Meet Electric Piers Open House 2023 Guest Curators

ELECTRIC PIERS

The Open House Festival team are delighted to announce that Tola Dabiri and Cheryl Bowen of Electric Piers will be joining us as Guest Curators for this years festival. The Guest Curators are selected Londoners who hail from diverse backgrounds within the built environment and their curated festival collections and events will explore various themes and narratives from within their own practice and experiences of architecture and the built environment. Below we introduce you to Electric Piers and a sneak peak into what their collection will be exploring ahead of the festival programme.

Tola Dabiri

Dr Tola Dabiri  is the Director of Electric CIC. Tola has worked across the cultural sector for almost 30 years,  beginning her career in public libraries and archives.  

Tola has worked at the Museums Libraries and Archives Council and The National Archives, and the UK Centre for Carnival Arts. As a she has developed and managed a number of successful projects including Carnival in a Box, Fundraising for Archives for The National Archives, and UKCCA’s HLF funded Carnival Archive Project.

Tola was awarded a PhD from Leeds Beckett University, for her research looking at orality and the intangible cultural heritage of British Caribbean Carnival.  

Cheryl Bowen

Cheryl Bowen has an educational background in Cultural Management, history of art and design, Museums studies and art education.

Cheryl has previously worked in East and South London for eighteen years in culture and heritage sector, her interests are in African Diasporic heritage and cultural communities in the UK, art education and cultural capital in South Yorkshire.

Their Collection:

Electric Piers is commemorating 75th anniversary of the arrival of the  Empire Windrush with passengers from across the Caribbean at Tilbury Docks on June 22nd 1948. For our collection, we have been inspired by creative and public spaces which tell the story of Windrush legacies and the modern migration of people from global south to London.  We have decided to explore a small selection of  the buildings and spaces in London which have been inspired, developed and sustained through activism and determination  of people from the Africa and the Caribbean. These spaces are for the exploration of cultural identity, truth and knowledge for these diaspora communities, which after 75 years are thriving and here to stay.