Chile in/en Liverpool - Music & Memories

Posted on: 17 August 2020 in Posts

Three IPM researchers, Lisa Shaw, Sara Cohen and Jacky Waldock, have been awarded a seed fund grant by the Northern Network for Medical Humanities Research (NNMHR) for the project “Co-curation and reminiscence as pathways to wellbeing: a pilot research project involving the University of Liverpool’s Popular Music Archive and Chilean exiles who moved to Liverpool during the Pinochet dictatorship”.

The Popular Music Archive at the University of Liverpool includes the Robert Pring-Mill Collection of audio-visual and written materials related to protest music in Chile, particularly during the Pinochet dictatorship (1973-90). This project will bring together a group of people who came to Liverpool as exiles from Chile during that period, and invite them to engage with these materials. The participants will co-curate their own exhibition featuring the materials they selected and the memories these materials prompted. The material will be digitised and made available as a virtual exhibition, and will also form the basis of exhibitions and related events at National Museums Liverpool, including musical events and screenings relating to Chilean protest music, and the screening of a short film about the project itself. 

The project will adopt techniques to stimulate interaction and recollection developed by Lisa Shaw’s ‘Cinema, memory and wellbeing’ projects in Brazil and Merseyside (as presented at the first NNMHR annual conference, Durham University, 2017. It also draws on Sara Cohen’s earlier projects enabling the public to engage with the Popular Music Archive, and co-curate an exhibition and concert, and Jacky Waldock’s use of co-curation methodology in her studies on sound and place making (2015).