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JP Could you tell me briefly about the work you were involved in before Community Arts.

What was your training, and what projects were you involved in?

SB My training was a BA in Sculpture at Goldsmiths College, London University. But in 1968 all teaching stopped due to the massive strikes throughout the country and after a few months of wondering, alongside friends in other art schools, what we should be doing with our time, four of us set up a project that we called Pavilions in the Parks.  The idea was to let artists and the public meet on equal ground without the intervention of critics, teachers or commerce.

We gave a press conference, to launch our idea, at the ICA.  We managed to raise money from the Arts Council, and Wates Ltd (the builders) lent us a prime site (which they were not yet ready to develop) on the Albert Bridge embankment.   Keith Critchelow, an architect who was designing cardboard housing, designed cardboard domes that were dismountable and could be used by artists to display their work. and another designer, Jeff, also built and loaned us a number of inflatable domes with back projection properties (for film or other performances, such as dance or acrobatics).  We ran Pavilions for three months on the Albert Bridge site in the summer of 1968 and in the following two years we ran Pavilions in the Parks on the green outside Euston Station, and on a housing estate in Croydon.

Walworth Road and the Aylesbury Estate Festival 1978, Brian Deighton,

JP We first met when you were setting up a project on the Aylesbury estate in south London.

Could you tell me a little about the estate and that project: why, for example, did you choose that estate and what did you hoped to achieve there?

SB Following the Pavilions in the Parks projects, I began to think about ways that people without formal arts training could gain access to producing creative work.  That was when we set up the Aylesbury Estate project.  

We approached Southwark Council when we had discovered that there were a number of empty flats on the estate.  We chose the Aylesbury (situated between the Walworth Road and the Old Kent Road) because there had been some publicity about suicides and depression amongst the tenants, and because we all lived in the Camberwell area and knew the local politics quite well.  

We were able to learn a lot about the estate from local schoolteachers and social workers but also from our own contacts within the area. We felt that at the heart of the problem was the design of the estate with “walkways in the air” isolating each layer of flats from the estate as a whole, that led to a lack of informal communication between tenants.

We made ourselves known to the tenants initially when we persuaded the GLC to let us use the Old Kent Road flyover as a roller-skating ramp for one Sunday.  This was important, because it introduced us in a fun way, and also demonstrated that it was possible to persuade the GLC (and therefore perhaps other authorities) that the ‘people’ could become participants in exciting ways in their own landscapes.

Initially we negotiated the use of two empty flats on the estate.  We set up a management group that included local tenants, the headmaster of the primary school as well as us four ‘community artists’.  One flat was used principally as a print room, where tenants could produce posters and/or newsletters, while the second flat was used for video productions. 

“A Happier Old Age”, Barefoot Video,1985

JP After leaving the Aylesbury, you set up Barefoot Video. Tell me about this project, who did you work with and where?

SB Five years later my family moved to Brighton. I had been brought up in Brighton and when we moved back there to be nearer my elderly mother, I reconnected with a network of old friends, and a group of us set up a video workshop named Barefoot Video (the name was inspired by the Chinese Barefoot Doctors). We intended to be decentralised communications resource that would make broadcast and non-broadcast programme video production available to local groups.

JP Can you describe a typical project?

SB One was with a group of elderly people.  Hove at that time had a large elderly population.  We had made contact with a very dedicated district nurse, who visited the elderly in their own homes as well as those in residential care.  We discovered that there were two types of residential care for the elderly in addition to help for people who continued to live in their own homes. These were people commercial residential homes; and hospitals. Commercial residential homes turned out to be the most dangerous for the elderly, as they were often charged a lot for very poor service and in crowded shared bedrooms.

We found that these elderly people took to documenting their own lives (and frustrations) on video, like ducks to water. We set up a simple training programme and when needed one of us would go along when they were filming.  But gradually this help was less and less needed. Meanwhile, we began to use their film to make what became the TV programme “A Happier Old Age” for Channel 4.

We made the film “A Happier Old Age” for Channel 4 showing this process.

JP How did Barefoot Video relate to your involvement in Community Arts?

SB  I think we thought of Barefoot Video as ‘community arts film workshop’. I’m pretty sure that the Arts Council used both terms. The films were all shot and edited by local people.  We offered initial training, and acted as technical back up.

JP Your books: Artists and People, Committing Photography and Video for Development are frequently cited as key texts in Community Arts. Reflecting back, I wonder how you view Community Arts from a perspective of five intervening decades.

SB I think many of us (including yourself) developed specific media in ways that enabled wider community production and representation.  

In the intervening years I continued to work with poor communities in Britain, Africa (Uganda, Kenya, Sierra Leone) India, Sri Lanka and Nepal. I think I felt it was up to the funders what they wanted to call it! 

The NGO’s I worked with overseas just saw the work as “development” with the added perspective of very poor and illiterate communities being enabled to research and film their own conditions and situations of poverty and represent it in video format to their own local authorities. 

We encouraged the villagers to explain their lives and their needs by drawing (and often building) maps on the ground that showed their villages, their fields and their water sources. We showed them how to make ‘ranking’ diagrams, recording seasonal shortages and recurring season sicknesses, etc. And they described to the camera, how they worked and struggled to provide for their families. In other words, we showed village people a graphic means of, an aid to, researching and reporting their own needs.

 Once they got the hang of it, village people became very adept at ‘showing’ their lives and needs to the camera. Sometimes they also used dialogue and short dramas.

We found that because the local officials were so impressed by the fact that illiterate people could express themselves and analyse their needs so effectively on film, they wanted to take the films, together with their village producers, to national government.  (I should explain that I am using the plural ‘we’ because the local NGO fieldworkers in each country and district where I worked, participated in the training with the village communities.)

Along with Oxfam staff, I ran a project in North Vietnam, which I documented in a book: Video for Development, Su Braden with Than Thi Thien Huong, Oxfam, 1998. The project was unusual because north Vietnam was under communist rule at the time. But the government gave us a completely free hand to work for three months with a community situated right up against the border with South Vietnam. We could sometimes see American troops on the other slope of the border.

Video for Development, Su Braden with Than Thi Thien Huong,Oxfam, 1998

I still haven’t answered your question, have I?  I guess we tested a lot of the community work aspects of the uses of film for poor or neglected communities, in the years at Barefoot.  

I really only learnt about poverty in Africa on the ground when Alice, my daughter, (then aged 6) and I accompanied anthropologist Robert Dodd (her dad and my husband) on his fieldwork with Baka hunters and gatherers in Cameroon.

I think that experience, and my subsequent work in Africa, India, Nepal and Vietnam, taught me that video could enable illiterate communities to ‘show’ themselves and their lives and problems in a way that was engaging, and informative, even to bureaucrats.

The process of video making encouraged ‘research’ by the community and the final productions enabled the participating communities to understand cause and effect in their own lives and so become clearer about how they might seek change and help.