Fathermen Exhibit @ The Byre, St Andrews 4th-18th April

On Saturday last week (4th april) we hosted the opening of our Fathermen ethnography-art exhibit at The Byre Theatre, St Andrews. 

Here are some pictures from the opening reception.

'Illustrating Intimacy'

 

Star and his daughter

Scratchie and SoSo

Cleve and the twins

a

audio visual installation 

Adom and Stella

Special thanks to Xander Johnson for the photos

The exhibit will hang until the 18th April, if you get  a chance to check it out please head to the Byre, floor four. Please contribute a memory of your male kin to the conversation via the memories box.

See below for some context on the exhibit as well as a video installation that features. 

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Fathermen: an art-ethnography exhibit

Fathermen explores fatherhood, kinship and paternal memory through a synergy of visual ethnography and art. A collaboration between Stella Phipps, a Glasgow-based artist and illustrator and Adom Philogene Heron, an anthropology Ph.D. student here at St Andrews, this exhibit offers an intimate inter-cultural conversation on the figurative presence and absence of men in families.

This exhibit brings together illustrations and photographs of men’s everyday kinship lives collected during fieldwork (from 2012-14) in Dominica, West Indies, the maternal island home of the ethnographer. These images of fathers, uncles and grandfathers are then re-interpreted through the paternal memories of the artist. The ethnographic material is thus brought into dialogue with illustrative recollections of the artist’s British father and grandfathers. By positioning these diverse images around the exhibit space, Fathermen seeks to present a three-dimensional perspective on the diverse roles of men in children’s lives.

Offering space for reflection the exhibit will also set out an interactive memories wall where visitors can contribute their own memories to the conversation.

This collaborative project extends from a guest contribution by Stella to Adom’s research blog in a post entitled ‘Illustrating Intimacy’. Here, a conversation around paternal proximities began. Stella’s interest in fatherhood has since developed into her work for community arts organisation Impact Arts [www.impactarts.co.uk] in which she has begun coordinating father-child art workshops in Glasgow and Edinburgh (some of this work is documented here).

The Gwo Pwel

I recently gave a presentation at a postgraduate conference at the Newcastle University Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. The preseentation was on the phenomenon known in the Francophone Antilles as the Gwo Pwel, or the 'Love Sickness' (known in Trinidad as 'the Tabanka') - the ubiquitous and deeply painful emotional affliction that often befalls somebody left by their lover. 

Men claim to suffer from it far worse than women since its cure - finding a replacement lover - is more readily available to females than men. The GP is also bound-up in a gendered micropolitics of conjugal distrust and ideals of masculinity constituted through emotional autonomy. The Gp therefore provides a fascinating social vehicle for understanding Dominican ideas about love, gender, kinship and the ideal of the mature, emotionally robust and independent individual self. I'm currently writing up this chapter on the GP but since the sickness seems to provoke humour at every turn I thought it might be fun to share the presentation here.

I was up until 2:30 am the night before the presentation producing this Prezi on the GP. Enjoy!

Fathermen: an art-ethnography exhibit at Scottish Story Telling Centre, Edinburgh - 10th-30th June 2015

It is with great excitement that I can confirm that fathermen will be presenting a visual-narrative art exhibit at the Scottish Storytelling Centre (SSC) during June - 10th-30th - to celebrate fathers day 2015! 

Growing out of our collaborative post featuring the illustrator Stella Phipps, the Fathermen exhibit will bring together drawing, photography, and audio-visual elements, from artist (Stella) and ethnographer (myself). Also, an interactive wall will offer visitors the opportunity to contribute memories to to this multilayered inter-cultural exhibit. The immersive experience will be complemented by an SSC Cafe Voices session from experienced storyteller Peter Snow. 

Dad's day events will also take place on 21st June to mark Fathers Day 20

Click:
....for more of Stella's work

....for more from the SSC

....for more of Peter Snow's work

a moment before I was born

I recently received a message from an art history graduate of St Andrews informing me of a semi-ethnographic /memoir-ish photo essay project that she has just set up, and asking me if I would like to contribute.

Her name is Livia Marinescu and her project is entitled 'a moment before I was born'.

As she writes on the site description,

‘In memory of my paternal grandparents, with whom I grew up, I created this online archive called 
a moment before I was born. It is relatively close in time to us, about a generation ago, in the time of our grandparents, that photography was a much rarer and precious act. I would like to invite people to submit portraits of their grandparents when they were young, close to the moment when they met. These photographs attest for a time when young couples would not be able to take hundreds of photos. It was most probably a special, memorable event, to sit in front of the camera and have this experience of togetherness. When you send the photo, please mention your grandparents’ names, the place and year where and when the photo was taken (if you know this – if not, then the places/countries they lived in). You can also write about how they met or anything else that you'd want to share'

I felt inspired by her concept and so I responded by writing the following mini photo essay the very same night.

a moment before I was born: 

1985.Peter Mendes Philogene

The Baby Mother's Tale (a Radio 4 documentary)

A lecturer and teacher of mine recently told me about a radio show that she heard on radio 4 called 'The Baby Mother's Tale'. This fascinating 28 minute documentary explores the stories of (first to third generation) Afro-Caribbean mothers living in Birmingham, UK and their reflections on parenting and conjugal dynamics within their communities. 

Whilst the blurb rightly highlights that 'the voices of these women are almost never heard', the show did remind me of Jamaican Sociologist/Author Olive Senior's path-breaking book, Working Miracles, which documents many similar such stories throughout Caribbean island contexts. In many ways Rebecca Lloyd Evans' radio-short traces the continuity of the familial patterns Senior documents into a metropolitan diasporic frame.   

The Baby Mother Tale interrogates the popular tropes of 'baby mother' (mother of a man's child), 'wifey' (main woman) and 'side chick' ('outside' woman) as various patriarchal categories that the women have to reckon with on an everyday basis as they negotiate relationships with their far from perfect 'child-fathers'. 

The show sketches a candid picture of maternal resilience and roving marginal men. Yet, there's an interesting moment in documentary where a younger man challenges the practices of his elder peers, forcefully provoking them to admit to their paternal shortcomings. Another poignant moment is when one of the young mothers visits her granny to discuss the history of the phenomenon, with her granny revealing the continuity between the 'other woman' of her generation and the 'side chick' of today. 

Available From The BBC Radio 4 Website Here!

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