back2back: Up Ya Archives x Rendezvous Projects:

Part of The Music is Black: A British Story at V&A East and headlined by Nia Archives, back2back: Up Ya Archives x Rendezvous Projects was a large-scale takeover of V&A East Museum and Storehouse exploring jungle music, pirate radio and East London’s DIY music infrastructures through archive, film, installation, workshops and live performance.

Curated for Up Ya Archives, the programme brought together foundational figures from East London jungle culture alongside contemporary artists, filmmakers, DJs, pirate radio broadcasters and community archivists across a day-long cross-site programme attended by nearly 8,500 visitors.

Katherine Green worked with Up Ya Archives and V&A East to shape the curatorial framework and programme narrative across both sites, bringing together archive material, oral histories, sound system culture, film and live performance within a major institutional context.

Talks across the programme explored jungle music through technology, pirate radio, representation and lived experience. DJ Warlock traced the roots of jungle through East London sound system culture and underground broadcasting, while Bizzy B, Dlux and Equinox broke down early jungle production methods using Commodore Amiga computers and OctaMED software. In the museum, a panel chaired by Julia Toppin brought together artists, DJs and researchers to discuss women’s voices and historical erasure within jungle culture.

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Film screenings across the programme explored jungle culture through pirate radio, rave, sampling and community history. The Why We Make Gallery hosted a continuous programme of documentaries including All Junglists: A London Somet’ing Dis (1994), Jungle Fever and What Makes Something Jungle?, while special screenings included Amen Brother with a Q&A featuring director DJ Proto J and DJ Dextrous, and HYPER: The Stevie Hyper D Story with the filmmakers and collaborators behind the project.

Felt Sound System’s youth-led project Each One Teach One (E1T1) transformed the museum entrance with two live sound systems built and activated by young people from East London, foregrounding sound system culture as a space for collective learning, participation and intergenerational exchange.

Alongside talks and screenings, visitors engaged directly with archive and music culture through Cassia Clarke’s pirate radio cassette workshop, Naz Hamdi’s talk on everyday archiving and Peter Collis’ immersive 360-degree documentary exploring the legacy of Forest Gate’s influential De Underground Records shop.

The day culminated in a back2back session featuring Nia Archives, DJ Flight, NAINA and Selecta Cee. Powered by towering stacks from Felt Sound System, the finale transformed the museum into a full-scale club environment rooted in the living culture of jungle music.

Local Frequencies

Curated by Rendezvous Projects, Local Frequencies unfolded across the museum’s transitional spaces, transforming corridors and circulation areas into informal archival encounters. Specially commissioned display structures by Inés Miño Izquierdo and Mon Cano drew on the visual language of crowd-control barriers and temporary infrastructure, reworking them into sculptural forms that invited visitors to pause and engage with material at eye level.

Spread throughout the building, the exhibition brought together pirate radio recordings, oral histories from the Rendezvous Projects archive, printed ephemera, archival footage and large-scale hand-painted rave banners from Stephen Puttock’s Bannerama collection. A takeover of the museum’s LED displays highlighted overlooked figures from East London’s jungle and rave scenes, while a recreation of Deja Vu FM connected the museum directly to the DIY broadcast infrastructures that shaped the sound of East London across multiple generations.

Photos by Ella Mitchell, Lua Amaro and Yamin Huseyin

Outcomes

  • Nearly 8,500 visitors engaged across a large-scale takeover of V&A East Museum and Storehouse
  • Connected foundational East London jungle figures with new and intergenerational audiences within a major museum context
  • Combined archive, oral history, installation, film, workshops and live performance into a single cross-site programme
  • Foregrounded overlooked voices, pirate radio culture and hyper-local East London music histories through community-led collaboration