Dear Stuart is a digital Zine that reinterprets the Stuart Hall Archive through practice-based creative research. It brings together a range of material interpretations of the archive such as mark-making, collage, sound as well as digital and analogue material. Created by seven Birmingham-based artists working in collaboration - Carla Busuttil, Gary Charles, Exodus Crooks, Jacques Groce (AKA Tony Bontana), Faisal Hussain, Piera Onacko and Cathy Wade - at the University of Birmingham over two workshops. 

The Zine sits alongside several other digital projects developed by the ‘Dialogues’ strand of the Stuart Hall Archive Project. It is offered as an alternative learning resource where DIY and improvisational creative techniques inform the character of the work.

Workshops for the Dear Stuart project were short in duration (two 3 hour sessions); it was important that the invited artists hold an interest in Hall’s work, and that they were based in Birmingham, entangling the city and the region in their work. In the lead up to the workshops each artist chose a box from the archive to engage with on the day. During the workshop, the artists spent the first hour in the Archive with their chosen resources, after which they dived straight into making, playing and creating. Artists were also asked to bring objects to the workshops from their own personal archive and / or any instrument or creative material for inspiration, once again entangling their own history and biography with the work in the archive. The work made during these two sessions is recorded and assembled together in this digital Zine.

-Carla Busuttil, artist and educator