Birth Rites Collection Summer School is a unique programme of lectures, workshops, seminars and one-to-one tutorials. It will introduce you to the collection and facilitate a dialogue between you, your practice and the artworks. The course is led by Helen Knowles, BRC Curator and artist and Hermione Wiltshire, artist and Co-Head of the Photography Programme at the Royal College of Art. The course will empower you to articulate your own responses to the collection in a supportive environment whilst exploring critical perspectives in the field of birth.
If you are a midwife, academic, curator, artist, medic, health professional, art historian or policy advisor, you will enter the course with your own skill set and finish, with a bespoke multi-media pack of visual, textual, auditory and filmic material, to be used thereafter in your own future work.
Workshops include shooting and editing short films on mobile phones and reflecting on the themes through visual and written material. We will introduce different perspectives from international guest speakers and chair in-depth discussions that address aesthetics, ethics, politics and the visual discourses of birth.
This year’s Summer School will take place in-person at the University of Kent from Monday 5th - Friday 9th September.