12:00 – 13:30 Session 1
Chair: Roland François Lack
Sabina Andron (Bartlett)
This talk will follow the temporal cycles of street art and graffiti from daytime and into nighttime, focusing on the relation between times of production and reception. It
will look at the association of graffiti production with nighttime activities, and how this has shifted into a much more visible daytime practice due to its changing visual
forms and increased legal tolerance. Using examples I have collected from London throughout the years, I will take you on a brief journey over 24 hours in the versatile
worlds of urban inscriptions.
Max Colson (Urban Lab)
Max will be discussing the work of the fictional photojournalist Adam Walker-Smith, whose investigative photography attempts to document the hidden apparatus of
security and surveillance in privatised public spaces. Privatised public spaces are nominally public urban environments, in which rights and freedoms typical of public space
in cities are able to be curtailed at will by private security services.
Margarita Saad (French)
‘After hours, from poetry to the city’
From Verlaine’s poem ‘Chanson d’Automne’ and the oulipian version by Olivier Salon, Margarita Saad gives her own interpretation of the city after hours.
Rafael Schacter (Anthropology)
‘Mapping at Moontime’
The city is never truly dark. It is never completely still, completely silent, light, sound, and movement pervading it even in those brutal hours before the dawn. Yet whilst
contemporary urbanity has undoubtedly transformed our affective relationship to the night, the nocturnal hours still do transfigure our appreciation of space; the way we
see (thanks to our enhanced peripheral vision), the way we hear (thanks to the comparative quietude), and even the way we move (thanks to the differing mores of the
night), influences the way we both recognise and react to the city after hours, the way we not only discern but are able to behave and perform in this space. In this manner,
our ability to map the city - through movement, action, or inscription - changes radically between diurnal and nocturnal periods. Through briefly exploring both the
practices and cartographies of independent public art (also known as graffiti and street art), in particular a set of maps by the Italian artist 108, this short paper will explore
these differing perceptions of the city, the particular potentialities that mapping at moontime permits.
13:30 – 14:30 Lunch Break
14:30 – 16:00 Session 2
Chair: Matthew Beaumont (English)
Mara Arts (CMII)
‘Viewing crime, viewing pleasure: Representations of London nightlife in film’
This presentation will consider the representation of London night in British film from 1896 to 1939. It will particularly explore how pleasure and crime were inextricably
linked in the cinematic representation of metropolitan nightlife, in this period. What can we learn from the fact that most British films that included night scenes showed
the city after dark to be a place full of criminal behaviour?
James Kneale (Geography)
‘Drink and Temperance in Cities After Hours’
Through the setting of opening and closing times, the licensing system helped structure the experience of Victorian cities after hours. Temperance hotels, cabdrivers’ rests
and other alternatives to pubs were also part of the nighttime city. But Victorian commentators on drink noted other temporalities: from the use of alcohol to provide an
appetite for the evening meal, to measurements of the diurnal rhythms of drinking, traced through the effects of alcohol on the drinker’s pulse.
Chris O’Rourke (CHIRP)
‘Silent cinemas and nights out in London’
This talk will follow early cinema-goers into London's West End to explore how cinemas fitted into a night out in the city, suggesting that changes in exhibition patterns
altered cinema's place among urban entertainments. It will draw on diaries and other first-hand accounts from the 1910s and 1920s.
Huda Tayob (Bartlett)
‘Sunday in ‘Little Mogadishu’
Bellville is an area in Cape Town which has recently acquired the reputation as a ‘little Mogadishu’. Sundays are important days for Bellville, as while the rest of the city
slows down, quietens, and rests, this area sees the gathering of Somali refugees from around the city and wider province. The surrounding streets are empty and wind
strewn, while this area is buzzing with activity - with families gathering to call home, stocking up on Somali goods, visiting each other, and eating Somali food together. One
Sunday in Bellville this January, I was invited to a Somali ‘Bododo’, a celebration which takes place 7 days after a wedding. This presentation will discuss the immigrant
geography and spatial practices of the area which recreate a sense of ‘home’ in a foreign land, through the events of Sunday 25th January 2015.
16:00 – 16:15 Coffee break
16:15 – 17:45 Session 3
Chair: Chris O’Rourke
Emma Whipday (English)
‘“Look to your house, your daughter and your bags!”: The City at Night on the Early Modern Stage’
In early modern England, darkness is associated with secrecy and sin, and urban homes are constructed as vulnerable to nighttime theft and sexual transgression. On the
Elizabethan stage, the liminal spaces of the home are mapped onto the spaces of the theatre, the upper stage and discovery space, which become emblematic of how the
city at night enables female mobility and criminality. Focusing on The Merchant of Venice and Othello, this short paper will explore how Shakespeare stages the boundary
between domestic space and the nighttime city of Venice, in order to engage with anxieties about the vulnerability of the home, and the potential for female transgression,
in early modern London at night.
Ruth Austin (French)
‘Jean Cocteau after the Curfew in German-Occupied Paris’
Taking Jean Cocteau’s poem ‘Léone’ as its starting point this talk will consider Cocteau’s engagement with the curfew in Paris during the German Occupation of France
during WW2.
Matthew Beaumont (English)
‘The Pedestrian: Ray Bradbury’s Los Angeles at Night’
This talk will discuss Ray Bradbury’s short story, ‘The Pedestrian,’ a dystopian fable about a nightwalker set in LA in the mid-21st century, outlining its inception in an
incident involving the police in the 1940s and pointing to its influence on Fahrenheit 451.
Roland François Lack (French)
‘Neon Paris’
This presentation introduces a project that will consider what image of the city is generated by mapping its electric signage. The project will focus, eventually, on neondominated Pigalle in the 1950s, but begins with the first installations of neon signage in Paris c. 1913.
Notes on Contributors:
Sabina Andron is a PhD candidate at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, with a project on graffiti, street art, and their relation to the built environment. Her research focuses
on the mutual influence between surfaces and inscriptions, which she traces through visual, material and cultural coordinates. Her graffiti photographic work has been shown in
exhibitions in the US and UK. Sabina is also an arts adviser and facilitator. She runs the London based arts education group I Know What I Like, where she organises critical gallery
visits and art walks, and curates exhibitions with work by artist members. She is also co-founder of Studio189, a high-end creative events space in London to disseminate art outside
the traditional gallery experience.
http://sabinaandron.com/
Mara Arts (CMII) My PhD research explores the value judgements the mass media attached to representations of London night-time activities. At a time when it became accepted
that the city after dark was full of activity, how did the newly invented cinema and the rapidly expanding press industry influence what happened at night, and what people thought
of the night? Cinemas functioned as new leisure spaces that both facilitated increased mobility, but also raised anxieties about transgressive and criminal behaviour. Filmmakers and
journalists who showed and described night-time activities, were both influenced by, and influencing, public discourse about the urban night. For my project I combine historical,
archival and press research with close analysis of film texts, in order to come to a cultural historical understanding of the role of mass media in the shaping of the London night.
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/multidisciplinary-and-intercultural-inquiry/research/current-research-projects/mara-arts
Ruth Austin is a Teaching Fellow in the Department of French, School of European Languages, Culture and Society (SELCS). Ruth’s research and teaching interests are focused
on twentieth-century literature and film with a particular interest in responses to literature and film to the First and Second World Wars as well as twentieth century dystopian and
utopian writing. Currently Ruth is looking at the German Occupation of Paris during the Second World War and in particular at the way in which Cocteau’s work from the period
can be seen to engage with the city under the curfew.
Matthew Beaumont studied English at LMH, Oxford, before doing an MSt and DPhil at Linacre College, Oxford. He was a Research Fellow at Keble College, Oxford, and a
Teaching Fellow at Pembroke College, Oxford, before becoming a lecturer at UCL in 2005, and a Senior Lecturer in 2008. He became a Co-Director of UCL's Urban Lab, where he
is responsible for the Cities Imaginaries strand, in 2013. His teaching interests include nineteenth-century literature; the fin de siècle; early modernism; C20 avant-gardes; film; crime
fiction; utopian and dystopian literature; and Marxist and other literary and cultural theories.
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/english/staff/matthew-beaumont
http://www.versobooks.com/authors/686-matthew-beaumont
Max Colson began his photographic career following the path of a photojournalist. After a spell in advertising, he now uses photography to explore how contemporary design and
technology of high security environments can inspire ‘paranoia’ and the way in which images can question the innocence of inanimate objects.
Website: www.maxcolson.com
James Kneale is a cultural and historical geographer interested in drink and temperance c.1830-1930, and in literary geographies. He is a senior lecturer in the Department of
Geography, UCL.
http://www.geog.ucl.ac.uk/about-the-department/people/academic-staff/james-kneale
Roland-François Lack teaches French and film at UCL, and is the creator of The Cine-Tourist website:
http://www.thecinetourist.net/
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/selcs/people/french-staff/roland-francois-lack
Sam Nightingale* is a London-based artist who works with photography and the moving image. Nightingale works in a research-based and site related way to explore and enliven
the spectral spaces of cinema, both real and imagined in locations across Europe, Australia and America. Recent related work includes: The Cinemas Project (Australia), a large-scale
project that maps the spectral spaces of cinema across rural Victoria; and Parallax Shifts: In Search of Imagined Landscapes (USA), a residency-based project in which Nightingale
went in search of the imagined landscapes of the ‘Spaghetti Western’ in the deserts of the American South West.
www.samnightingale.com
Chris O'Rourke is a film historian based in UCL's Centre for Humanities Interdisciplinary Research Projects (CHIRP). His research focusses on cinema in Britain, and he is
currently working on a project that explores the early history of cinema in London, before 1930. A book, based on part of his doctoral research, about the craze for film acting in
inter-war Britain, is due to be published by I.B. Tauris in 2015.
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/multidisciplinary-and-intercultural-inquiry/people/chris-o-rourke
Margarita Saad is a Lerverhulme Trust Artist in Residence at the UCL French Department, where she is exploring, with prof. Timothy Mathews, the visual consequences of the
translation into English of Oulipian French texts. Signs and space are at the heart of her work; urban landscapes and architecture, popular art and nature, alphabets and poetry are
constant sources of inspiration.
She has exhibited her work throughout different countries in Europe, Asia and South America.
https://translationtranscription.wordpress.com/
http://margaritasaad.wix.com/art
Rafael Schacter is an anthropologist, curator, and author from London. He has recently been made a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow from 2014-2017. Rafael has been
undertaking research on graffiti and street-art for almost ten years, culminating in the award of a PhD in Anthropology at University College London in 2011. Arguing that graffiti
and street art are both inherently ornamental (both adjunctive and decorative), as well as set within a ritual modality (within a performative, ludic frame), Rafael’s work seeks to
undermine the traditional understanding of these forms as either art or vandalism. Working within the world renowned Material Culture section of the anthropology department, he
has taught widely on themes related both to anthropology and visual culture and has given lectures at conferences around the world. Rafael has also curated numerous exhibitions
including the iconic show Street-Art at the Tate Modern in 2008 which he co-curated. He has recently established an arts production company, A(by)P, who are producing a two
year series of events and exhibitions at one of London’s most established cultural and art hubs, Somerset House. In 2013 and 2014, Rafael also published his first two books with
Yale University Press and Ashgate.
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/anthropology/people/research_staff/r-schacter
Huda Tayob has an undergraduate and Masters degree in Architecture from the University of Cape Town. Prior to starting her PhD she practiced as an architect in Cape Town,
Tokyo, and Mumbai. Her research focuses on the architectural and urban history of hidden spaces in Cape Town. Her PhD is supported by the Commonwealth Scholarship
Commission.
Emma Whipday is a Stipendiary Lecturer in English (1550-1760) at Brasenose College, Oxford. She recently completed her PhD in ‘Shakespeare’s Domestic Tragedies: Disrupted
Homes on the Early Modern Page, Stage and Street’ at UCL. Emma has directed a Jacobean-style production of Samuel Daniel’s The Tragedie of Cleopatra (2013) and a cue-script
performance of ‘The Tragedy of Thomas Merry’ from Robert Yarington’s Two Lamentable Tragedies (2014). She has published on news pamphlets reporting domestic murder, on
Elizabethan true crime drama Arden of Faversham, and on the RSC Roaring Girls season.
https://www.bnc.ox.ac.uk/about-brasenose/academic-staff/496-dr-emma-whipday
*Sam will be exhibiting work relating to his project The Remains at the gallery at the back of the Gustave Tuck Lecture Theatre during the day of the colloquium.
The Remains, takes the idea of the ‘city after hours’ as both referring to the nocturnal city and the cinemas it has housed while also pointing to the spectral traces that remain – long
‘after hours’ – once these cinemas close and in most cases vanish from view.
Rather than focusing on images of the cinemas or the films they showed, The Remains looks to the archive and the tangible remains that are left behind: the manila folders that
contain architect reports, letters to and from London Country Council and application for cinematographic licenses, for example. This is the minutiae of the hidden lives of the
cinemas that once entertained the city at night…
The Remains is part of an ongoing artist research project initiated by Nightingale to unearth, collect, and illuminate the multiple histories and present-day realities of Islington’s
cinematic past. www.islingtonslostcinemas.com
****************************
The Cities After Hours Colloquium was made possible through the generous support of UCL’s Joint Faculty Institute of Graduate Studies (JFIGS) and Urban Lab. We would like
to thank Jo Garwood and Catherine Thomson (JFIGS) and Jordan Rowe (Urban Lab) for their help and support.
You can follow us on twitter @UCLAfterHours
View projects relating to today’s colloquium on History Pin: http://bit.ly/1EsUgzr