food growing, climate and diasporic connections between black and minority ethnic peoples in the UK and beyond. The work layered sound and conceived of each narrative within the audio as a layer in a soil survey
An interview with the artist who has maintained the sculpture The New York Earth Room since 1989

This expansive approach to the rich subject of TERROIR was beautiful because it enabled multiple viewpoints to converge and overlap.
It was so rich – lecture as listening. The scope of the material and the variety of voices, formats and textures made it really interesting. Perhaps my favourite thing was how the different audio works collectively destabilised traditional ideas about TERROIR, transforming it from an idea associated almost exclusively with wine drinking and a certain social class into a much broader and more inclusive global concept: one that can be used to speak about many urgent and important ideas regarding people, places, food and land.

The diversity of perspectives was amazing and I’m still thinking about all the stories we heard, and how they crossed over, contradicted and complemented each other, brought into one amazing whole through this event.

I absolutely loved it. Thank you, Lucy.

Have you had any learning experiences that expand on what we might think of as the format for a lecture?