Ordsall creativity celebrated at University of Salford event

An event celebrating the fantastic achievements accomplished by those involved in the University of Salford led ‘Ideas4Ordsall’ initiative was held at the University’s Old Fire Station on Saturday 12th September 2015.

  Here is the Ideas4Ordsall group celebrating at the event with Salford’s Ceremonial Mayor Cllr Peter Dobbs (centre).

Ideas4Ordsall, which supports the Ordsall community of Salford to develop cultural and creative activities, launched in January 2015 and the event was created to acknowledge its early success.

Local people from Ordsall and Islington were awarded certificates at the event by one of the Guests of Honour, Salford’s Ceremonial Mayor Cllr Peter Dobbs, which recognised their achievements in developing their ideas into community activities.

The University of Salford’s Pro-Vice Chancellor for Research and Enterprise, Professor Nigel Mellors and the City Mayor of Salford, Ian Stewart also made guest appearances. Mr Stewart gave a rousing speech which highlighted how the local people had worked creatively in their community to realise their ideas and ambitions.

The University of Salford’s Pro-Vice Chancellor for Research and Enterprise, Professor Nigel Mellors (left) and the City Mayor of Salford, Ian Stewart (right).

Local ideas range from Rosemary Swift’s idea for an Ordsall Social History play to Shannon Randall’s dog walking service, from Ronnie Crowther’s Ordsall Art Collective to David Winston’s research into WW1 nurse heroine, Edith Cavell.

Ideas4Ordsall is funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), and is led by Dr Jessica Symons and Dr Beth Perry from the University of Salford’s Sustainable Urban and Regional Futures (SURF)  group in the School of Built Environment (SoBE).

It is part of a four-year project on cultural intermediaries in the creative city with partners at the Universities of Birmingham, Birmingham City and City University.

Ideas4Ordsall has supported over 20 local residents to carry out community festivals, art collectives, bee hive installations, craft clubs and local history plays, to name but a few. The initiative takes local residents ideas and turns them into reality through the provision of much needed financial and practical support.

Named the ‘Ordsall Creatives’, residents have also received support from a range of local organisations including Let’s Go Global, Chapel Street Community Arts, Ordsall Community Arts and local Salford artist, Amber Sanchez.

Speaking at the event, Nigel Mellors, PVC Research and Enterprise at the University of Salford, said: “It was great to be able to welcome the Ordsall community onto the campus and celebrate their creativity.

Professor Nigel Mellors discussing the initiative with a member of the Ideas4Ordsall initiative.

“Ideas4Ordsall illustrates the high commitment to working with local people that the University wants to support.

“SoBE’s SURF team have done a fantastic job”

Dr Beth Perry, Director of UPRISE/Sustainable Urban and Regional Futures in SoBE, from the University of Salford, said: “There is so much energy and creativity in Ordsall that we wanted to give people a chance to develop their own ideas.

Salford’s Ceremonial Mayor Cllr Peter Dobbs (centre) and Dr Beth Perry, Director of UPRISE Research Centre looking at Ideas4Ordsall’s ideas.

“Local cultural organisations and artists have played a vital role in supporting residents to make their ideas happen.

“We wanted to have an event to celebrate all the wonderful people that have participated in this research.”

Research Fellow Dr Jess Symons spent time in Ordsall getting to know people and then developed ‘Ideas4Ordsall’ to give local people’s ideas a boost.

One of the ideas supported is the Ordsall Art Collective. Local resident Ronnie Crowther, a 44-year old father of two who works night-shifts at Sainsbury’s, brought the collective together. They have had a pop-up shop at the Lowry Outlet Mall and will be exhibiting at the Royal Exchange Theatre between 7-27 September 2015.

Ronnie said: “There is a lot of artistic talent in Ordsall that goes completely unnoticed and it was my idea to create a platform to get that talent recognised.

“The work of the Collective is of a very high standard and we wanted somewhere to say ‘we are here and look at what we can do’.

“These people should be making a proper living out of their work and hopefully this can help them take the next step.”

Laura Kendall is a local resident whose volunteering with Ordsall Community Arts has changed her life. Ideas4Ordsall supported Laura to work with Ordsall Community Arts and develop her idea of a community billboard. The billboard is now displayed on Ordsall Community Allotments to let local people know about all the activities taking part in the neighbourhood.

Laura said “With the right support I’ve learned how to cope in social situations, I have become so much stronger in myself and I am now very active in my community.

“There is so much going on in Ordsall but a huge majority of people just don’t know about it.

“I thought of having a noticeboard where I know it will be seen by so many people walking by to school, the shops, the doctors, and the dentist.”

A full list of creative activities undertaken as part of the project can be found on the Ideas4Ordsall website.

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Place, people and plants………….

Its been really satisfying going back to people who were involved in the Square Mile project over 5 years ago and finding out what impact that had on their lives. Square Mile worked with local people, local artists and environmental scientists to “map” their immediate neighbourhood through art – photography, storytelling, dance etc and to look at the people that lived their and their lives; the environment – bio diversity, waste etc and the cultural environment.  Five years on people had strong memories of the programme – what worked, the new relationships built and some of the challenges in doing this work.

The project took place in 6 cities in the UK and also in: Johannesburg; Delhi; Karachi; Dakar; Tehran; Toronto and all the projects were linked on line.  The ambition to have a global conversation was a bit ambitious as the technology, even six years ago, was not really up to it.

The key learning from reflection was that it is important to give time and listen to the natural rhythm to the work.  Not easy when their are funding cycles involved. That building trust is a slow and intense process; that people have remarkable solutions to problems and fresh approaches to local challenges if the time and circumstances are there to listen.

The report has been written as part of the cultural intermediaries project.

Summer’s over, but festival season is just starting!

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Art, Culture, Festivals, Manchester

As the new academic year begins here at University of Salford the grinding of gears can almost be heard on campus as green areas and buildings are being smartened up in anticipation of new and returning student cohorts.

I’ve just come back to the grey and rainy North from a weekend spent camping at End of the Road festival, which has been one of the last reliably sunny outdoor music festivals of the season for the last ten English summers, but to balance the sadness at the thought of no more nights under canvas until next summer, the season for urban indoor-based events is picking up. In fact, autumn looks set to be the festival highlight of the year!

Right now there’s a national month-long festival of independent and repertory cinema underway, thanks to the organisers of Scalarama, now in its fifth year and still growing.

This year independent screening groups, film clubs and cinema enthusiasts in a number of cities formed festival sub-hubs to collectively co-ordinate their programme contributions.

This has been a brilliant and (in Leeds) unprecedented way to bring a disparate group of film exhibitors with very different aims and practices around a table regularly to meet each other, start a dialogue and share knowledge. New partnerships and future plans have emerged from this process and as we look forward to Leeds International Film Festival in November, there is a sense that this year, when the festival closes, there will still be plenty going on in the city to sustain a truly independent film culture year-round.

I’ve contributed two documentary films to the Scalarama programme this year. On Wednesday 16th September there’s another screening of the 2013 documantary Manakamana to raise money to send to a Nepal rebuilding project. The documentary, directed by Stephanie Spray, Pacho Velez, was made in the Manakamana temple area by a group of ethnographic filmmakers who are part of the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard University. The work of this practice-as-research centre is characteristically immersive and this film is no exception: a 16mm camera was placed in a cable car that transports worshippers up and down a mountain to a remote temple. It is a journey that prior to the development of the cable car service took many days and the people caught in the intense gaze of the film reflect on this and other things during their journeys.

The film makers set up a crowd funding campaign earlier this year to send assistance to the village where they were based during filming after the terrible earthquakes and with the help of the film’s UK distributor Dogwoof, some colleagues and I have been able to screen this film several times this year to send the door money to the film’s participant community via that fund.

Then on Thursday 24^th September I’m joining in with a simultaneous screening across 6 UK venues with two films that look closely at protest, direct action and freedom of speech in the UK. One is a short documentary by Nick Broomfield about six Greenpeace protesters who in 2008 were tried and acquitted for shutting down Kingsnorth power station in the UK, the other is Franny Armstrong’s film McLibel which is rarely screened but is a remarkable story about two protestors who were charged with libel by McDonalds after leafletting outside one of their shops, with surprising consequences. 

This second film is also part of the #directedbywomen strand within Scalarama this year, drawing attention to the achievements of women in film, while women are still under-represented in most areas of film making practice.

The Radical Film Network have facilitated this second event and this group have been an important discovery during my PhD research that has helped me to put a critical frame of reference around a set cultural activities which I attempt to describe in my thesis as constitutive of a discursive public sphere. This is a lightweight, international network of film makers, exhibitors and academics which emerged from the Bristol Radical Film Festival (BRFF), it is the festival’s 4^th edition this year, with all screenings taking place at the Arnolfini in October.

The 2015 festival is formally very different to the last one.
Last year the BRFF festival organisers set up some of their political film screenings in community centres, taking their message to areas beyond city’s usual centre of cultural consumption. This year the festival celebrates the 40th anniversary of The First Festival of British Independent Cinema, a landmark event in the history of alternative film in Britain, which was organised by the filmmaker, writer, curator and dramatist, David Hopkins (1940-2004) at the Arnolfini. The 1975 festival screened overtly political film alongside avant-garde and experimental work on 35mm and super-8mm formats. In true radical film tradition, a speaker from the festival will be at the screening to lead the discussions afterwards.

Inspired by the work I have encountered in my research, I have been able to bring many events from the BRFF and other festivals to Leeds through my own events series and my connections with the Leeds International Film Festival (LIFF). This year there will be a programme exchange between LIFF and BRFF, they have suggested a rarely screened, collectively-made film from 1974 which puts into practice the tenets of feminist film theory, however the title can’t be revealed yet! The LIFF programme launch is on Light Night, Friday 9th October at Leeds Town Hall.

A film festival event in November that I can announce is a collaboration with Dr. Emily Zobel Marshall, a researcher at Leeds Beckett University. We have placed a film screening simultaneously in both LIFF and the national Being Human festival of the humanities, all Being Human events are between12 and 22 November 2015.

La Rue Cases-Nègres (Black Shack Alley) is the title of a book by well-known Martinican writer Joseph Zobel, the story was made into a film in 1983, directed by Euzhan Palcy. In the year of its release the film was awarded Silver Lion award at the 1983 Venice Film Festival and the director won a César Award for Best First Feature Film, making 25 year old Euzhan Palcy the first black female director of a Hollywood film.

The film transports viewers to 1930s Martinique, an island under French colonial rule, when poor rural black children can hope for little more than a life of back-breaking working in the sugar cane fields, working for the wealthy white béké, or boss. Young Jose escapes this fate and gains an education through the many sacrifices of his extraordinary Grandmother.

The film will be introduced by Joseph Zobel’s daughter, Jenny Zobel, and granddaughter, Emily Marshall, a researcher in literature and post-colonial studies who suggested the title to me.

The screening and its contextualisation through the introduction and discussion will hopefully start a conversation about colonialism, oppression, resistance and the importance of education. The Being Human festival is one of a number of festivals organised by universities which I’ve become aware of through my research that are committed to showing the strength of humanities research and teaching at a time when the study of humanities subjects is being politically undermined.

Manchester Metropolitan University’s Helen Malarky and Professor Berthold Schoene manage a ‘festival of the humanities’, held in Manchester, called Humanities in Public, which started in 2013 as a year-long public engagement initiative aiming to reach people with no experience of higher education but who may be interested in what higher education can offer. In this guest blog for the Being Human festival, they explain: “we didn’t want our public engagement efforts to be seen as a way of ‘saving’ the humanities. As far as we were concerned, the humanities did not need saving. They already had what it took.” They celebrate the work being done at MMU and want their staff to share it with the public.

The HiP festival is made up of themes, each of which involves a short series of events ranging from evening talks, exhibitions and interdisciplinary seminars to off-campus activities such as city walks or tours of buildings, pub quizzes and film screenings. The university has developed many new cultural partnerships through this festival and researchers at Faculty of Humanities, Languages and Social Science have produced vast amounts of original work. The faculty recently took on the former Cornerhouse facilities nearby, where some of the events will be happening and it all kicks off next month.

So with such a range of events I’m going to have plenty to keep me busy in the evenings, my days are now filled with writing writing writing as the three years of PhD are nearly up! I hope this post has given a flavour of the sorts of cultural events I’ve been studying and why they matter, now to make sense of everything I’ve encountered along the way.

Ideas4Ordsall

What an adventure we have had in Ordsall

The project is reaching a crescendo this month with a Celebration Event at the Old Fire Station in the University of Salford campus.

We are pleased to welcome the Pro-Vice Chancellor of Enterprise at the University of Salford, Professor Nigel Mellors together with the Civic Mayor of Salford, Ian Stewart and the Ceremonial Mayor of Salford, Councillor Pete Dobbs who also happens to be Councillor for the Ordsall Ward. The other councillors for Ordsall, Cllr Ray Mashita (who is Chair of Planning and Regulatory Panel at the council) and Cllr Tanya Birch are also going to be attending.

All these grand people are coming to applaud the hard work of the Ideas4Ordsall cohort – 20 local people who were supported by the Cultural Intermediation project to develop ideas that they have for the local area.  These ideas have ranged from beehives in the Ordsall Community Allotments to a Social History play at the Salford Lads Club, to photo/craft/bike workshops to the Islington Community Festival. We have learned about World War 1 nurse Edith Cavell, a war heroine who was shot by the Germans for helping wounded soldiers escape Belgium from one enthusiast who is now giving regular talks across the city region about this remarkable woman.

You can find out more about these great ideas on the Ideas4Ordsall website