Welcome to England - Joyce Treasure
'Welcome to England' centres on an intergenerational project with older African and Caribbean people from the Pepper Pot Day Centre under the Westway, W10. The film focuses on the older people's experiences of moving to England, and helping to shape their communities.
Screening Room Programme
Online
Selected by: Katerina Matheson
The film is warmly enticing, with a colloquial set-up that highlights the intricacies of the stories told by the film's subjects. The questions asked are simple but poignant, and allow for the sharing of embedded nostalgic memories. One particular question asked is
'Were people welcoming to you?' - though this is answered with anecdotes from the past, it is impossible not to reflect on the this question in the present. How should we conduct our environments to be welcoming? To feel as connected and warm as the atmosphere formed in Joyce's film.
Joyce Treasure is a multidisciplinary artist ~ she gained her BA (1st) Honours in Black Studies from Birmingham City University. From 1998 onwards: scriptwriting, editing, directing and DV film production. In 2012, she began to practice as a multidisciplinary artist working in layers and body forms to slice cultural and iconic imagery together using collage, print, acrylic, assemblage and film around the topic of identity. She employs notions of 'the carnivalesque', feminism and decolonial thought to question colonialism, which seeks to examine ideas of dominance and power and celebrate culture.
Her current work seeks to interrogate colonial histories of trauma, resistance and survival to analyse parallels between different sites and locations using decolonial reasoning. She is interested in the intergenerational transmission of trauma as a site for healing and well-being.
Screening and exhibitions include ICA, Portobello Film Festival, Himalaya Palace, The International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, Kijkruimte, Bishopsgate institution, Tate Liverpool, Selfridges, Eastside Projects and Grand Union. One of five winners of BBC Bollywood Shorts, funded by BFI and BBC and residencies with Kijkruimte Gallery, Netherland, Grand Union and Bruntwood, Birmingham.