history

Critical Living by Alex Widdowson

"Critical Living draws upon the experiences of people involved in the Philadelphia Association therapeutic communities while also addressing some of the major discussion points in the Critical Psychiatry movement.

Critical Psychiatry, formally known as Anti-Psychiatry, has been scrutinising the dominant medical understanding of distress for over 50 years. It’s leading members were a disparate bunch that included R. D. Laing and David Cooper, both disillusioned psychiatrists and co-founders of the Philadelphia Association, as well as the renowned philosopher Michel Foucault, the libertarian Thomas Szasz, and Erving Goffman a sociologist.

Since creating a therapeutic community at Kingsley Hall in 1965, the Philadelphia Association has run more than twenty community houses which have offered asylum and hospitality to people in distress. This work continues at two houses in North London.

The experience of fifty years has shown that personal crises and seemingly inescapable unhappiness may for many people be transformed in households like these. They are places where people can come together to address their difficulties in a situation of shared everyday living."

Vienna Hit by Anna Vasof

I Have a Message for You
by Matan Rochlitz

Animation May Kindred Boothby
Music by Leonardo Milani

"On April 4th 1943, a young woman finds herself on a train.
A decision she makes that day saves her life, but leaves a huge burden on her conscience.
Until, 20 years later, she meets a stranger, with a message for her."

DESH 3 min excerpt by Akram Khan Company

"DESH is a new full-length contemporary solo and the most personal work to date from celebrated choreographer and performer, Akram Khan. DESH meaning 'homeland' in Bengali, draws multiple tales of land, nation, resistance and convergence into the body and voice of one man trying to find his balance in an unstable world.

Moving between Britain and Bangladesh, Khan weaves threads of memory, experience and myth into a surreal world of surprising connection. At once intimate and epic, DESH explores fragility in the face of natural forces, and celebrates the resilience of the human spirit in the rhythms of labour, in dream and story, and in transformation and survival."

ONE MINUTE ART HISTORY for VIMEO
by CaoShu

AMARILLO
by Ana Pérez López


"This fruit has been part of our cultural history for centuries and is now threatened by extinction through monocropping and a looming epidemic. Ana Pérez López lets us take part in her internet expedition to explore the fate of the Gros Michel banana with alert humor. A finely drawn chronicle which also uses relics of the media and everyday history of the 20th century to retrace how telegenic the industry banana is and will remain. Even if it will soon cease to exist."

Cargo Cult
by bastiendubois