Can Everything Be Mended? Verified listing

Join Sue Mayo and the Breaks and Joins Teams for this two part event in the afternoon of the 23rd May 2024.

We are excited to launch our new film, Can Everything Be Mended?, an essay film about repair as an act of resistance.

Drawn from the multi-modal creative project, Breaks and Joins, the film documents and celebrates the repair of our stuff, ourselves and our communities.

Film maker Chuck Blue Lowry, and Sue Mayo, the lead artist on Breaks and Joins, have visited menders of many kinds. Starting at a one-man repair cafe South London, the film collages a series of encounters with menders, from the orthopaedic team at Lewisham Hospital, to the ground-breaking social change organisation Civic Square, from the maintenance team at the Royal Albert Hall to individuals like the ceramicist Rachel Ho, who creates and gifts scarred pots to celebrate the marks we carry. With commissioned poetry from award winning poet Arji Manuelpillai, and a soundtrack from musician Charlie Davey, the film asks the questions, can everything be mended and whether everything should be mended? In all of these spheres we discover the beauty, resilience, curiosity and tenacity of menders, who have so much to offer the world.

The screening will be preceded by a workshop, drawing from our programme of creative workshops that allow a gentle space to explore brokenness and mending, and followed by a panel discussion to open up the conversation provoked by the film.

Timings:

2-3pm Workshop

3.30-5pm Film Screening and panel

Please note, there is seperate booking for the workshop (capacity 40 people) and the screening (60 people). Please make sure you book a ticket for both events if you want to attend the whole afternoon.

Biographies:

Raj Bhari

Raj Bhari has worked in conflict transformation and peacebuilding internationally and in the UK for over 25 years. His practice focuses on the nexus between conflict transformation, peacebuilding, applied arts and social cohesion. Raj is a Senior Peacebuilding Adviser with expertise in peacebuilding programming in Libya, Ukraine the Black Sea Region and Syria. As a senior adviser to the UK government Raj has contributed to the development of national community cohesion policy and practice in the UK. As well as designing and delivering large-scale peacebuilding programmes, Raj is also currently a senior associate with Belong, Cohesion & Faith Network UK and mentors/ supports community-facing peacebuilders, operating in challenging and hostile environments. He teaches at Goldsmiths, Rose Bruford and RADA.

Chuck Blue Lowry

Chuck specialises in art as social practice, with a particular focus on intergenerational exchange and storytelling. Her primary art form is film, and she directs, shoots and edits. She platforms the voices of those who are often under or misrepresented and has worked nationally and internationally. Chuck’s work has been presented at galleries and festivals including Tate Modern, British Film Institute, Women of the World Festival, London Short Film Festival, Battersea Arts Centre, Whitechapel Gallery and Charcoal in Hong Kong. She has been awarded ‘Best Music Video Director’ at Canned Film.  Chuck lectures in Film and Performance at Central St Martin’s.

Sue Mayo

Sue Mayo is an artist who works collaboratively with communities. She has worked as a performer, writer, director, teacher and facilitator, and has taught at Rose Bruford College, Queen Mary, University of London, Central School of Speech and Drama and Goldsmiths, University of London, where she lectured for 17 years, including 10 years as Director of the Masters in Applied Theatre.

She trained at Birmingham University in Drama and additionally with Leap Confronting Conflict in dealing creatively with conflict. She is associate artist with Magic Me, the leading intergenerational arts charity, where she designed and led the Women’s Project that ran from 2004 to 2022. With an intergenerational group of women she created a resource on activism and two campaigning films, as part of a climate justice project Generation Rebellion.

Her publications include “We know”: Collective Care in Participatory  Arts; chapters A Marvelous Experiment and The Artist in Collaboration in Performance and Community edited by Dr Caoimhe McAvinchey (Methuen 2012); Detail and Daring: the Art and Craft of Intergenerational Arts Work, published online November 2012 on Magic Me; In the Company of Others: Entelechy’s work with older people in Performances of Age: United Kingdom, volume 2, part 5 of The Routledge Companion to Applied Performance, edited by Ananda Breed and Tim Prentki (London and New York: Routledge, 2020).

Rose Sinclair MBE

Rose is a lecturer in Design (Textiles) and Design Education at Goldsmiths, University of London, where she teaches textiles and design related practice at postgraduate level, including how technologies play a part in the aesthetics of the practice of crafting and making. She has passion for textiles and the stories that can be told through cloth, especially the stories of those often absent from the design discourse.

Rose’s PhD doctoral research focuses on Black British women and their crafting design practices, through textiles, through the lens of textiles networks such as Dorcas Clubs and Dorcas Societies, through which she discusses migration, identity and settlement. She is also interested in the use of textiles networks as a form of participatory craft practice and public engagement in crafts.

Rose continues to explore her textiles practice through participatory immersive workshops in local pop-up shops, installations and presentations in museums and diverse spaces such as the V&A London, The British Library, The Garden Museum, The Bruce Castle Museum and House for an Art Lover, and Broadway Theatre, Catford. Her research work on Dorcas Clubs was recently featured in the BBC programme Craftivism: Making a Difference. She has also been interviewed for her work on BBC Woman’s Hour and BBC1Xtra.

In 2022 she co-curated the first retrospective exhibition about the work of the Trinidadian born textile designer Althea McNish, (Althea McNish: Colour is Mine) who would go on to be the first Black designer of Caribbean heritage to gain international recognition for her design work. The work was first shown at the William Morris Gallery in April 2022 then went on to tour at The Whitworth in Manchester (Oct 2022-April 2023).

Rose has authored several textile books and articles, her most recent being Textiles and Fashion, Materials, Design and Technology (2015) and ‘Tracing back to trace forwards: what it means/takes to be a Black Designer’ in Textile Design Theory in the Making (2021) and “Black because it has power in it..’ (2023). She is a member of the International Advisory board for Textile: Journal of Cloth and Culture, and Co-Editor of the Journal of Textile Research and Practice and is a member of the AHRC Stitching Together Network, an Ambassador for Heritage Crafts and a Trustee for the Crafts Council. In 2024 she was awarded an MBE for services to the arts.

Book tickets here.