The Museo Roca, The Parade of Monsters, and Spanish Popular Anatomical Museums at The Barcelona Congress for Curious People!

Last week, we celebrated day one of the Barcelona Congress for Curious People with a special "Medicine and Science in Old Barcelona" walking tour; it featured a variety of anatomically-themed lectures, including one in the astounding 18th Century Royal Academy of Medicine's Anatomical Theatre, and another by Enric H. March--author of the wonderful (but sadly Catalan language only) blog Bereshit--on the history of popular anatomical museums in Barcelona such as the Museo Roca and its "Parade of Monsters."

March explained to me that he became interested in popular anatomical museums when he happened upon some ephemera related to The Museo Roca at a local antique shop in 2008. He has since done a great deal of research, including some in tandem with Alfons Zarzoso--curator of the Museu d'Història de la Medicina de Catalunya--who was the first to introduce me to the topic many years ago. We ended up featuring a number of pieces from this collection for the Wellcome Collection's 2009 exhibition Exquisite Bodies: or the Curious and Grotesque History of the Anatomical Model.

El Periódico, a much read Spanish newspaper, ran a lovely piece about our day of anatomy, featuring an interview with March about his work, popular anatomical museums in general and the Museo Roca; you can see the article by clicking here, or read it in English (via Google Translate, with a few of my own fine tunings) following.

Above are some images, and also an utterly mind-blowing video montage by Yolanda Fontal which March included in his talk. It features, among other things, a walk-through of the collection when it was still in private hands in Barcelona. VERY much worth a watch, but also, due to horrific diseased genitals, definitely NSFW.

If this is of interest, definitely check out Enric H. March amazing Bereshit blog by clicking here.

The Museum of Horrors

Museum Roca came to Barcelona in 1900 as a show where people queued to see naked bodies. A Belgian billionaire bought the collection and exhibits in Antwerp

Archive Museum of Roca
Diseases and newspaper. The consequences of venereal diseases were spreading to Chinatown.

Phenomena like the giant spider from Japan, the Siamese twins, monsters, real human fetuses, creepy close-ups of genitals deformed by venereal diseases. All this and many more dreadful images formed the Roca Museum, founded by Francisco Roca, a professional illusionist and promoter of shows in Carrer Nou de la Rambla 1900.

Locals lined up to see what was exhibited in those rooms: waxworks naked and slit open to show the inside of the body, and other amazing and creepy images aroused popular curiosity for the medical or educational interest. "Impressionable people should abstain from entering," warned a poster at the entrance of the museum, which years later moved to Parallel, and ended with the pieces stored for decades in a storage room.

Sale and transfer
"Francis Arellano, collector and antiques dealer, bought the entire collection. Nobody in Barcelona was interested, and they ended at the hands of a Belgian millionaire currently who currently exhibits them in his private residence in Antwerp," reveals Enric H. March, author of the blog Bereshit, yesterday during the first day of the Congress of Curious People, held until March 2 in Barcelona. He gave an illustrated lecture on the history of anatomical museums during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, notably the the Roca Museum.

"It was an exhibition of wax figures depicting the human body, its physiology in health and also ravaged bycertain diseases, especially venereal ones," explains March." It was the time when the scientific expositions revealed, and museums began to exhibit what until then were private collections. Between 1849 and 1938, there were 26 anatomical collections on view in Barcelona." March is particularly interested in the Roca Museum's sociological aspect, wherein the popular of such museum rose along with a more general interest in health and hygiene.

The museum was founded Roca supported by the gentry, but soon become a popular show."Went into decline when the film came to Barcelona," he says. No longer interested or famous anatomical Venus, who not only showed their female sexual organs, pubic hair also." Something unthinkable in any graphic expression of the time, even in artistic representations."

Congress for Curious People in Barcelona, Spain for Carnival Week! February 26 - March 2, 2014!

This year, Morbid Anatomy is delighted to be co-presenting--along with Aaron Beebe, Via Barcelona and Kriminal Kabarett--a special Barcelona, Spain-based Congress for Curious People! Scheduled to coincide with Carnival (February 26 - March 2), this week-long cultural festival is dedicated to the history of Carnival and to enlightenment-era Barcelona in general. It will highlight the unusual and hidden sides of Barcelona via special walking tours, conferences, dinners, decadent costume parties, and more.

A list of events follow; for full details on all, click here. All events will be in Spanish with English translation. Hope very much to see you there!

Also: if any of you out there have must-see suggestions for Madrid or Barcelona, I would love to hear them! Just shoot me an email at morbidanatomy [at] gmail.com.

Barcelona, Spain Congress for Curious People
Dates: February 26 - March 2
Admission: Varies; see website for more info
Tickets can be purchased by emailing curiouscongressbcn@gmail.com or calling 34677360980
Presented by
** All programs in Spanish with English Translation

This year, the Congress for Curious People will travel to Barcelona to help celebrate Carnival Week with a week-long cultural festival highlighting the unusual side of Barcelona. For a single, action-packed week, we will satisfy your curiosity through special activities, cultural itineraries, conferences and exclusive dinners and parties. The Congress is dedicated to the history of Carnival and to the city of Barcelona in its age of Enlightenment after 1714, and will take the form of special visits and walking tours, decadent parties, and talks on the history of medicine and science between the XV and XVIII centuries. 

SCHEDULE

Wednesday, February 26

Medicine and Science in Old Barcelona
A guided tour of The “Royal College of Surgeons,” which will open the doors of the sumptuous anatomical amphitheater, one of the best preserved in the world with lectures and discussions about natural history and sciences, medicine and Barcelona curiosities. More here. 

Thursday, February 27

Bunkers and Mansions: Secrets of Tibidado Avenue Walking Tour
An unusual tour through the splendour and the decadence of the bourgeois Barcelona in the former village of “Sant Gervasi.” The itinerary will follow the path of aristocratic and orientalist residences with enigmatic stories, featuring the luxurious mansions in the “Golden Twenties” to the lights and shadows of the Second Spanish Republic and the Civil War as well as a visit to the palace which hosted the Soviet embassy in 1936 and its impressive bunker, shelter for one of the most famous spies in the XX century. More here.

Friday, February 28
The Unusual Side of Gracia Walking Tour
A walking tour of "Gràcia”, an independent village until 1897, is well known today for being one of the biggest cultural centers in Barcelona, with dynamic societies and one of the most emblematic festivals in our country. Here, you to discover its history and above all, the most surprising curiosities in the district. Topics will include the legends in “plaça de la Virreina” and the “Devil’s House”, the clocks of Gracia, revolutions and freemasonry and the circle of spiritist women in the late XIX century. The tour will include a visit inside the private garden of fabulous fairy tale palace: “Casa Vicens”, designed by Gaudí. More here. 

Friday, February 28

Noir Masquerade
Tonight will celebrate our "Noir Masquerade" inside theAtelier de la Muerte Negra-- a private death museum in the heart of "Gràcia". This is the masterpiece of Otilio Salazar, a fashion designer and artist who paid a tribute to the anthropology of death in ancient cultures (Egypt, Rome, medieval Europe, Japan...) More here. 

Saturday, March 1

The Masonic Barcelona and the Athenaeum Minerva Walking Tour
This is a walking tour about the history of freemasonry and its privileged relationship with Barcelona. It will include stops at "Parc de la Ciutadella," not far from the “Arús Public Library,”a former lodge and a sanctuary for XIX century knowledge. We will continue with a fascinating tour exploring masonic urbanism and the “Congress of Spiritism” during the Universal Exhibition in 1888, the hermetic gates in the monastery of Saint Agustine, the Napoleonic invasion and freemasonry, XVIII century esoterism and the visit of count Cagliostro, and the secrets of the Templar Knights in the medieval royal palace. Specially for us, the members of the “Simbolic Lodge of Spain” will open their lodge, the "Athenaeum Minerva", in the heart of the medieval city. An exceptional oportunity to discover an institution which has been an enormous influence for arts, science, architecture and philosophy. More here.

Saturday, March 1
Surrealist Dinner
Kriminal Kabarett presents its first SURREALIST DINNER , an evening of Carnival in the mythical "Taxidermist" in Plaza Real, now occupied by the Mariscco restaurant. This is dedicated to the taxidermist as one of the favorite places of Salvador Dali in Barcelona, and whose fascination for good food eventually led him to publish in 1973 a book of culinary arts, "Les diners de Gala". This dinner will  join two passions of this Genius: gastronomy and the animal kingdom, to recall the surrealist dinners for which he was famous during his stays in Paris and New York. The menu will be inspired by Catalan and Mediterranean cuisine: opening tapas and then seafood. Water, wine and dessert are included. Gin provided by Hendricks. More here. 

Sunday, March 2

Libertine Barcelona- Erotic Tour from the XVIII Century
This is a walking tour of Rococo Barcelona, a city in the Age of Enlightement after the dramatic episodes of 1714. The count of Peralada and Diana, his courtesan, will guide you through the erotic adventures of Giacomo Casanova when he visited our city in 1768, the masked balls organized by the governor, the mysteries of Count Cagliostro, the erudite circle in “Palau Dalmases” and the libertine general Lecchi under Napoleonic rule. A theatralised and sexy tour for Carnival, performed by the artist Lady Bon Bon and sponsored by Isabel Capdevila from “aDa Art Gallery”, who created precious costumes. The tour will finish in the "Palace Gomis", a XVIII century building near Picasso Museum. Inside its spectacular ballroom, we will celebrate a conference about sex and pornography in the XIX century Spain (by Albert Domenech, writer in the bibliophile blog "Piscolabis Librorum"). More here.

Congress for Curious Peoples Ticket Updates and Cancellation

We are very sorry to announce that this Wednesday night's scheduled Congress for Curious People phantasmagoria show with “Professor” Mervyn Heard and the The Real Tuesday Weld has been cancelled due to illness; anyone who purchased tickets will get a notice and be refunded in full very soon.
 

We also have a just few more tickets for our epic ‘Reclaiming Spectacle’ two-day symposium at the Horse Hospital, with presenters including Richard Barnett and Ross MacFarlane of The Wellcome Trust; Simon Werrett of UCL, Anna Maerker of King's College, James Kennaway of Durham University; artist Brian Catling; tattoo historian Matt Lodder; Will Fowler of the BFI; Christina Harrington, director of London's iconic Treadwell’s Bookshop and many more discussing such topics as collecting the spectacular, non-human spectacle, extraordinary bodies and religion and ritual.

Details and ticketing information follows; You can find more by clicking here. Hope very much to see you three!

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2-DAY SYMPOSIUM
Saturday 7th September – Sunday 8th September
‘Reclaiming Spectacle: A two-day symposium’
Horse Hospital, Colonnade, Bloomsbury, WC1N 1JD (Map)
Tickets are £20 for the full weekend, £12 for one day. Click here to buy tickets.

The Congress for Curious People will draw to a close with this two day symposium addressing the concept of spectacle. Please see the full schedule below. To download a shorter programme as a PDF, please click here. For more information about each speaker, take a look at our participants page

Generally, the word spectacle refers to an event that is memorable for the appearance it creates. In nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholarship, spectacle has been frequently described as simultaneously enticing, deceptive and superficial, but above all as the domination of mass media, consumption and surveillance, which reduces citizens to spectators by political neutralisation. From this elitist view the audiences for spectacles have been described as passive consumers while the agency of those creating content is rarely addressed. We want to exactly challenge the very opposition between viewing (or writing about) and acting. How one can actively translate and interpret scientific spectacles and how can the boundaries between looking and doing be blurred: What can we learn from an encounter with performers, objects and spaces that create spectacles? Can counter-spaces and interventionist critiques be created?

SATURDAY 7th SEPTEMBER

10.00 Registration

10.30 Welcome address
Aaron Beebe (Coney Island Museum), Joanna Ebenstein (Morbid Anatomy), Petra Lange-Berndt (Preserved!), Mark Pilkington (Strange Attractor).

‘Spectacular cultures’ (moderated by Joanna Ebenstein, Morbid Anatomy) 

11.15 Richard Barnett, Engagement Fellow, Wellcome Trust: ‘All the Fun of the Fair’
Richard Barnett’s talk will tell the story of the fair. This is a tale of fleeting encounters, vivid pleasures, and the (temporary) dissolution of the bonds of mundane life. We will get our feet dusty at medieval patronal fairs, gawp at Victorian freaks and strongmen, and savour the neon and candyfloss of contemporary funfairs. We will look for traces of a pre-Christian festival culture, and examine what this endeavour reveals about changing attitudes towards the very notion of tradition. And we will end by asking: Who are the true modern inheritors of the ferias spiritus?

12.00 Break

12.15 Panel discussion: ‘Being Spectacular, Collecting the Spectacular’
This panel will address a range of spectacular practices. Discussion will take place between artists who dabble in the spectacular and archival and museum professionals faced with looking after and caring for the remnants of spectacular practices and objects with, at times, challenging histories. Artist Brian Catling turns into a Cyclops using the special effects of latex rubber masks; artistic duo Claire and Bob Humm enjoy carnivalesque humbug such as the fertility rites of Hasting’s Jack in the Green; Will Fowler is curator of artists’ moving images at the BFI; Subhadra Das is curator of UCL’s biomedical Teaching and Research Collections; Carla Valentine works as curator of Barts Pathology Museum.

13.30 Lunch break

14.30 Simon Werrett, Lecturer, Science and Technology Studies, UCL: ‘Fireworks: Behind the Bang!’
There’s much more to fireworks than meets the eye. We use fireworks today for celebrations, but in the past fireworks had many different uses. This talk will show how fireworks were used for spectacular religious and political festivals in European history, as tools of empire on voyages of exploration, as polite parlour-games and as dangerous weapons for radicals and rioters. Spectacle served many ends. Along the way, fireworks inspired scientists, artists, and poets and provided models for all kinds of inventions that have become part of the modern world. The legacy of these spectacles remains in everything from home-lighting to space exploration.

15.15 Break

‘Extraordinary bodies’ (moderated by Matt Lodder, Art Historian)

15.45 Robert Mills, Lecturer, History of Art, UCL: ‘Talking Heads, or, A Tale of Two Clerics’
Around the year 1000, two churchmen, Gerbert of Aurillac (later Pope Sylvester II) and his contemporary and one-time foe Abbo of Fleury became associated with tales of talking heads. Gerbert is the subject of the story, accused of manufacturing a head that magically issues prophesies and leads to his eventual downfall. Abbo is the author of the story, a narrative recounting the martyrdom of St Edmund of East Anglia, whose head miraculously announces its presence to the king’s subjects after its removal from his body by murderous Danes. This talk will use these stories as the starting point for an analysis of the phenomenon of talking heads in the Middle Ages, paying particular attention to the motif’s ambivalent associations. Located on the ambiguous borderland between magic and miracle, organic and inorganic, image and idol, medieval and modern, talking heads speak in many different voices.

16.30 Bill MacLehose, Lecturer in History of Science and Medicine, UCL: ‘Remnants of Jesus’ foreskin’

17.15 Break

17.30 Ross MacFarlane, Research Officer, Wellcome Library: ‘Tom Thumb and the Hilton Sisters: Uncovering the ‘Freaks’ of the Wellcome Library’
Exploitation or entertainment? Highlighting handbills and journals, postcards and posters, this talk will delve into the sensational world of the freakshow, as seen through the collections of the Wellcome Library.

18.15 End

SUNDAY 8TH SEPTEMBER

‘Nonhuman Spectacles’ (moderated by Petra Lange-Berndt, Lecturer, History of Art, UCL)

10.00 ‘The Micro-Spectacular’
We will screen the films An Insidious Intrusion (2008) by artist Tessa Farmer, and Serenading to Spiders (2012) by artist Eleanor Morgan. While Farmer engages in stop motion animation of dead insects and uncanny skeletal fairies, Morgan tries to attract a living spider by singing to the animal.

Afterwards, Bergit Arends (Curator), Gavin Broad (Senior Curator, Hymenoptera, Natural History Museum), Catriona McAra (Research Fellow in Cultural Theory, University of Huddersfield) and Eleanor Morgan (Artist) will discuss the impact that creepy crawlies and parasites have on us and how artists have been addressing the micro-spectacular plane.

11.15 Tim Cockerill, artist and zoologist: ‘The Flea Circus: The Smallest Show on Earth’
‘All our fleas are harnessed. You don’t take any more out than you bring in yourself’ (From a sign in John Torp’s American Flea Circus, 1950s)
Roll up and see the world-famous performing fleas! For over 150 years, audiences have been paying their sixpences to be amazed by whole troupes of real, live, performing fleas. Believe it, or not? In this talk, Tim Cockerill will persuade you that the flea circus, until recently, was a 100% genuine spectacle, made up of live fleas pulling chariots, riding tricycles and even fighting duels with perfectly crafted miniature swords. Find out how the Flea Circus ‘Professors’ fed their fleas, which household appliance spelled the demise of the Flea Circus in the 1950s, and how a flea could make a Victorian lady take all of her clothes off. Tim will teach you how – once you have found your fleas – to harness and train them yourself, so you can start a flea circus of your very own! After several years researching the history and techniques of the flea circus, Tim has uncovered previously unseen footage and photos of the fleas in action. Tim has also tracked down the last remaining Flea Circus Professors, who have taught him the secret techniques of flea training. All of this and more is included in the talk you can afford to see, but cannot afford to miss!

12.00 Break

12.15 Dietmar Rübel, Professor of Art History and Theory, Art Academy Dresden: ‘Blobjects: Nothing can stop it!’
Spectacular B-Movie horror scenarios enable us to critically engage with anxieties in relation to liquid objects beyond human subjectivity. Rübel will consider the film “The Blob” from 1958, a horror film classic, in which a jellylike, life-forms-devouring mass from outer space is relentlessly growing and spreading. Out of this fictitious story in the past decades fascinating human-thing-hybrids have been developed: So called “Blobjects” push from the realms of art, design and architecture into public spaces and conquer our everyday lives. As one can hear in Burt Bacharach’s main title song: “Beware of ‘The Blob’, it creeps / And leaps and glides and slides / Across the floor / Right through the door / And all around the wall / A splotch, a blotch / Be careful of The Blob.”

13.00 Lunch break

‘Ritual and Spectacle’ (moderated by Mark Pilkington, writer and curator)

14.00 Chiara Ambrosio, filmmaker and visual artist: ‘Tarantism: Dance, Possession and Exorcism in Southern Italy’
Tarantism is a form of dance mania that illustrates the complex struggle between Pagnism and Catholicism in the South of Italy. Its journey and development – from Greek and Roman times, through the middle ages and renaissance, straight through to the modern day – traces a story that transcends the history of medicine and religion to embrace a vast and complicated conversation about the political and socio-economical identity of a land, and the continued fight for freedom and emancipation in an extremely volatile and difficult terrain, both physical and psychological. This talk will explore Tarantism as a ritualistic spectacle that, through dance and music, offers a form of resistance and continuation of specific local histories beliefs and identity.

14.45 Shannon Taggart, photographer and independent researcher,
‘Physical Physical Mediumship, Spiritualist Ritual and the Search for Ectoplasm -
After learning the details of her grandfather's death through a medium, Shannon Taggart began a long term project on Modern Spiritualism. Through images made from 2001-2013, this talk will examine Spiritualist ritual, its uses of technology and its links with Shamanistic spectacle. The intrinsic connection between Spiritualism, photography, and the science of the invisible will be discussed. A comparison between the latent theater of physical mediumship and the literal theatrics of Haitian Vodou will also be explored.

15.30 Break

16.00 Panel discussion, ‘Practicing Occultism’
With Cecile Dubuis (artistic gothic librarian, UCL), Christina Harrington (Director of Treadwell’s Bookshop), Shannon Taggart (photographer/independent researcher), Robert Wallis (Professor of Visual Culture, Richmond University).

17.15 James Kennaway, History of Medicine and Disease, Durham University: ‘Psychiatry vs. Religion’
Over the past two hundred years many psychiatrists have taken a dim view of religion, and have attempted to portray it, and especially its more extravagant and mystical aspects, as essentially an expression of types of mental illness such as hysteria or schizophrenia. The lives of prophets, saints and religious leaders have been reinterpreted in diagnostic terms. Ecstatic and mystical religious experiences, from Voodoo ceremonies to Pentecostal speaking in tongues, have been diagnosed as pathological delusions. Discussions of Jesus as a paranoid schizophrenic and Mohammed as a psychopath abound. This talk will look at some of the strangest examples of this phenomenon and consider its causes, uses and limitations.

18.00 Final discussion

18.30 End

You can find out more about all events--and purchase tickets!--by clicking here.

Photos: Anatomical Venuse of La Specola from The Secret Museum Exhibition, © Joanna Ebenstein

A Few Remaining Tickets for "Congress for Curious People: A Festival of Spectacular Cultures" London, 30 August - 8 September

There are still tickets available for a few of the events comprising this year's Congress for Curious People, organized by Morbid Anatomy, Strange Attractor and Preserved! with the support of The Wellcome Trust.

Bearing that in mind, does anybody fancy an illustrated lecture on ‘Shows of London: Illegitimate Entertainment and Shop Shows in London 1800 to 1900’ by Vanessa Toulmin of the National Fairground Archive (Monday, 2 September, above image)? Or an evening dedicated to ‘Amazing Anatomies’ at the Old Operating Theatre with talks by John Troyer and Anna Maerker and drawing lessons with Art Macabre (Tuesday, 3 September)? Or perhaps you might enjoy a spectacular, immersive phantasmagoria show presented by “Professor” Mervyn Heard accompanied by the music the The Real Tuesday Weld (Wednesday, 4 September)? Or, if you crave more substantial fare, perhaps our epic ‘Reclaiming Spectacle’ two-day symposium (!!!) at the Horse Hospital--with panels on collecting the spectacular, non-human spectacle, extraordinary bodies and religion and ritual (Saturday and Sunday, 7 and 8 September)--might appeal? Or, for the very adventurous among you, maybe you'd like to join us for an overnight excursion to the faded Victorian seaside resort of Blackpool, complete with walking tour and a viewing of the famous illuminations (This Saturday, 31 Aug)!

Details and ticketing information for each event follows; You can find more about all events by clicking here. Hope very much to see you there!

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Saturday 31st August – Sunday 1st September
Thrills in Blackpool!
Free of charge, but please send an e-mail to Jessica Dain, j.dain [at] ucl.ac.uk if you want to attend.

Join us for a trip to Blackpool, once Britain’s most spectacular seaside resort. Enjoy over 10 km of beach and promenade, the piers, fortune-tellers, the only surviving first-generation tramway of this country, fish and chip shops, the Blackpool Tower, Madame Tussauds, the attractions of the Pleasure Beach as well as an exhibition by artist Zoe Beloff,  “Dreamland: The Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society and Their Circle, 1926-1972”. Walk the city with local guide, Kelly Walker, for a tour taking in the Winter Gardens, Comedy Carpet, Town Hall, Central Library and North Pier, then stay overnight for the opening of the famous Blackpool Illuminations.

Click here for further information.

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Monday 2nd September
‘Shows of London: Illegitimate Entertainment and Shop Shows in London 1800 to 1900′
7pm, Gustave Tuck Lecture Theatre, Wilkins Building, UCL, Gower Street, WC1E 6BT (map)
Free of charge, but please send an e-mail to Jessica Dain, j.dain [at] ucl.ac.uk if you want to attend.

Join Vanessa Toulmin, Director of the National Fairground Archive and Professor at the University of Sheffield, for a talk about the spectacular history of the fairground.

Click here for further information.

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Tuesday 3rd September
8pm, ‘Amazing Anatomy: The Human Body as Spectacular Object’
Old Operating Theatre, 9a St. Thomas Street, SE1 9RY (map)
Tickets are priced £8, click here to buy.

Tonight, make your way up the vertiginous winding staircase of the atmospheric Old Operating Theatre – the oldest in Europe, in the roof space of an English baroque church – for a night dedicated to Spectacular Anatomies. First, join Art Macabre for a drawing workshop in which you will have the opportunity to draw a real life Anatomical Venus. Drawing materials provided thanks to Cass Art (pencils, charcoal and drawing boards). Bring along a sketchbook/paper.

Following, enjoy two illustrated talks on the human body as spectacular object with Anna Maerker, Senior Lecturer, History of Medicine, King’s College London and John Troyer, Deputy Director, Centre for Death and Society, University of Bath.

Click here for further information.

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2-DAY SYMPOSIUM
Saturday 7th September – Sunday 8th September
‘Reclaiming Spectacle: A two-day symposium’
Horse Hospital, Colonnade, Bloomsbury, WC1N 1JD (Map)
Tickets are £20 for the full weekend, £12 for one day. Click here to buy tickets.

The Congress for Curious People will draw to a close with this two day symposium addressing the concept of spectacle. Please see the full schedule below. To download a shorter programme as a PDF, please click here. For more information about each speaker, take a look at our participants page

Generally, the word spectacle refers to an event that is memorable for the appearance it creates. In nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholarship, spectacle has been frequently described as simultaneously enticing, deceptive and superficial, but above all as the domination of mass media, consumption and surveillance, which reduces citizens to spectators by political neutralisation. From this elitist view the audiences for spectacles have been described as passive consumers while the agency of those creating content is rarely addressed. We want to exactly challenge the very opposition between viewing (or writing about) and acting. How one can actively translate and interpret scientific spectacles and how can the boundaries between looking and doing be blurred: What can we learn from an encounter with performers, objects and spaces that create spectacles? Can counter-spaces and interventionist critiques be created?

SATURDAY 7th SEPTEMBER

10.00 Registration

10.30 Welcome address
Aaron Beebe (Coney Island Museum), Joanna Ebenstein (Morbid Anatomy), Petra Lange-Berndt (Preserved!), Mark Pilkington (Strange Attractor).

‘Spectacular cultures’ (moderated by Joanna Ebenstein, Morbid Anatomy) 

11.15 Richard Barnett, Engagement Fellow, Wellcome Trust: ‘All the Fun of the Fair’
Richard Barnett’s talk will tell the story of the fair. This is a tale of fleeting encounters, vivid pleasures, and the (temporary) dissolution of the bonds of mundane life. We will get our feet dusty at medieval patronal fairs, gawp at Victorian freaks and strongmen, and savour the neon and candyfloss of contemporary funfairs. We will look for traces of a pre-Christian festival culture, and examine what this endeavour reveals about changing attitudes towards the very notion of tradition. And we will end by asking: Who are the true modern inheritors of the ferias spiritus?

12.00 Break

12.15 Panel discussion: ‘Being Spectacular, Collecting the Spectacular’
This panel will address a range of spectacular practices. Discussion will take place between artists who dabble in the spectacular and archival and museum professionals faced with looking after and caring for the remnants of spectacular practices and objects with, at times, challenging histories. Artist Brian Catling turns into a Cyclops using the special effects of latex rubber masks; artistic duo Claire and Bob Humm enjoy carnivalesque humbug such as the fertility rites of Hasting’s Jack in the Green; Will Fowler is curator of artists’ moving images at the BFI; Subhadra Das is curator of UCL’s biomedical Teaching and Research Collections; Carla Valentine works as curator of Barts Pathology Museum.

13.30 Lunch break

14.30 Simon Werrett, Lecturer, Science and Technology Studies, UCL: ‘Fireworks: Behind the Bang!’
There’s much more to fireworks than meets the eye. We use fireworks today for celebrations, but in the past fireworks had many different uses. This talk will show how fireworks were used for spectacular religious and political festivals in European history, as tools of empire on voyages of exploration, as polite parlour-games and as dangerous weapons for radicals and rioters. Spectacle served many ends. Along the way, fireworks inspired scientists, artists, and poets and provided models for all kinds of inventions that have become part of the modern world. The legacy of these spectacles remains in everything from home-lighting to space exploration.

15.15 Break

‘Extraordinary bodies’ (moderated by Matt Lodder, Art Historian)

15.45 Robert Mills, Lecturer, History of Art, UCL: ‘Talking Heads, or, A Tale of Two Clerics’
Around the year 1000, two churchmen, Gerbert of Aurillac (later Pope Sylvester II) and his contemporary and one-time foe Abbo of Fleury became associated with tales of talking heads. Gerbert is the subject of the story, accused of manufacturing a head that magically issues prophesies and leads to his eventual downfall. Abbo is the author of the story, a narrative recounting the martyrdom of St Edmund of East Anglia, whose head miraculously announces its presence to the king’s subjects after its removal from his body by murderous Danes. This talk will use these stories as the starting point for an analysis of the phenomenon of talking heads in the Middle Ages, paying particular attention to the motif’s ambivalent associations. Located on the ambiguous borderland between magic and miracle, organic and inorganic, image and idol, medieval and modern, talking heads speak in many different voices.

16.30 Bill MacLehose, Lecturer in History of Science and Medicine, UCL: ‘Remnants of Jesus’ foreskin’

17.15 Break

17.30 Ross MacFarlane, Research Officer, Wellcome Library: ‘Tom Thumb and the Hilton Sisters: Uncovering the ‘Freaks’ of the Wellcome Library’
Exploitation or entertainment? Highlighting handbills and journals, postcards and posters, this talk will delve into the sensational world of the freakshow, as seen through the collections of the Wellcome Library.

18.15 End

SUNDAY 8TH SEPTEMBER

‘Nonhuman Spectacles’ (moderated by Petra Lange-Berndt, Lecturer, History of Art, UCL)

10.00 ‘The Micro-Spectacular’
We will screen the films An Insidious Intrusion (2008) by artist Tessa Farmer, and Serenading to Spiders (2012) by artist Eleanor Morgan. While Farmer engages in stop motion animation of dead insects and uncanny skeletal fairies, Morgan tries to attract a living spider by singing to the animal.

Afterwards, Bergit Arends (Curator), Gavin Broad (Senior Curator, Hymenoptera, Natural History Museum), Catriona McAra (Research Fellow in Cultural Theory, University of Huddersfield) and Eleanor Morgan (Artist) will discuss the impact that creepy crawlies and parasites have on us and how artists have been addressing the micro-spectacular plane.

11.15 Tim Cockerill, artist and zoologist: ‘The Flea Circus: The Smallest Show on Earth’
‘All our fleas are harnessed. You don’t take any more out than you bring in yourself’ (From a sign in John Torp’s American Flea Circus, 1950s)
Roll up and see the world-famous performing fleas! For over 150 years, audiences have been paying their sixpences to be amazed by whole troupes of real, live, performing fleas. Believe it, or not? In this talk, Tim Cockerill will persuade you that the flea circus, until recently, was a 100% genuine spectacle, made up of live fleas pulling chariots, riding tricycles and even fighting duels with perfectly crafted miniature swords. Find out how the Flea Circus ‘Professors’ fed their fleas, which household appliance spelled the demise of the Flea Circus in the 1950s, and how a flea could make a Victorian lady take all of her clothes off. Tim will teach you how – once you have found your fleas – to harness and train them yourself, so you can start a flea circus of your very own! After several years researching the history and techniques of the flea circus, Tim has uncovered previously unseen footage and photos of the fleas in action. Tim has also tracked down the last remaining Flea Circus Professors, who have taught him the secret techniques of flea training. All of this and more is included in the talk you can afford to see, but cannot afford to miss!

12.00 Break

12.15 Dietmar Rübel, Professor of Art History and Theory, Art Academy Dresden: ‘Blobjects: Nothing can stop it!’
Spectacular B-Movie horror scenarios enable us to critically engage with anxieties in relation to liquid objects beyond human subjectivity. Rübel will consider the film “The Blob” from 1958, a horror film classic, in which a jellylike, life-forms-devouring mass from outer space is relentlessly growing and spreading. Out of this fictitious story in the past decades fascinating human-thing-hybrids have been developed: So called “Blobjects” push from the realms of art, design and architecture into public spaces and conquer our everyday lives. As one can hear in Burt Bacharach’s main title song: “Beware of ‘The Blob’, it creeps / And leaps and glides and slides / Across the floor / Right through the door / And all around the wall / A splotch, a blotch / Be careful of The Blob.”

13.00 Lunch break

‘Ritual and Spectacle’ (moderated by Mark Pilkington, writer and curator)

14.00 Chiara Ambrosio, filmmaker and visual artist: ‘Tarantism: Dance, Possession and Exorcism in Southern Italy’
Tarantism is a form of dance mania that illustrates the complex struggle between Pagnism and Catholicism in the South of Italy. Its journey and development – from Greek and Roman times, through the middle ages and renaissance, straight through to the modern day – traces a story that transcends the history of medicine and religion to embrace a vast and complicated conversation about the political and socio-economical identity of a land, and the continued fight for freedom and emancipation in an extremely volatile and difficult terrain, both physical and psychological. This talk will explore Tarantism as a ritualistic spectacle that, through dance and music, offers a form of resistance and continuation of specific local histories beliefs and identity.

14.45 Shannon Taggart, photographer and independent researcher,
‘Physical Physical Mediumship, Spiritualist Ritual and the Search for Ectoplasm -
After learning the details of her grandfather's death through a medium, Shannon Taggart began a long term project on Modern Spiritualism. Through images made from 2001-2013, this talk will examine Spiritualist ritual, its uses of technology and its links with Shamanistic spectacle. The intrinsic connection between Spiritualism, photography, and the science of the invisible will be discussed. A comparison between the latent theater of physical mediumship and the literal theatrics of Haitian Vodou will also be explored.

15.30 Break

16.00 Panel discussion, ‘Practicing Occultism’
With Cecile Dubuis (artistic gothic librarian, UCL), Christina Harrington (Director of Treadwell’s Bookshop), Shannon Taggart (photographer/independent researcher), Robert Wallis (Professor of Visual Culture, Richmond University).

17.15 James Kennaway, History of Medicine and Disease, Durham University: ‘Psychiatry vs. Religion’
Over the past two hundred years many psychiatrists have taken a dim view of religion, and have attempted to portray it, and especially its more extravagant and mystical aspects, as essentially an expression of types of mental illness such as hysteria or schizophrenia. The lives of prophets, saints and religious leaders have been reinterpreted in diagnostic terms. Ecstatic and mystical religious experiences, from Voodoo ceremonies to Pentecostal speaking in tongues, have been diagnosed as pathological delusions. Discussions of Jesus as a paranoid schizophrenic and Mohammed as a psychopath abound. This talk will look at some of the strangest examples of this phenomenon and consider its causes, uses and limitations.

18.00 Final discussion

18.30 End

You can find out more about all events--and purchase tickets!--by clicking here.

Image source: The British Library; more here

The Congress for Curious Poeple: A Festival of Spectacular Culture; August 29th – September 8th, London and Blackpool

I am absolutely delighted to announce this year's 4th annual Congress for Curious People. This year's iteration, subtitled "A Festival of Spectacular Cultures," will take place from August 29th – September 8th at various locations around London and Blackpool and is kindly supported by the Wellcome Trust.

You can find a full schedule by clicking here and more information more information by clicking here,
Hope to see you at one or more of these terrific events!

The Congress for Curious People: A Festival of Spectacular Cultures
August 29th – September 8th 2013
London and Blackpool
Co-curated by Morbid Anatomy, Preserved!, and Strange Attractor

From Fun Fairs to Freak Shows… Magic Lantern Lectures to Flea Circuses… Cyclopian Artists and Mediumistic Drawings to Severed Heads and Anthropomorphic Taxidermy… Riotous Fireworks and the bright lights of an otherworldly Blackpool to the dark recesses of Old Operating Theatres and Clandestine Archives.

Join us for an excursion into the peculiar, the carnivalesque and the macabre….

The Congress for Curious People is a week long festival of spectacular cultures, followed by a two-day symposium, co-curated by Morbid Anatomy, Preserved!, and Strange Attractor.

Founded in 2010 as a scholarly sideshow to the Congress of Curious People – a theatrical celebration of the carnivalesque at the Coney Island Museum in New York – the Congress for Curious People finds itself this year in a series of hidden locales and out-of-the-way venues across the U.K. Presenting talks, screenings, performances and walking tours, the festival will bring together over 40 international contributors specialising in eccentric customs, alternate histories and medical anomalies to explore ideas of spectacle and curiosity in some truly fascinating locales.

A two-day symposium on ‘Reclaiming Spectacle’ will include panels of academics, rogue scholars and artists discussing the intricacies of collecting, the politics of bodily display, non-human oddities, religion and the occult, whilst The Horse Hospital will host ‘Ethel Le Rossignol: A Goodly Company’, an exhibition of stunningly beautiful psychic artworks painted in the 1920s by this previously unknown medium and artist. The Congress will create a forum not only for discussing, but also for experiencing spectacle, combining the niche and the popular, the scholarly and the entertaining.

More information and a full schedule can be found at curiouscongress.wordpress.com. Please contact us at congressadmin@strangeattractor.com.

www.morbidanatomy.blogspot.co.uk / www.preservedproject.co.uk / www.strangeattractor.co.uk

Kindly supported by the Wellcome Trust.

More information can be found here, and a full schedule can be found here.

"Reclaiming Spectacle" Two-day Symposium, Congress for Curious People, September 7th and 8th, London

I am delighted to announce the final schedule for the two day symposium component of this year's London-based Congress for Curious People. The theme is "Reclaiming Spectacle," and it will take place at London's Horse Hospital over the weekend of September 7th and 8th.

Panels will cover "Spectacular Cultures," "Collecting the Spectacular," "Extraordinary Bodies," "Non-Human Spectacles," and "Ritual and Spectacle" and will feature such speakers as Carla Connolly, curator of Barts Pathology Museum; Chiara Ambrosio, Filmmaker and visual artist; Richard Barnett of the Wellcome Trust; artists Brian Catling and Tessa Farmer; Will Fowler, curator of artists’ moving images, BFI; James Kennaway, Durham University; Dr Matt Lodder, art historian, London; Ross MacFarlane, Research Officer of the Wellcome Library; Shannon Taggart, Photographer/independent researcher;  and Simon Werrett, Lecturer, Science and Technology Studies, UCL.

Full schedule follows; you can find out more on all here, and purchase tickets by clicking here here. This project is kindly supported by The Wellcome Trust

Hope very much to see you there!

"Reclaiming Spectacle" Two-day Symposium, Congress for Curious Peoples, LondonA 2-day symposium devoted to spectacular cultures, produced by Morbid Anatomy, Strange Attractor, The Coney Island Museum, and Preserved!
Dates: Saturday September 7th and Sunday September 8th
Times: 10-6:30
Admission: £20 for the full weekend, £12 for one day. Click here to buy tickets.
Location: Horse Hospital, Colonnade, Bloomsbury, London WC1N 1JD (Map)

The Congress for Curious People will draw to a close with this two day symposium addressing the concept of spectacle. Please see the full schedule below. To download a shorter programme as a PDF, please click here. For more information about each speaker, take a look at our participants page.

Generally, the word spectacle refers to an event that is memorable for the appearance it creates. In nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholarship, spectacle has been frequently described as simultaneously enticing, deceptive and superficial, but above all as the domination of mass media, consumption and surveillance, which reduces citizens to spectators by political neutralisation. From this elitist view the audiences for spectacles have been described as passive consumers while the agency of those creating content is rarely addressed. We want to exactly challenge the very opposition between viewing (or writing about) and acting. How one can actively translate and interpret scientific spectacles and how can the boundaries between looking and doing be blurred: What can we learn from an encounter with performers, objects and spaces that create spectacles? Can counter-spaces and interventionist critiques be created?

SATURDAY SEPTEMBER 7

10.00 Registration

10.30 Welcome address
Aaron Beebe (Coney Island Museum), Joanna Ebenstein (Morbid Anatomy), Petra Lange-Berndt (Preserved!), Mark Pilkington (Strange Attractor).

‘Spectacular cultures’ (moderated by Joanna Ebenstein, Morbid Anatomy) 

11.15 Richard Barnett, Engagement Fellow, Wellcome Trust: ‘All the Fun of the Fair’
Richard Barnett’s talk will tell the story of the fair. This is a tale of fleeting encounters, vivid pleasures, and the (temporary) dissolution of the bonds of mundane life. We will get our feet dusty at medieval patronal fairs, gawp at Victorian freaks and strongmen, and savour the neon and candyfloss of contemporary funfairs. We will look for traces of a pre-Christian festival culture, and examine what this endeavour reveals about changing attitudes towards the very notion of tradition. And we will end by asking: Who are the true modern inheritors of the ferias spiritus?

12.00 Break

12.15 Panel discussion: ‘Being Spectacular, Collecting the Spectacular’
This panel will address a range of spectacular practices. Discussion will take place between artists who dabble in the spectacular and archival and museum professionals faced with looking after and caring for the remnants of spectacular practices and objects with, at times, challenging histories. Artist Brian Catling turns into a Cyclops using the special effects of latex rubber masks; artistic duo Claire and Bob Humm enjoy carnivalesque humbug such as the fertility rites of Hasting’s Jack in the Green; Will Fowler is curator of artists’ moving images at the BFI; Subhadra Das is curator of UCL’s biomedical Teaching & Research Collections; Carla Connolly works as curator of Barts Pathology Museum.

13.30 Lunch break

14.30 Simon Werrett, Lecturer, Science and Technology Studies, UCL: ‘Fireworks: Behind the Bang!’
There’s much more to fireworks than meets the eye. We use fireworks today for celebrations, but in the past fireworks had many different uses. This talk will show how fireworks were used for spectacular religious and political festivals in European history, as tools of empire on voyages of exploration, as polite parlour-games and as dangerous weapons for radicals and rioters. Spectacle served many ends. Along the way, fireworks inspired scientists, artists, and poets and provided models for all kinds of inventions that have become part of the modern world. The legacy of these spectacles remains in everything from home-lighting to space exploration.

15.15 Break

‘Extraordinary bodies’ (moderated by Matt Lodder, Art Historian)

15.45 Robert Mills, Lecturer, History of Art, UCL: ‘Talking Heads, or, A Tale of Two Clerics’
Around the year 1000, two churchmen, Gerbert of Aurillac (later Pope Sylvester II) and his contemporary and one-time foe Abbo of Fleury became associated with tales of talking heads. Gerbert is the subject of the story, accused of manufacturing a head that magically issues prophesies and leads to his eventual downfall. Abbo is the author of the story, a narrative recounting the martyrdom of St Edmund of East Anglia, whose head miraculously announces its presence to the king’s subjects after its removal from his body by murderous Danes. This talk will use these stories as the starting point for an analysis of the phenomenon of talking heads in the Middle Ages, paying particular attention to the motif’s ambivalent associations. Located on the ambiguous borderland between magic and miracle, organic and inorganic, image and idol, medieval and modern, talking heads speak in many different voices.

16.30 Bill MacLehose, Lecturer in History of Science and Medicine, UCL: ‘Remnants of Jesus’ foreskin’

17.15 Break

17.30 Ross MacFarlane, Research Officer, Wellcome Library: ‘Tom Thumb and the Hilton Sisters: Uncovering the ‘Freaks’ of the Wellcome Library’
Exploitation or entertainment? Highlighting handbills and journals, postcards and posters, this talk will delve into the sensational world of the freakshow, as seen through the collections of the Wellcome Library.

18.15 End

SUNDAY SEPTEMBER 8

‘Nonhuman Spectacles’ (moderated by Petra Lange-Berndt, Lecturer, History of Art, UCL)

10.00 ‘The Micro-Spectacular’
We will screen the films An Insidious Intrusion (2008) by artist Tessa Farmer, and Serenading to Spiders (2012) by artist Eleanor Morgan. While Farmer engages in stop motion animation of dead insects and uncanny skeletal fairies, Morgan tries to attract a living spider by singing to the animal.

Afterwards, Bergit Arends (Curator), Gavin Broad (Senior Curator, Hymenoptera, Natural History Museum), Catriona McAra (Research Fellow in Cultural Theory, University of Huddersfield) and Eleanor Morgan (Artist) will discuss the impact that creepy crawlies and parasites have on us and how artists have been addressing the micro-spectacular plane.

11.15 Tim Cockerill, artist and zoologist: ‘The Flea Circus: The Smallest Show on Earth’
‘All our fleas are harnessed. You don’t take any more out than you bring in yourself’ (From a sign in John Torp’s American Flea Circus, 1950s)
Roll up and see the world-famous performing fleas! For over 150 years, audiences have been paying their sixpences to be amazed by whole troupes of real, live, performing fleas. Believe it, or not? In this talk, Tim Cockerill will persuade you that the flea circus, until recently, was a 100% genuine spectacle, made up of live fleas pulling chariots, riding tricycles and even fighting duels with perfectly crafted miniature swords. Find out how the Flea Circus ‘Professors’ fed their fleas, which household appliance spelled the demise of the Flea Circus in the 1950s, and how a flea could make a Victorian lady take all of her clothes off. Tim will teach you how – once you have found your fleas – to harness and train them yourself, so you can start a flea circus of your very own! After several years researching the history and techniques of the flea circus, Tim has uncovered previously unseen footage and photos of the fleas in action. Tim has also tracked down the last remaining Flea Circus Professors, who have taught him the secret techniques of flea training. All of this and more is included in the talk you can afford to see, but cannot afford to miss!

12.00 Break

12.15 Dietmar Rübel, Professor of Art History and Theory, Art Academy Dresden: ‘Blobjects: Nothing can stop it!’
Spectacular B-Movie horror scenarios enable us to critically engage with anxieties in relation to liquid objects beyond human subjectivity. Rübel will consider the film “The Blob” from 1958, a horror film classic, in which a jellylike, life-forms-devouring mass from outer space is relentlessly growing and spreading. Out of this fictitious story in the past decades fascinating human-thing-hybrids have been developed: So called “Blobjects” push from the realms of art, design and architecture into public spaces and conquer our everyday lives. As one can hear in Burt Bacharach’s main title song: “Beware of ‘The Blob’, it creeps / And leaps and glides and slides / Across the floor / Right through the door / And all around the wall / A splotch, a blotch / Be careful of The Blob.”

13.00 Lunch break

‘Ritual and Spectacle’ (moderated by Mark Pilkington, writer and curator)

14.00 Chiara Ambrosio, filmmaker and visual artist: ‘Tarantism: Dance, Possession and Exorcism in Southern Italy’
Tarantism is a form of dance mania that illustrates the complex struggle between Pagnism and Catholicism in the South of Italy. Its journey and development- from Greek and Roman times, through the middle ages and renaissance, straight through to the modern day- traces a story that transcends the history of medicine and religion to embrace a vast and complicated conversation about the political and socio-economical identity of a land, and the continued fight for freedom and emancipation in an extremely volatile and difficult terrain, both physical and psychological. This talk will explore Tarantism as a ritualistic spectacle that, through dance and music, offers a form of resistance and continuation of specific local histories beliefs and identity.

14.45 Shannon Taggart, photographer and independent researcher, ‘Physical Mediumship, Spiritualist Ritual and the Search for Ectoplasm’
The invention of photography coincided with the scientific exploration of a variety of invisible forces. Disembodied communication was made possible with the telegraph, the power of electricity was harnessed, radiation was discovered, x-rays were produced and worlds within worlds were being revealed via microscopes and telescopes. During this era of possibility, photography was used in scientific attempts to show thoughts and feelings, verify the existence of a universal life force and manifest proof of the human soul. This presentation will begin with an overview of early camera-less photographic experimentation including the evolution of what is now known as the Kirlian photography process. We will then set up a Kirlian device for a demonstration and everyone will have a chance to get their hand photographed.


15.30 Break

16.00 Panel discussion, ‘Practicing Occultism’
With Cecile Dubuis (artistic gothic librarian, UCL), Christina Harrington (Director of Treadwell’s Bookshop), Shannon Taggart (photographer/independent researcher), Robert Wallis (Professor of Visual Culture, Richmond University).

17.15 James Kennaway, History of Medicine and Disease, Durham University: ‘Psychiatry vs. Religion’
Over the past two hundred years many psychiatrists have taken a dim view of religion, and have attempted to portray it, and especially its more extravagant and mystical aspects, as essentially an expression of types of mental illness such as hysteria or schizophrenia. The lives of prophets, saints and religious leaders have been reinterpreted in diagnostic terms. Ecstatic and mystical religious experiences, from Voodoo ceremonies to Pentecostal speaking in tongues, have been diagnosed as pathological delusions. Discussions of Jesus as a paranoid schizophrenic and Mohammed as a psychopath abound. This talk will look at some of the strangest examples of this phenomenon and consider its causes, uses and limitations.

18.00 Final discussion

18.30 End

Congress for Curious People, London Edition, August 29th to September 8th: Save the Date(s)!!!

In just a few weeks, Morbid Anatomy and our partners--Strange Attractor, UCL's Preserved! and The Coney Island Museum--will be launching the second annual London edition of the Congress for Curious Peoples. This year's Congress has the theme “Spectacular Cultures," and will present a variety of lectures, performances, open houses and tours at at a number of underseen curious venues around London with the aim of entertaining, delighting, amazing, educating and opening up discussion about the nature of spectacle and the spectacular.

The Congress will end in a two-day symposium on “Reclaiming Spectacle”, which will include panels of academics, museum professionals, rogue scholars and artists discussing the intricacies of collecting the spectacular, the politics of bodily display, non-human spectacles, religion and the occult. In conjunction with the events The Horse Hospital will host "Ethel Le Rossignol: A Goodly Company" an exhibition of stunningly beautiful channelled psychic artworks painted in the 1920s by the largely unknown medium and artist.
 
A few of our confirmed presenters thus far include:

• Bergit Arends, independent curator, London 
• Carla Connolly, curator of Barts Pathology Museum
• Chiara Ambrosio, Filmmaker and visual artist
• Richard Barnett, Wellcome Trust Engagement Fellow
• Dr Gavin Broad, senior curator, Hymenoptera, Natural History Museum 
• Brian Catling, artist, London
  Dr Tim Cockerill, artist and zoologist, London
• Eleanor Crook, sculptor and medical artist, London 
• Subhadra Das, Curator, UCL Teaching and Research Collections (Biomedical and Galton)
• Tessa Farmer, artist, London 
• Will Fowler, curator of artists’ moving images, BFI, National Archives
• Christina Harrington, director of Treadwell’s Bookshop
• Mervyn Heard, professional lanternist, London
• James Kennaway, Durham University
• Dr Matt Lodder, art historian, London 
• Ross MacFarlane, Research Officer, Wellcome Library, London 
• Dr. Bill MacLehose, senior lecturer in History of Science and Medicine, UCL 
• Anna Maerker, Senior Lecturer, History of Medicine, King's College London
• Eleanor Morgan, artist, London 
• Dr. Pat Morris, former lecturer in Zoology and mammal ecologist 
• Prof Dr Dietmar Rübel, art historian, Art Academy Dresden
• Shannon Taggart, Photographer/independent researcher
• Professor Vanessa Toulmin, Director of the National Fairground Archive, The University of Sheffield
• John Troyer, Deputy Director, Centre for Death and Society, University of Bath
• Simon Werrett, Lecturer, Science and Technology Studies, UCL
• The Real Tuesday Weld 

While a selection of confirmed venues include:

• Old Operating Theatre 
• St Bart’s Pathology Museum 
• Apiary Studios 
• Swedenborg Hall 
• Grant Museum 
• The Horse Hospital

Stay tuned, as very soon we hope to release a full programme, plus ticketing details. For all this and more as it becomes available, please keep checking back here, or visit the Congress website by clicking here. And hope to see you at one or more of these terrific events!