Bobby Niven: Chez Galip, 2010
Courtesy of Sierra Metro & the artist

This collection contains clips and production stills from Chez Galip, an observational documentary set in Cappadocia, Turkey about a potter and his hair collection. Scottish artist, Bobby Niven created the project, which was supported by the Central Station Member Fund.

Potter Galip Körükçü collected women’s hair along with a note displaying the owner’s name and contact details. Every six months women were chosen at random for a free pottery workshop.

See the full collection of Chez Galip.

(originally published on Central Station V1)

Central Station set up it’s own commissioning strand to grant monthly awards to innovative and risky projects proposed by our members.

Research during the development of the site revealed that what artists, filmmakers and designers wanted most was not promotion, advice or access to facilities but cold hard cash.

In response we launched the Member Fund, £10K that was used to award small sums of cash each month to projects that wouldn’t be supported via traditional routes. No laborious application process, we just asked for applicants to tell us what they wanted to do and how much they wanted.

The Member Fund was judged by our panel of Creative Heads, independent practitioners that included designers, curators, filmmakers and artists.

Although the fund no longer exists, it isn’t impossible that it might just come back one day.

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Take a look at some of the projects we supported and read what they had to say…

Announcement blogs by Censta:
Member Fund: Who gets £1,500?
£1,500 round two
Member Fund 03: Who won by who?
The next Member Fund award
Member Fund winners 5&6

Member Fund projects:
Fools Gold [Recoat]
AGK [Yuck n' Yum]
Brand Vs. Ethos’ Workshop – 200810 [SASA]
Pop-Up Cinema Matinee [SASA]
Pop-Up Cinema Matinee 200810 [SASA
A BIG Poster Club thank you to Central Station! [Poster Club]
I was a child Futurist [ptarmigan]
Boswell in Space…! [Boswell in Space]
Boswell in Space goes to Sheffield [Boswell in Space]
An Unco Site! [Confraternity of the Neoflagalents]
Chez Gallip [Bobby Niven]
Magic Towards Your Face [Henry Coombes]
Norman Hogg: Neomedievalism, From Empire to Kookdom in Three Easy Steps! [Confraternity of the Neoflagalents]

And here are some additional bits to browse:
Q&A: Boswell in Space
Q&A Bobby Niven

Boswell in Space was the final project to be funded by Central Station’s Member Fund. It’s an experiment in documentary-making using a variety of old and new forms of communication, including illustration, photography, video and blogging. It is also an exploration of narrative, character and performance in the virtual world. Mitch Miller and Emma Lennox, the pair behind the project, sit down with the man himself (albeit in a spiritual incarnation) to reveal the thinking behind their interactive documentary adventure.

Boswell’s Ghost: I note that in your advertisements as to your undertaking, that you refer to my past incarnation, Mr Boswell, as the ‘first documentarian’. I must ask you to tell me more about this as I am unfamiliar with the term.

Emma: Well, your methods of documentation are very similar to today. You write very thoroughly about the human experience and you are particularly good at describing people’s character. I’d like to think that if you were still alive today, you’d have a film crew tagging along after you while you tweeted from your iphone.

Boswell’s Ghost: Madam, I am not a bird!

Emma: …not that kind of tweeting. Anyway, trust me I think you would find all these new ways of communication fascinating.

Mitch: Pretty much what Emma says. You obviously precede the invention of film, but all of the techniques we see documentary filmmakers using – recording the detail of what they see, interviewing, subtly changing their behaviour or approach as necessary, eavesdropping on conversation, fashioning characters out of real people – even creating situations and set pieces to see what happens – are all techniques you actually pioneered, just in print, not celluloid. I read this book about Direct Cinema once that outlined ‘crisis’ theory – that it is when you put real people in difficult situations that they reveal their character, and forget they’re being observed. I’ve noted that you did this all the time – you took Dr. Johnson into the Highlands where he was in every way out of his comfort zone, or introduced him to people he was politically or morally opposed to – just to watch what happened. And, like Nick Broomfield, you are always in the story yourself, often posing as an idiot (which if you don’t mind me saying was, in many ways, not a huge stretch for you…

Boswell’s Ghost: Not a huge stretch!?

Mitch: …BUT, to be sure, you are a clever, clever guy. You use your talents in acting to make people underestimate you, make them drop their guard. Above all, as Emma points out, you were indeed scrupulous in collecting details and tracking down facts and quotations – if only more journalists were like you!
Boswell’s Ghost: Sir, I find many of them fail in absolutely every regard!

Mitch: Exactly. You were interested in absolutely everything, and wrote it all down, which gives your books enormous documentary value, but also value as imaginative works of art. In fact, I think anyone interested in working in a documentary form should read your introduction to The Life of Johnson  (a great book by the way) which lays out how you worked – those methods still hold good today, and we wanted to explore that in Boswell in Space.

Boswell’s Ghost: It satisfied me that so much more of my work is known now – and increasingly valued, I hear. But pray, how did you come up with ‘Boswell in Space’?

Emma: Mitch came up with the idea. I just thought it would be great to tag along in a 21st Century style.
Boswell’s Ghost: Indeed. So much more is revealed by watching carefully from the back of the room.

Mitch: What she said…I’d noticed how ‘psycho-geographically’ you write about some places – like Child’s Coffee House, the description of Mrs Rudd’s dining room, or your home at Auchinleck – and wanted to explore that through trying to draw them. Spaces aren’t just a backdrop – they help create the ‘characters’ and are, in a sense, characters themselves. Emma then observed how you would be to a bloggers world, we started to spark off each other…

Emma: And then it all went out of control…

Mitch: That’s one way of looking at it.

Boswell’s Ghost: So your endeavours began in mid November, which I note is the anniversary of my past self’s great adventure to London in 1762. Many of us have, to be sure, been fascinated by the first of your episodes, but what stage are you at now?

Emma: We had a delayed start to the project, so we’re still playing catch up; filming actors’ readings, editing, writing and drawing. Everything has taken longer than expected so I have a load of material to edit, and Mitch is looking very ink stained. Fortunately our web designer, Ewan Sinclair, has been very patient with us!

Mitch: It’s been a struggle at times, no question – we’re trying a lot of stuff we’ve never tried before, and inevitably, that means there are occasional difficulties, and a need to reverse and rethink. Just gaining access to some places has been a major headache! Some of the other things we wanted to try – like making more use of email to create a narrative, for example – just wasn’t possible because of the limitations of available software (I’m looking at YOU Google mail) but I’m pleased at what we have achieved, with a mix of old, new, the specially designed and the freely available on the web.

Emma: what has worked though, has worked very well, such as animating the drawings and linking them up with my blogs and photographs, and we’ve also interacted with some great people along the way, who help to flesh out the themes of the journey and encourage people to look at them in a new way.

Boswell’s Ghost: What though, would you say has had cause to surprise you on this journey? Travel can be precarious…

Emma: A pleasant surprise has been exploring areas and finding that although the people and buildings may have changed in the last 250 years, the nature of the place is still the same. For instance the site of Child’s Coffee house near St Paul’s in London is now an area covered in coffee shops and cafes. We may think of coffee shops as a modern convenience, but people having been going o St Paul’s Churchyard for a cup of ground beans for centuries.

Boswell’s Ghost: I am glad to hear that the citizens of London still sit in the shadow of that great, edifying building to conduct their business. It ensures the spiritual is retained even as we are engaged in our material wellbeing.

Boswell’s Ghost: The impression sir (and madam) of this project is of a happy union of disciplines that results in a most felicitous variety of experience in the eye of the beholder. Are there other such associations of artists and poets who have come together in a cross-disciplinary undertaking that have had cause to inspire you?

Emma: I think we’re inspired by all the traditional methods of documentation, but have put them together in an unusual way. I’ve been looking at online documentaries such as Maisie Crow the photographer, and the story4 journalists. Creating the navigation of the website was one of the hardest parts, and along with Ewan we looked at the Dummy Jim website, and even the Donnie Darko website from a few years ago. We’re probably closer to a web comic than anything else.

Mitch: I’ve liked Chris Dooks’ work on ‘Ayrtime’ - a mixture of live events, art, music and podcasting to help generate activity and interest in his local area. I also came across the Book of the Erinyes, which combines bookbinding, printmaking and surreal fiction, and documents it online.

Boswell’s Ghost: But what next for your partnership? Surely this will not be the last collaboration between you?

Emma: I think, sir, you are a unique character, and it’s hard to imagine doing this with any other figure. The detailed descriptions of your life that you left us have made it easy to track places down and inspire new work. But I’ve really enjoyed telling a story this way, through Mitch’s drawings my photographs and writing, so we’ll definitely do something like this again. In the meantime, I’ll be continuing with freelancing and script work.

Mitch: My thoughts are turning to the Red Road Flats and a small cinema installed inside a caravan. But I think we shall definitely work together again – though I’m going to let her come up with the idea for the next one…

Boswell in Space is unfolding at www.boswellinspace.org
 Find out about the latest developments on the Boswell in Space Facebook page.

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Boswell in Space was one of the projects awarded cash from the Central Station Members Fund.

As part of the larger SASA (Scottish Architecture Students Assembly) 2010 event, ‘Brand Vs. Ethos’ was a design led workshop hosted by Pidgin Perfect which invited 20 students from the six schools of architecture in Scotland to take part in a topical discussion, react and make a statement.

‘Brand Vs. Ethos’ investigated the current identity crisis taking place within Scotland, and more specifically Glasgow. Challenging the premise of branding the city as a commodity, the workshop asked for the participants to devise their own manifesto for how city’s should identify themselves and then subsequently produce a piece of propaganda to illustrate their manifesto whilst tackling the current ‘Glasgow: Scotland with Style’ marketing campaign.

The workshop began at the office of Collective Architecture where Jude Barber, a director at the office, presented a small seminar on the topic of ‘self actuated projects’, refering greatly to her work with GLASpaper which began as a student project and then subsequently transformed into an internationally respected set of journals. This discussion set the precedent for the ideas and concepts of the workshop, essentially providing young and talented students of architecture with the tools and medium in which to communicate their opinions and manifesto’s on urbanity and general everyday issues.

The workshop posed that we need to reject the idea of the city as a brand to be marketed and rather develop an ethos in order to create a meaningful collective urban identity? ‘Brand Vs. Ethos’ used the tools of ‘branding and marketing’ to demonstrate how the reductive branding of cities (such as Glasgow) ignores heritage, place and people with the physical result being the closure of active elements which no longer sit within the manufactured image of the city.

The propaganda created explored the ramifications of the loss of continuity, expropriations, speculative developments, buzz word regenerations, elitist cultural projects and suggested more meaningful images to represent Glasgow as a city.

Interestingly so, all of the workshops groups looked towards finding stories and images from actual Glaswegians to portray ideas on the attitude and ‘style’ of Glasgow. The end result suggested that an acceptance of Glasgow as a melting point of culture, history, immigration, ideals and attitudes could have been simply portrayed by embracing the notion of, ‘Glasgow: Scotland with STYLES’… the plurality of ‘styles’ illuminating the great depth, variety and character available. This ‘new attitude’ was then supported by a series of satirical and humours images that typical represent ‘Glasgow Banter’.

‘Brand Vs. Ethos’ was launched at Mono Café/Bar in the Kings Court area of Glasgow with one of the workshops associated tasks being to ask the participants to curate a Flash Mob exhibition in Mono Café/Bar in 45 minutes to display the work created that day. The exhibition was launched to the public that evening with many local artists and architects in attendance; including Jude Barber and Chris Stewart of Collective Architecture, representatives from NORD and Chris Leslie amongst others.

With great thanks and appreciation to Central Station and Central Station Member Fund for all there help and support in making this event as successful and special as possible.

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SASA was one of the projects awarded cash from the Central Station Members Fund.

image: The Hair Museum, Cappadocia, Turkey. (Credit: Bobby Niven)

Central Station catches up with Bobby Niven, who was awarded our Member Fund back in June, to discuss his documentary Chez Galip about the eerie Hair Museum in Cappadocia, Turkey.

When did you first hear about the Hair Museum in Turkey?
I went to Istanbul to do a residency in 2008 and from there I took an overnight bus to Cappadocia to do some drawings of the volcanic landscape. I remember picking up a leaflet about potters in the town of Avanos and in there I found an article about the hair museum, so the next day I went to have a look.

The museum is set in a cave below the workshop of a potter called Galip. In 1979 Galip had the idea of collecting women’s hair, the purpose of which was to raise course participation numbers for the pottery workshops he was running. Galip takes a cutting of hair from women that visit his workshop and attaches it along with a post-it note with their name, phone number and address to the wall of the cave. Every six months 10 addresses are chosen at random from inside the cave, the women are then contacted to announce that they have won a trip to stay in his guesthouse and participate in the pottery workshops for free.

What was it about the place that you wanted to explore through film?
Last winter I made a film up in the extreme north of Scotland with Martin Clark and Cara Connolly. We were making an observational documentary about Hermit’s Castle and the story of its creator David Scott (see image below). The process of working with film, the intensity of working collaboratively and the excitement of the journey was a great experience for me. Just after shooting Hermit’s Castle I was invited to do a show at Sierra Metro in Edinburgh and so I immediately started thinking about potential subjects for another film. Then I had the idea to travel to Turkey and make a film about the hair museum and its creator Galip. The exhibition would then become a comparative study of two quite extreme stories about two very different characters building something absurd in two geologically incredible landscapes. What I wanted to explore through film was the relationship between structure and landscape and the potential for the medium to question the reasoning and psychology behind the creation of these absurd structures.

Image: Hermit’s Castle, Scotland. (Credit: Bobby Niven)

How many days were you there shooting for? How did the shoot go?
We were away for 11 days in total, four of which were spent traveling leaving us only 7 days in which to collect the footage. We had to put in some long shifts, shooting tracking shots in the cave during the day and doing interviews in the evening. There is an abundance of material to film in Cappadocia. I was interested in capturing the visceral qualities of the hair, the clay, the soft curvaceous landscape and the sound textures of these materials set within the acoustics of the enclosed caves and valleys.

How did the experience compare to your expectations? Did anything come from the experience that was particularly surprising to you?
The sounds Cara collected from inside the pot as it was being thrown were amazing. The potter’s workshop is a real orchestra of different sounds through the wedging of the clay, the spinning of the kick wheel, the contact between hand and clay, the breathing fluctuations of the potter and the air movement out of the pots as the potter brings in the neck. It was really interesting to observe the reactions of the potters as they listened back over the sound recordings.

I had originally planned on interviewing Galip when he was throwing as a way to avoid the direct eye contact of a conventional interview set-up, but what I didn’t appreciate was the potter’s need for silence and concentration when throwing. The quality of the sound in the room as we filmed him throwing was incredibly vivid, allowing you to observe this concentration and connection between hand, brain and clay. We also recorded the sound of ceramic instruments being played by local musicians who take this connection between clay and sound and introduce rhythm and lyrics recalling old folk songs from the area that are so old they are without author. There seemed to be a strong relationship between potter and musician with both taking pleasure in the other’s craft.

Image: Love Valley, Cappadocia, Turkey. (Credit: Bobby Niven)

What was the most memorable part of the shoot?
There are a few. Diarrhea, good food, the generosity of the hosts, the Turkish humour, the entertainment of working collaboratively… The most intense experience had to be filming in the underground city which was insane. Walking hunchbacked down through eight stories of underground labyrinth, descending further and further into a network of rooms built by Christian communities as hideouts during the Arab raids. It brought on an unnerving sensation of excitement combined with the claustrophobia of descending into a stone hell.

A clip from Chez Galip, an observational documentary set in Cappadocia, Turkey about a potter and his hair collection.

The museum is set in a cave below the workshop of potter Galip Körükçü. In 1979 Galip had the idea of collecting women’s hair, the purpose of which was to raise course participation numbers for the pottery workshops he was running. Galip takes a cutting of hair from women that visit his workshop and attaches it along with a post-it note complete with their name, phone number and address to the wall of the cave. Every six months 10 addresses are chosen at random from inside the cave, the women are then contacted to announce that they have won a trip to stay in his guesthouse and participate in the pottery workshops for free.

Chez Galip screened at Sierra Metro Gallery in Edinburgh, November 2010. To see more clips from the film go here.

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Chez Galip

Director Bobby Niven
Cinematographer Martin Clark
2nd Camera Cara Connolly
Sound Cara Connolly
Editing Bobby Niven
Translation Alev Ersan

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Chez Galip was one of the projects awarded cash from the Central Station Members Fund.

The winner of £1,500 on round five was Bobby Niven who will be making a film about the Hair Museum in Cappedocia, Turkey. He will be documenting the cave, the owner, the pottery workshops and the landscape in the region. He’ll also make a series of ceramic and stone sculptures to accompany the film.

We had 80 submissions in July, with requests totaling over £100,000. The team really enjoyed looking through the ideas and were impressed by the breadth and variety of the projects. Unfortunately we couldn’t fund everyone.

Our last £1,500 went to Mitch Miller and Emma Lennox who will be presenting “Boswell In Space – A Strictly Ill-adviced Documentary Journey“. It caught our eye because of the project is trying to do something genuinely multimedia, in a territory that’s still struggling to establish itself with frameworks and guidelines.

Congratulations to the winners.

Here, Boswell describes the scene when two Highland soldiers entered a London theatre, and received the sharp end of anti-Scottish resentment;

…two Highland officers came in. The mob in the upper gallery roared out ‘No Scots! No Scots! Out with them!’, hissed and pelted them with apples. My heart warmed to my countrymen, my Scotch blood boiled with indignation. I jumped up on the benches, roared out, ‘Damn you, you rascals!’, hissed and was in the greatest rage. I am very sure at that this time I should have been one of the most distinguished of heroes. I hated the English; I wished from my soul that the Union was broke and that we might give them another battle of Bannockburn. …[I] asked them of what regiment they were. They told me Lord John Murray’s and that they had just come from Havana. ‘And this’ said they, ‘is the thanks that we get – to be hissed when we come home…’But,’ said one, ‘If I had a grip o yin or twa o the tamd rascals I sud let them ken what they’re about.’

So, what kind of friend of Boswell are you? Destined for immortality, or a consoling spirit such as Johnston? We would like you to follow Emma and Mitch as they follow Boswell. As a ‘FoB’ (That’s ‘Friend of Boswell’) you will receive a special username and password right before the launch of Boswell in Space online. And, in the preamble to the event, will also receive exclusive material that fleshes out the story of Boswell, and the backstory to Emma and Mitch’s jaunt.

It’s dead easy, and can be done by:

-Clicking the RSS feed and following this blog – we will take note of you as a follower, and keep in touch!

-Liking our Facebook Page

-Writing to us at boswellinspace@gmail.com, where we will add you to our mailing list.

Boswell himself has graciously agreed to haunt the proceedings, and has learned the art of tweeting. Follow BoswellsGhost to receive his thoughts on the project. Incurable gossip that he is, Mr Boswell will also be using twitter to spread rumour, hearsay and news on a fairly regular basis.

Hope to see you there!

Pop Up Cinéma Matinée was a unique and free cinema event for members of the public which will took place in the courtyard of ‘The Barra’s Centre’ on Friday 20th August from 11.30am – 1pm.
The event aimed to create a discussion on the ‘collective urban identity’ of Glasgow and look at the current shape of regeneration taking place in the city through the showing of a series of original short films which deat with issues of identity, community and memory in Glasgow’s changing urban landscape. Pop Up Cinéma Matinée saw various artists from the city come together to show their work in a collective presentation and in an unexpected ‘pop up’ environment to new and old audiences.

Providing an opportunity for artists within the city to meet, share, understand and appreciate their work with not only one another but the general everyday public and the city.

Pop Up Cinéma Matinée was also intended as a celebration of ‘Paddy’s Market’, an historical flea market in Glasgow City Centre, which closed in the May of 2009. Short films which focused on Paddy’s Market were shown by local Glasgow artists Chris Leslie and Sijle Eirin Aure. Edinburgh based artist Lindsay Perth was also invited to screen some short films which dealt with high rise living within Glasgow.

Pop Up Cinéma Matinée took the form of a 1:1 temporary bespoke cinema installation, designed and created by Marc Cairns and Dele Adeyemo of PIDGIN PERFECT. The installation utilises the covered courtyard space at The Barras Centre, a project by ataStudio.  The project also sought to highlight the trade of the local area and more specifically The Barra’s by ensuring that the entire event from materiality to catering was sourced from local traders in an effort to encourage trade in the area and show the merits of the area.

Pop Up Cinéma Matinée was presented by ‘PIDGIN PERFECT’ as part of the  SASA 2010 event day. Pop Up Cinéma Matinée is an example of a SASA event which seeks to prove that collective thought creates a more powerful response.

With great thanks and appreciation to Central Station and Central Station Member Fund for all there help and support in making this event as successful and special as possible.

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SASA was one of the projects awarded cash from the Central Station Members Fund.

But first, we should describe who ‘we’ are; Mitch Miller is an illustrator and Emma Lennox is a podcaster – both are also writers. We have devised an online immersive journey experience that will encourage our audience (assuming we can find one – please let us know if you have any spare), other artists and people they meet to consider the mechanics of the imaginative process. 

Our subject is one James Boswell, who you may well have heard of – he is best known as the slightly bumbling companion to the famous Dr Johnson, who wrote the first major English language dictionary, and famously toured Scotland in the late eighteenth century. Boswell is often remembered as a sycophant, a fool and a stenographer who leeched off of more impressive figures. This is not totally inaccurate (he also wrote an unforgivably idiotic poem on slavery) but he was also rigorously self-aware, an imaginative observer of his surroundings and an excellent writer of non-fiction. We reckon he was the first real documentarian – someone who took information, fact and his observation of where he was and who he was with, and made it into art. The writer worked as today’s documentarians do, drawing from his own experience, entering dialogue with his subjects and then – often at his own instigation, observing them in moments of crisis or culture shock, in order to draw out their inner character.

Miller read Boswell’s scandalous London Journal when he was 23 – the same age as Boswell when he wrote the bulk of it. He was immediately impressed by the quality of its writing and the powerful imagery of its scenes and sequences of dingy alleyways, smoky pubs and ornate drawing rooms. Ten years on, he will now attempt to draw in the ‘dialectogram’ style, a number of the locations and places mentioned so vividly in Boswell’s work – starting out in Glasgow, and going to Edinburgh, Ayrshire, Mull, St Andrews and London. These drawings will show how Boswell’s feel for space was used to create characters in his nonfiction, and draw out elements of their personality and back-story.

But that’s not all – Lennox will be dogging Miller’s steps, a Boswell Mark II whose task shall be to document the process of visiting major Boswellian locations and meeting a range of people along the way – people who know about Boswell, people who don’t, but know a lot about the places he frequented, and various waifs and strays picked up on the way. Whereas Miller will be using very traditional methods – as old fashioned as a pen and ink – Lennox will use film, sound editing, photography, podcasting and blogging to observe Miller in pursuit of his obsession, almost as a character in his own work.

And then what? Well, we will be asking anyone who is interested to sign up as a ‘Friend of James Boswell’ via Facebook and Central Station sometime in late October. As part of the group you will receive a special password that will invite you to follow our ‘journey’ as an internet event, each stage of the trip being released in episodes through a flash website. You will be able to piece together the story, and what happened, through drawing, animation, video, podcast, blog and anything else we can dream up. We will post up details about the group on this blog over the next week, so please do join us! We will be releasing ‘trailer’ material from around mid October, so hopefully you won’t get too bored waiting for the internet event to happen.

Speaking of which, the actual event will begin on Monday the 15^{th of} November.

Why then? Well, that is the same date Boswell began his London Journal. While we will be delving into various of Boswell’s other writings, the Journal will remain the focal point of much of our misadventures, so we leave you with its opening lines – with which we couldn’t agree more  (except to say that all Boswell says applies regardless of sexual orientation, race, ethnicity or gender…);

The ancient philosopher certainly gave a wise counsel when he said, ‘Know thyself.’ For surely this Knowledge is of all the most important… A man cannot know himself better than by attending to the feelings of his heart and to his external actions, from which he may with tolerable certainty judge ‘what manner or person he is’. I have therefore determined to keep a daily journal of which I shall set down my various sentiments and my various conduct, which will be not only useful but very agreeable.

James Boswell, 15 November 1762 

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Boswell in Space was one of the projects awarded cash from the Central Station Members Fund.