On Thursday 5 March, students from Camberwell, Chelsea and Wimbledon took over the Horniman Museum and Gardens for a night of interactive experiences that offered a creative response to the global climate crisis.
Students presented films, installations, workshops and performances designed to spark conversations and awareness around global climate issues and the museum’s collections.
Sayali Phadke, Rohan Sharma and Esmond Sit, Camberwell MA Graphic Design Communication and MA Designer Maker students, presented a new piece of work at the event titled Currencies of the Speculative Past / Future.
Their interactive installation in the museum’s World Gallery included a film which was shown;alongside specially created items of currency to form a museum ‘object handling’ experience.
Intrigued by the idea behind the founding of the Horniman Museum and the concept of “bringing the world into Forest Hill”, the students were inspired to explore whether the world that was being brought into the museum the real world or a version of the real world that is glorified and adapted to the ideals of the then British Empire.
“Having all come from nations with colonial pasts, the stark gap between what we know versus what is portrayed pushed us to engage with the event Sayali explained.
“The visit to the museum and in particular the World Gallery section made visible the stark differences between the portrayal of history versus the reality. Conversations with peers and news archives made us realise how unaware the youth of today’s Britain is about their colonial past.”
The group’s aim was to create a timeline linking our present day to the history of colonisation in which the damning effects of consumption and the exhaustion of resources are ‘re-animated’ in storytelling seen through the lives of ordinary (colonised) people.
Reflecting on the project, Sayali said: “Set up in an extremely rainy week just before lockdown, the response we got from the public to our project at the Horniman was unexpectedly overwhelming. It wasn't just our peers and visitors from UAL, but even enthusiastic citizens who came in numbers to see an exhibit built around the subjects of;decolonisation and decarbonisation which made us reflect on just how many people understand the importance of the cause.”
“The project we had put up together sparked up conversations about revisiting history and relating it to current day scenarios of over-consumption. People came and told us how they could relate to every bit of it, even if they weren't from a colonised background.”
“The conversations we had with visitors ranged over a variety of topics from history and our present socio-political scenarios to the basic struggle to survive without realising it. The icing on the cake was that our work was situated right next to the Horniman’s large globe which maps some of the transatlantic slave trade routes on its surface.”
The work she refers to is entitled Blue Earth 1807-2007, and was unveiled at the museum in December 2007 as a major new permanent addition to their African Worlds Gallery to mark the end of the Bicentenary Year commemorating the 1807 Parliamentary Abolition of Transatlantic Slavery. The globe is the work of artist Taslim Martin, who also works as Specialist Ceramics Technician at Camberwell College of Arts.
Sayali continued: “We invited people to take our currency and paste it on the global map on their home countries which had untold stories of being colonised. It was great to see people participate actively and offer a contrast to all the colonial artefacts in the museum.”
“All in all, when we started with the project, we did not realise the impact it would have. We just looked at it as telling a story to bridge a 200-year-old gap of colonial history and the current state of decolonised nations which people today have no idea of.”
Find out more about at MA Graphic Design Communication and MA Designer Maker at Camberwell.