Open Research Week: Revisiting Roger Casement in the Amazon
Battersea Arts Centre
Monday 28th October 2024 - Friday 1st November 2024
00:00
- 00:00
Location
SW11 5TN, London, Greater London, England, United Kingdom
Prices
FREE
Tickets and booking details will be released alongside a full line up of activities on 6 Sept 2024.
Through a week-long programme in collaboration with thinkers, makers and activists from both sides of the Atlantic, artist Mark Maughan invites audiences into the making process for a new performance piece.
Join Mark Maughan for a week of sessions to collectively unpick a series of enquiries and begin to imagine how these might translate into a future performance.
About the project
From 1907 to 1913, the UK funded Peruvian Amazon Company operated at the height of the rubber boom on land now belonging to Colombia. In 1911, an Ireland born British diplomat called Roger Casement wrote a report so damning, that the company was called in front of UK Parliament for committing genocide against an estimated 60,000 Indigenous Peoples and subsequently liquidated.
Casement became a household name overnight as a defender of human rights, before a very public decline soon followed due to his political and sexual persuasions, leading to his execution at Pentonville Prison. Still to date, the violent impact of the UK rubber trade on the people of the Colombian Amazon is yet to be reconciled.
With a background as a translator for NGOs in Colombia, theatre maker Mark Maughan has spent the last two years working with the four nations of La Chorrera: the Uitoto, Okaina, Muinane and Bora, on a theatre project that starts with the unheard perspectives of this history, exploring the tension between the desire for objective truth and the inescapable subjectivity of theatrical retelling.
Open Research is a new strand of support for artists to explore projects creatively with a public audience as part of their making process. It is inspired by Reena Kalsi’s Process programme at Roundhouse London (2022).