Through The Round Window

Robin Deacon presents ‘Through the Round Window’, one of a series of monologues by the artist exploring his haunted memories of 1970’s and 1980’s televisual culture. In this episode, Robin turns his attention to questions of education and representation. Using storytelling and sampled footage, he pieces together half remembered recollections of presenter Floella Benjamin on the children’s TV show, Play School.  

Questioning the reliability of his own memories, Robin charts his journey as a child learning from a television screen to his adult experiences as a lecturer and a professor, to examine the relationship between education and representation. Is the reflection of one’s identity (on a screen or in a classroom) a prerequisite for identification? Is there a tension between the desire to be part of a collective and the sense of oneself as an individual?  

When does representation matter, and when might it not?