NIGHT TIMES
UCLNight Scenes took place online between 30 April and 15 May 2020 and examined how night spaces have been imagined, produced, experienced and narrated in European cities by communities who have mobilized around particular migrant identities or histories. These events are linked to a three-year transdisciplinary European research project - NITE - exploring nocturnal public spaces in eight European cities (Aarhus, Amsterdam, Berlin, Cork, Galway, Lisbon, London, Rotterdam). The project, and events, set out to explore night-time urban settings in their complexity as sites of crisis and regeneration, memory and heritage, visibility and invisibility, community solidarity and growth, and to contribute evidence from the arts and humanities to policy and wider debates on cities at night.
On 13 May 2020, the NIGHT TIMES panel included four talks from Zoe Adjonyoh, Ella Harris and Mark Knightley, Emilia Smeds and Alessio Kolioulis. At a moment when many night-time activities were interrupted by lockdown due to Covid-19, these speakers gathered different stories of historical and present-day urban night-time temporalities, of golden eras and moments of rupture, of the hours of darkness or twilight conditions, of everyday routine and ephemeral improvisation.
For a time, Zoe’s Ghana Kitchen occupied a shipping container community project Pop Brixton – a long term pop-up residency in London that gave Zoe the opportunity to test her ‘chop bar meets contemporary dining’ restaurant concept in a fixed space, where guests gather to enjoy Ghanaian classics, notable for their heartiness and spice alongside Zoe’s contemporary inventions. Zoe has garnered a huge amount of press interest, doing a residency for The Guardian and being picked up by Nigel Slater as one to watch on the topic of immigration food in Britain. In response to the COVID 19 pandemic, Zoe is running a community kitchen, operating in East London. You can support this project and Zoe’s Ghana Kitchen via their crowdfunding campaign
Mark Knightley is Co-artistic Director of Crowded Room. Current projects include One Night (developed at Shoreditch Town Hall) and La Lucha (a co-creation with trade union the IWGB, commissioned by BAC). Previous CR writing/directing includes: 2030 (Collusion/ Cambridge Junction), The Heart of Adrian Lovett (Theatre Delicatessen), Abe & Hans (Theatre 503). Directing includes: Echoes (prison tour and PHE commission). Producing: The Colours (Soho Theatre), The Listening Room (theatre and prison tour). Actor credits include: The Woman in the Moon (Shakespeare’s Globe), Wuthering Heights (Theatr Clwyd), Maleficent 2 (Disney), Holby City (BBC). Mark trained at Oxford School of Drama.
Ella Harris is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Geography Department at Birkbeck, University of London. Her work explores compensatory cultures of the post-2008 era including pop-up culture, precarious housing and ‘class tourism’ (the exoticization of working class culture). She also experiments with interactive documentary as a creative and participatory method and impact tool. She has published widely on pop-up culture, housing insecurity, interactive documentary and immersive cinema. Her forthcoming book Rebranding Precarity examines the role of pop-up culture in normalising insecurity in London since the 2008 crash.
