Stories of the world
Lighting the cauldron conference highlights
Podcast transcript:
This podcast is produced by Arts Council England. For more content like this, visit
artscouncil.org.uk or soundcloud.com/artscouncilengland.
Moira Sinclair:
Good morning everyone, my name’s Moira Sinclair and I work at the Arts Council. It’s
been an unprecedented year for showcasing the best of culture. As principal funders of
the cultural Olympiad we’ve been incredibly pleased and proud with the creativity
shown, the wonderful collective moments, the participation of millions of people in
cultural activity across the country. It’s a foundation on which we can really build, and
I’m not sure that when we started this back in 2005 we had any inkling of quite what a
year of explosive activity it was going to be.
Stories of the world was one of the projects that the MLA and Arts Council have been
involved in right from the beginning. It embodied from the outset London 2012’s
commitment to place young people at the heart of all activity, to inspire a generation and
leave a legacy. Stories of the world was the largest youth engagement programme ever
undertaken by museums. For the last four years, young people and professionals in
museums up and down the country have worked together. They’ve worked incredibly
hard, to use the country’s rich collections to tell inspirational stories about the UK’s
relationships with the world.
Esther Amis-Hughes
My name’s Esther. We were asked to talk about the integration of collections in
outreach, so I’m here to launch a new word. The legacy of our project is this new word
here, ‘colleducation’. Colleducation is the accidental and entirely unintentional marrying
of ‘collections’ and ‘education’.
One thing we tried to do was allow the people that we worked with to choose the
collections that they wanted to work with. It was complicated; it was worth doing. It was
those things that all the way through my career I’ve thought ‘Shall I-? Oh no, actually I
won’t do that, because that’s going to be a complete nightmare.’ Because we didn’t
have those barriers. The people we worked with weren’t aware of things that were going
to be and were not going to be a nightmare.
Colleducation’s first baby was ‘Mock the Gorilla’; we found that we could use this object
in loads of ways. The first thing we did was we worked with two graffiti artists, Jake and
Nick, who were fantastic. We said ‘Jake and Nick, we’ve got this story ‘Mock the
Gorilla’, what shall we do?’ They were like ‘Er, make a massive box for him to travel
around Leeds in and decorate it.’ We said ‘Okay, yes, we’ll build a box,’ and we worked
with some vulnerable young women who were taught graffiti skills and were taught
about Mock, and then they decorated the box. People could really engage with Mock.
We had a bit of a campaign ‘Where’s Mock?’ ‘Is he at the museum? Is he around
Leeds?’ You could tweet. For me, what this illustrated was we could use one object to
tell people about our collection. Not about some vague notion of knowledge. Not about
gorillas, not that they exist somewhere in the world, but about our collection. This was
the first time I thought ‘actually this could really work. This is really engaging with an
object and working out what it’s all about, and letting other people interpret it.’
Vanessa Trevelyan:
In Norfolk we wanted the Stories of the world programme to help change the way in
which we work with young people; changing them from consumers to co-producers. We
have a range of programmes involving young people; we work with vulnerable young
people including looked after children and young adults with disabilities. We work with
existing agencies to broker introductions to young people such as the Looked After
Children’s team in Norfolk County Council.
We run a lively programme of filmmaking animations for young people. Several of our
films are currently on show in the castle and there are always visitors watching the
animations that reinterpret different aspects of the collection. We’ve created several
geographically based youth forums now for 16 to 24 year-olds. These have been
involved in devising and delivering public programmes.
We know that cultural experiences can have beneficial effects and experience has
shown that young people can gain an immense amount of confidence from participating
in our programmes.
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Moira Sinclair:
Across the country, museums also experimented with establishing young people’s
panels to help inform their planning and decision-making. The success of panels has
been really extraordinary and has changed museum practice. The evidence for that is
that many of those will continue permanently.
Lucie Fitton:
Hi everybody, good morning, my name’s Lucie Fitton and I work here at the Museum of
London. I’ve had the pleasure of working on the Stories of the world project for the last
three years, and it’s been the largest long-term participation project that we’ve done with
young people. The work has culminated in a large exhibition called ‘Our Londinium
2012’, which comprises of a series of creative audio-visual and object installations that
are in and around our existing permanent Roman London gallery.
However, it was the process of creating the exhibition which has had the greatest
impact on us at the museum here. The exhibition drove every element of the project,
and it involved a huge team of people from all over the museum, from every single
department. Every single staff member gained new skills and new ways of working. Not
only was the project an amazing opportunity for the young people involved to gain lots
of new skills and experiences, it was also a massive learning opportunity for us at the
museum.
From being part of this project we’ve really recognised that collaborating with young
people is vital for us as a museum, to not only bring creativity and new perspectives to
what we do, but to reflect and improve on our working practices, to inform our collecting
and interpretation of contemporary London and also highlight the amazing potential that
museums have to play a social role in the world around us.
I think, for me, the greatest legacy of the project is our youth panel called Junction. We
set up Junction right at the beginning of the project, and it’s really grown from strength
to strength. I think having this long-term panel of young people work on the project with
us has been vital to ensure that the impact and learning from the project is not shortterm. Junction continues to run today and will continue to run into the future. It’s
something we’re committed to doing here at the Museum of London.
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Moira Sinclair:
This collaborative approach to working put young people at the heart of the creative and
decision-making process, helping them to develop new skills and experience and
knowledge. It also helped build new audiences and stronger relationships with
communities both here and abroad. It gave us a deeper understanding of our rich
heritage.
Karen Perkins:
It started with an inspiration that came from our collections. Luton is known for its
history, for its vehicle collection, for Vauxhall, and Bedford trucks historically shipped out
to the Far East, to India, Bangladesh and Pakistan. Our connection with Pakistan has
been something we’ve always wanted to explore.
Now, Luton is a diverse community, it has a large percentage of people from the
Pakistani community. We wanted to build on that, and we thought this Truck Art project
would be a great way to do it.
The aim of the project was really to get young people involved in building that
relationship between the two connections, between the two countries, between Luton
and Pakistan, or Luton and Lahore, as it became. The connections between our
heritage in Luton and their Pakistani heritage.
The key bit of the project was to actually create our own youth group. This was our
recreated group. The idea of the youth group was to really immerse them in the heritage
of Pakistan and Luton, establish a partnership, a long-term relationship with Pakistan
that we didn’t have before, and really try and create an inspirational project out of it.
Katherine Pritchard:
What were some of your biggest difficulties that you had to face, and what did you do to
address them?
Lucie Fitton:
It was quite difficult for us to marry the really strong collaborative element of the Stories
of the world project with things like the design process. That caused a lot of sticking
points.
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Audience member:
The difficulties which were all overcome were really logistical difficulties in actually
getting the programme out there into the galleries. I think that’s always the other side of
creativity is that you have to make sure that the infrastructures are there to support it.
Otherwise it’s just a big mess and all the participation in the world won’t make it
successful.
Karen Perkins:
The real challenge for us was changing the way that staff within the museum perceive
the control of things. Like exhibitions and their collections. Staff are slowly changing and
slowly building their confidence that actually it’s okay to let go. I think there’s a real
culture shift that has to happen in organisations if we’re ever going to get co-production
and co-creation really working well.
Piotr Bienkowski:
The ones where you pursue things that you’re not quite sure where it’s going to go are
the ones that work. It seems to me that we’ve got the seed of that here.
Esther Amis-Hughes:
I think the group now feel that they own a part of the museum. To me that is in itself
participation. They feel that they also want to change other parts of the museum. What
they do want to do is look at the other things in the museum that aren’t working so well
and see what they can do to make them work.
Stephanie Webb:
I use the phrase ‘ownership of the process’ all the time when people are asking me. I do
feel like it’s for now our gallery. A lot of the younger ones are not from a museum
background, they don’t have aspirations in museums, but they keep coming and you
can see their enthusiasm as well. That’s because they did it, it was their work and their
practical effort.
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Esther Amis-Hughes:
I think by doing lots of projects like this we will over time see that more young people
come and visit our museums and get involved in our museums.
Karen Perkins:
The Truck Art project was very much about trying to increase the representation in our
visitors of diverse communities. It definitely did that. That’s our real challenge is how we
can continue to capture who those audiences are and what reasons they came to that
display, and try and get them to come to the permanent galleries.
The process, the output of the evaluation we’ve done so far, we’re gathering all of that
information together and it is directly feeding and informing our future plans for the
whole service in terms of co-production. It’s real evidence that shows how co-curated or
community curated projects can actually reach new audiences, reach different
audiences, hard-to-reach audiences. As I’ve just said, they’re the ones we want to get
coming back to the permanent galleries, not just the temporary exhibitions.
Holli McGuire:
At its best, work with young people is integrated across an organisation, it’s intrinsic to
its culture, its strategy and its day to day ways of working. At worst it’s an outreach
programme that no-one else in the organisation really knows that much about. Is it
about meeting an SLA requirement or being able to tick a box on a funding application?
Is it about fulfilling its charitable objectives?
My argument is that if the cultural sector is to truly engage young people then it needs
to perhaps rethink how it does that, for the benefit of the young people and crucially the
benefit of the organisation itself and the wider sector. We’re all aware of and celebrate
the value of cultural learning for young people’s development, but let’s consider the
value of a more embedded model.
Piotr Bienkowski:
Real participation is vulnerable and rare, both because the activities and the posts
delivering them are project-funded and liable to be cut, and because they’re not
necessarily seen as part of the core work of the organisation and part of everyone’s
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role. To truly embed participation you have to embed it in every part of the organisation.
It reaches deep into the heart of everything you do, and affects every member of staff.
It means re-evaluating values, behaviours, decision-making and governance,
communication, policies, the skills of staff. The creation and sustainability of a truly
participatory museum, or any other cultural organisation will not work unless there is
clear buy-in and championing from the top, so that everyone inside and outside the
organisation knows that this is what the organisation does and stands for. It becomes
part of the DNA of the organisation and all who work in it.
Moira Sinclair:
This has required learning from all the partners. All credit to the directors, the heads of
service and other museum professionals who were willing to take a risk in giving up
control and allowing young people to take the reins. One person said ‘This is one of the
few projects that everybody I’ve talked to says it’s a great project.’ I think there’s
something very powerful about the methodology that was used in this programme.
The starting point was always listening to young people. Arts Council England would
like to see this collaborative audience-based, audience-focused approach being
adopted by more museums and by the wider cultural sector.
The starting point for developing new initiatives in the future will be to learn from the
Stories of the world programme. I hope that we will continue to open up to new ideas
and ways of collaborating with communities and young people that we may previously
not have considered. I think there are some exciting ideas in this room that we’re going
to take forward.
This podcast is produced by Arts Council England. For more content like this, visit
artscouncil.org.uk or soundcloud.com/artscouncilengland.
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