Biscuit Town on Film   - Special Free Summer Event
- Saturday 4th & Sunday 5th July 2009
- Open 12-6 pm.
Home Movies and Professional Documentary Films recalling memories of Work, Life and Times at the Peek Frean factory in Bermondsey. Due to the success of Memory Factory 2009 project in February we present the films by popular demand and also include the famous Biscuit salons where visitors can enjoy a cup of tea whilst watching the films and sharing with others their knowledge of peek frean and life in Bermondsey. Peek Frean operated in Bermondsey from 1867 to 1989, the factory played an important role in forming the economic and social climate: the factory was one of the largest employers in Southwark, at its peak 4000s people worked there. Families worked at Peek Frean for several generations, they met spouses and friends in the factory. The area surrounding the factory was fondly referred to as Biscuit Town, as mainly Peek Frean workers lived there. Biscuit Town is often remembered as a place with a unique social and communal atmosphere, where values of kindness, helpfulness and safety mattered. Special film Screenings throughout the day feature the BFI Film 'A Visit to Peek Frean & Co's Biscuit Works' (1906), Squirrel Films 'Old Ways New Ways' ( 1989) & the Home Movies of former workers.
Memory Factory 2009 supported by Awards for All and Southwark Council
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Salt Hotel
  
Dates: 23rd May 2009 – 14th June 2009
Times: Fri, Sat , Sun. 12 - 6 pm & by appointment
Preview: Friday 22nd May 6 - 9pm Acoustic Performance: Fri 22nd May 9-late featuring Arthur Brick and The Mountain Tops Coleman Project Space presents Salt Hotel a series of etchings by Zoe Hodgson that draw on landscapes and structures seen both near and far, from South America to South London. The images share an exchange between object and site and convey a sense of an underlying, possibly apocalyptic, world returning.
Some 40,000 years ago, on the Bolivian Altiplano, a giant prehistoric lake began to give up its water to the thin Andean air. This reverse rain left a crystalline desert of 40 square miles, a salt lake known as the “Salar de Uyuni”. In the middle of this seemingly endless expanse of white stands a hotel made entirely of salt. Although a relatively recent structure the hotel seems to share the prehistoric aura of its surroundings. Rather than something built, it seems to have grown, and the cone like shapes of the roofs echo the piles of salt that the local people extract to sell.
Like flicking through a book in which paintings have been submitted to x-ray inspection, Hodgson’s de-saturated and colourless view of the world creates a tonal landscape of petrified moments, a forensic view of the beginnings of things. The aforementioned process is known as a “shadowgraph” and like a photographic negative each image creates an unsettling vision of the world; a retinal after burn that lives on the inside of a closed eye, a Luna landscape full of lies or a dead world returning in the form of a crystal ghost. Despite this ambiguity in the image there is also a strong sense of materiality, a unifying physical presence, like coral coating the bows of a drowned ship. Her eye and etching tool become an incision into the fabric of the world, a tear that allows us to see the ruined bones of time re-flesh themselves, a wound that frames a brutal beauty akin to the films of Andrei Tarkovsky (Stalker) and Frantisek Vlacil (Marketa Lazarova).
Coleman project Space supported by Southwark Council
Press & Images Frances Coleman 07930377734
www.colemanprojects.org.uk
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