This Food for Thought Lunchtime talk will take place in-person
This lunchtime talk will share Heni Hale’s process of encountering archive materials of The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations (TIHR), and its 70 + years of social science action research from a systems psychodynamic perspective. Recounting and re-enacting scenes, from a selection of papery documents from 1950 and 60s TIHR studies Heni is playing with a wobble between past, present and future. It is a deliberate scrambling of what happened then, with what is happening in the here and now, via a live, semi-improvised talk, punctuated with a series of short video documents that Heni has been assembling this year.
Heni’s particular focus is on TIHR 1950’s research within the socio-technical systems theory development and the effects of automation and higher mechanisation in factories. Immersing herself in fieldnotes from a sulphur recovery plant in Manchester in 1959, Heni observes resonances with contemporary pre-occupation about the speed of advancement in Artificial Intelligence. Heni is investigating what affective reverberations about the meaning of work can be generated using creative practices, drawing from her dance artist experience that places specific attention on the body as a site of processual change, and on choreographic thinking.
This year Heni designed and is delivering a series of one-to-one performance encounters using reprinted replicas of archive materials to explore participants’ connections to these historical, mainly textual documents. Insights and documentation from these encounters have been assembled, mediated and reconfigured using assemblage processes, spoken word and video-making practices, thereby re-archived as ‘scrambling (of) time and matter’ (Singh, 2018)
Heni will invite tactile participatory engagement and re-arrangement with replica prints. As we trace an unstable, emotionally tangled bodily encounter with the past, it is in the gaps, fissures, and errors that Heni hopes to uncover the voices that may not have been heard then - but are imagined now, and the many other meanings that lurk in the shadows.
Heni Hale is a PhD candidate engaging creative and embodied practice research with TIHR archive, through Coventry University’s Centre for Dance Research and supported through Midlands4Cities doctoral training. She is a performance-maker, and movement artist working collaboratively for nearly 30 years. She is a founder member of collective, Dog Kennel Hill Project, and has been an artist development facilitator, co-directing Independent Dance, a dance research hub in London. She has also been Lead Tutor for the Dance Professional pathway of MA/MFA Creative Practice in partnership with Trinity Laban.
Image: Wallpaper close – fragment of Scrambling memories of the archive. A wall-paper collage. April 2024 at TIHR office
Location
The Tavistock Institute, 3rd Floor, 63 Gee Street, EC1V 3RS
