Dr Angela Piccini

Dr Angela Piccini is Programme Lead for the BA Fine Art and is UoA32 REF Coordinator in the School of Art, Design and Architecture

For full list of outputs, see https://plymouth.academia.edu/AngelaPiccini

Angela's work 'stays with the trouble' (Haraway) of the traces of the past in the present. Combining archaeological imaginaries and speculative futures, her practice works with archives, found materials, and memory to explore place, land, belonging, exclusion and the potential of process and practice to produce new, imagined, and real places. Angela has specific interests in contested urban spaces and spatial practice, co-creation, and practice-as-research. Her research spans histories of urban video art and their relationships with port planning and infrastructure; participatory, social practice and co-produced moving image projects that engage with critical questions of heritage and society; digital technologies and moving image archives; mega event screen infrastructures and their entanglement with cultural heritage.

Angela's story begins in Vancouver, Canada – the unceded, shared territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) and səlilwətaɬ (Tseil-Waututh) nations. Her parents came to Vancouver from Chile and Italy. She is a first-generation academic with a long-standing commitment to interdisciplinary, intermedial and cross-sector research through peer-reviewed scholarship and through social practice, performance and the moving image. What connects these activities is her turning a critical lens across all materials and media involved in the making, circulating, consuming and subverting of narrative in order to investigate how narrative itself becomes a medium for material transformation. 

Never having been taught about the importance of discipline until it was too late, Angela remains unapologetically interdisciplinary. Her return to Fine Art after journeys across (with a nod to Mieke Bal) Archaeology, Geography, Heritage, Film, Screen Media, and Performance illustrates a centring of attentions to place, material sensitivity, aesthetics, politics, and a bit of tricksterism. 

Before working in academia, Angela worked as a janitor, a college radio DJ, an archivist, a librarian, a cook, and a publications officer for Cadw: Welsh Historic Monuments where she commissioned photography, design, and print for guidebooks and postcards.

She is co-director with Sefryn Penrose of Bureau for the Contemporary and Historic (ButCH) and of 37 Looe Street gallery and workshop in Plymouth. She enjoys working with different publics as a curator-producer-artist and is involved in a number of collaborative research projects that involve film and artists' cinema. She is on the editorial boards of the Journal of Contemporary Archaeology, Landscapes, and the new BARS book series on contemporary archaeology. Previously, she was Head of Film & Television at University of Bristol and was on the Management Committee of Bristol UNESCO City of Film. Angela is on the Board of Plymouth Arts Cinema. She's a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute and Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA). Angela is a member of Bristol Expanded and Experimental Film (BEEF), Cube and Contemporary Art Membership Plymouth (CAMP). With Dan Hicks, she co-founded the Contemporary and Historical Archaeology in Theory Group (2003-date). 

As programme lead for the BA in Fine Art, Angela teaches across all undergraduate modules

ART419: Interdisciplinary Approaches 1

ART421: Art Writing 1

ART525: Creative Reading 2

ART529: Common Challenge: Artist Placement

ADA600: Common Dissertation (Fine Art)

ART626: Studio 4: Going Public

Director of Studies
Desmond Beach: Black Joy: The Path to Healing Our Hearts, Our Minds, Our Bodies, and Our Souls in the Face of Racialized Trauma
Duncan Cameron: The Shock of the Old: The Use of Anachronistic Museological Display Methodologies in the Presentation of the Natural and Artefactual within Visual Arts Practice
Megan Curet: En Ritmo: Praxis in Decolonizing Traditional Dance Spaces
David Harbott: The Biotic Subject: On Becoming More Than Human
Donna Kukama: Ways-of-Remembering-Existing: Performance Art as an Unknowing Vocabulary for (Writing Histories) Memory Work
Cam Williamson: Socially engaged social realist painting and the Queer District Collective

2nd
Emma Bush

CURRENT PROJECTS
2023, PI, The Way We Live, AHRC Impact Initiator Fund, Researchers: Joanne Dorothea-Smith and Sefryn Penrose. Project partners: The Box. We focus on Jill Craigie's 1946 film, The Way We Liveto explore the relationships between film, communities, creative practice and participatory planning and their impact on museum practice
2022-24, Co-Investigator, Exhibiting Fashion: exhibition-making and curation as a catalyst for advancing innovative museum practices, AHRC, PI Jeffrey Horsley (London College of Fashion)
2018-23, Association of Unknown Shores https://a-o-u-s.org/. Angela and her collaborator Kayle Brandonco-founded AOUS in 2018. We respond to the historic and ongoing links between Bristol, Plymouth and Iqaluit, Nunavut, which were sparked by Martin Frobisher’s attempt in 1576-78 to colonise Inuit territory. In August 2020, AOUS participated in the Chale Wote Festival in Accra, Ghana with Our Sceptre, a collaborative Zoom performance and installed video work with former Bristol Lord Mayor Cleo Lake and current MLA for Iqaluit and former Deputy Mayor, Janet Pitsiulaaq Brewster. The latest action is Part 9: Practice Assembly, ACE-funded Project Grant. Exhibition opened at St Stephen's Church, Bristol in December 2022 and at 37 Looe Street, Plymouth, 17-31 March 2023.
Ongoing. Port City Video Cultures. A practice-based project investigating the potential contemporary activation of video art archives from the 1960s-80s for port city planning, which looks at Bristol, Vancouver, and Yokohama. The work emerges from Angela's research on University of Local Knowledgeand her work on the Bristol Channel early video archives within the Know your Bristol on the Moveproject.
Ongoing. The Story of My Teeth is a Long and Boring One.Archival project based in Vancouver, British Columbia, exploring the relationships between personal photographic archives, home and settler-coloniality
Ongoing. Swan Out. In Swandown(2012), Andrew Kötting and Iain Sinclair ‘pedal a swan-shaped paddle-boat from the seaside in Hastings to Hackney [upstream] using England’s inland waterways’. Their swan-based performance is either an absurdist critique of Olympic landscapes, documentation of a vanishing Englishness, or a publically funded ‘insufferable mancrush’. Amongst their musings on Blake and Conrad and cameos by a number of like-minded men, artist Marcia Farquhar speaks other people’s words, while another woman, actor Kristin O’Donnell, silently performs in the water. The men debate their lack of female collaborators but happily resolve the problem by declaring their swan to be female. This is not a feminist film. Since 2019, Penrose and Piccini have spent summers inflating a series of swans – less durable, more prone, but nimbler and lighter than their pedalo cousins – and floating with them down the River Tamar which forms the border between Devon and Cornwall. Initially either a caustic-queer response to a prickly feeling around Swandownand the male appropriation of swan culture, a legitimate use of a gifted inflatable golden swan, or a portrait of borders and flow, Swan Outhas become an experiment in reclaiming derring-do: what is it to be brave and foolish as women and to pontificate mid-stream and to take ourselves seriously while doing so? Goneril and Regan do Deliverance. Using handheld waterproof cameras, mobile phones and Go-Pro knock-offs, Swan Outis a multi-perspectival account of going downstream with minimal control: precarious people on precarious rafts in a precarious landscape.
SELECTED PAST PROJECTS
2013-18 Productive Margins: Regulating for Engagement (PI, Morag McDermont, School of Law). I was Deputy PI (PI, 2014-15) on this Connected Communities project co-produced research with Cardiff University and seven community organisations in Bristol and South Wales, which included several artist commissions, residencies and artist placements.
2013-15Know your Bristol on the Move(PI Prof Robert Bickers, Historical Studies). AHRC Digital Transformations project (2013-15) follow-on project. We aimed to enable people to explore, research and co-create Bristol history, heritage and culture using digital tools. As a Co-Investigator, I led Exploring Models of Community Co-production with Knowle West Media Centre and the Knowle West TV archive, working with artists David Hopkinson and Zoe Tissandier
2012 AHRC-funded Connected Communities project Know Your Bristol (PI: Prof Robert Bickers) hosted a series of free public events about local community heritage. With Knowle West Media Centre, I explored the potential for home movies to provide information about Bristol's changing built environment and create opportunities for co-producing planning. The project worked with Peter Insole and Bristol City Council's Planning Department to develop further the Know Your Placeweb tool.
2011-12 University of Local Knowledge (PI: Mike Fraser, Computer Science) RCUK Digital Economy 'Research in the Wild' project emerged out of initial collaboration between US artist Suzanne Lacy, Knowle West Media Centre, BBC and Arnolfini. The University of Local Knowledge brings together KWMC and the Knowle West community to study the deployment and use of technologies and techniques that enhance understandings of the relationships between physical and digital communities.
2011-12AHRC-funded Into the Future: Sustainable Access to the National Review of Live Art Digital Archive (PI: Prof Simon Jones; CIs: Paul Clarke and Angela Piccini; RA: Amanda Egbe) project preserved the digitised National Review of Live Art archiveusing the Performing Arts Documentation System (PADS) and the Semantic Tools for Arts Research System (STARS) to enable public participation in the production of user-generated metadata, interactivity and the curation of performance documents (including video) across the whole range of the Theatre Collection. Rethinking ways of delivering and processing the archived information using these web technologies generates new forms of understanding, both of the documents and records themselves, but also of the methodologies for online use of other kinds of archival materials.
2006-08PI on an AHRC Landscape and Environment Network (with UWE and University of Aberystwyth) exploring transdisciplinary and mixed-mode research approaches to site, with a specific focus on enactments of place as ‘empty’. Participants included performance scholars Mike Pearson and Heike Roms
2006, PI on the eScience project, Locating Grid Technologies, with explored tools for distributed networked performance and semantic web approaches to visualising relationships between digital media assets generated by those performances. In 2007-08, I collaborated with Bristol's Institute for Learning and Research Technology and Watershed Media Centre on the JISC-funded STARS (Semantic Web Tools for Screen Arts Research) project, which further developed the work.

As member of staff at University of Bristol:
2020, Co-supervisor, Will Finch, Sound and music in the BBC’s Arena documentary series, PhD
2020, Primary Supervisor, Molly Niu, Digital visual effects in contemporary Hollywood cinema aesthetics, networks and transnational practice, PhD
2018, Member of supervisory Committee, Greg Bond, Co-producing Spaces of Descent, practice-based PhD
2018, Primary Supervisor, Vesna Lukic, The River Danube as a Holocaust Landscape: Journey of the Kladovo Transport, practice-based PhD
2017, Primary supervisor, Greg Bailey, Soundings, practice-based PhD
2016, Primary supervisor, Laura Aish, A practice-based exploration of authenticity, found footage and structural filmmaking, MPhil
2016, Primary supervisor, Yuyu Zhang, A practice-based exploration of expanded cinema and site-specificity, MPhil
2013, Co-supervisor, Sy Taffel, Digital Media Ecologies, PhD

As member of staff at University of Plymouth
2023, PI, The Way We Live, AHRC Impact Initiator Fund, £10k. Researchers: Joanne Dorothea-Smith and Sefryn Penrose. Project partners: The Box
2021-24, Co-Investigator, Exhibiting Fashion: exhibition-making and curation as a catalyst for advancing innovative museum practices, AHRC, PI Jeffrey Horsley (London College of Fashion), £202,766, https://www.arts.ac.uk/colleges/london-college-of-fashion/stories/jeff-horsley-ahrc-announcement
2021-23, £15k ACE project funding for Association of Unknown Shores
As member of staff at University of Bristol
2018-19, Association of Unknown Shores, Brigstow Institute, £5k; University of Bristol, £3k; Canada-UK Foundation, £1k
2014-15, Acting Principal Investigator, Productive Margins, ESRC/AHRC Connected Communities large grant programme. www.productivemargins.ac.uk/£2.4m
2014, Principal Investigator, Productive Margins, Connected Communities Showcase, AHRC Festival fund. £47k
2013-18, Deputy Principal Investigator, Productive Margins, ESRC/AHRC Connected Communities large grant programme, PI Morag McDermont, Law, £2.4m
2013-15, Co-Investigator, Know Your Bristol on the Move, AHRC Connected Communities, PI Robert Bickers, Historical Studies, £600k
2013, University of Bristol Research Fellowship, Institute for Advanced Studies, £10k
2012, Co-I, Know Your Bristol, AHRC Connected Communities, PI Robert Bickers, £25k
2011-13, Co-I, University of Local Knowledge, EPSRC, PI Mike Fraser, £370k, Collaboration with artist Suzanne Lacy, Knowle West Media Centre, Arnolfini Gallery
2010-11, Co-I, Into the Future, AHRC, PI Simon Jones, £140k
2007-09 , Co-I, STARS: Semantic Tools for Screen Arts Research, JISC-funded, PI Nikki Rogers, ILRT, £280k
2006-08, Principal Investigator, Living in a Material World, AHRC Landscape and Environment Network, £30k
2006, Principal Investigator, Locating Grid Technologies, AHRC e-Science Workshop, £15k

See Publications