Supporting documents for Black2hastings
BLACK2HASTINGS PROGRAMME OF ACTIVITIES
Freedom Bus
2 Trips to cultural institutions- TBD with community
Freedom Buses began in the 1960s as a peaceful protest to highlight the inequalities that Black and People of Colour faced in America and England. Today Afri-Co-Lab invites Black and People of Colour from St Leonards, Rother & Hastings to come with their friends and families to take a ride on the BLACK 2 HASTINGS Freedom Bus.
We meet in the mornings at a central location in St Leonards, where a coach will take the community to our destination cultural institution, pilots have seen us visit Fashion Africa at the V&A, Sonya Boyce at The Turner Contemporary and The Turner Prize at The Towner Gallery. Community members are given a creative pack- with activities they can do on the coach or throughout the day. Traveling by coach encourages folks to chat and get to know each other on the trip, there are snacks provided for the journey and plenty of comfort breaks. We work with the Institution to provide care and and deeply held experience for our group. They have a space within the institution which works as base for the day. Workshops and activities are curated to link to the institution and the exhibition/work we are seeing. The group are also met by a senior creative from the Institution or connected to work to give in-depth and behind the scenes information to the work.
A collective picnic is shared and the community are encouraged to bring food to share if possible, however Afri-Co-Lab always brings enough for everyone covering all dietary needs. Then there is free or curated guides to the work or exhibition we are visiting. There is also time to explore the local area- weather dependent. Then we travel back home on the bus together- allowing space and time for reflections, processing and a communal sharing of the work.
Shop Front Gallery
4 Artists take over the shop front turning it into a 24 hour community street gallery.
Through an open callout, 4 local artists will be selected to exhibit a piece of work in our shopfront window for 4-6 weeks, with the opportunity to sell work with low commission costs. We will support the artist with a fee and installation support with the work being able to be seen 24 hours a day on a busy seafront walking route.
We Piloted this project over 2021-2022 with local artists, and artist received sales, commissions and further exhibiting opportunities.
Network Nights
7 events taking place at Afri-Co-Lab, Eggtooth, The Towner, Stelladore, Hastings Museum and Art Gallery
Taking place at Afri-Co-Lab and other local arts galleries and community spaces. We will collate a cohort of 7 artists from an open call to show and present an already created work or a work in progress. It will be a chance for the artist to present their practice, speak about their work and also network with their peers and other arts professionals. It will be a paid opportunity and also an opportunity for the wider community to meet and discover local BPoC artists and creatives.
What Sarah Read Next - Literary Events
5 events taking place at Afri-Co-Lab with Black and People of Colour Writers
Sarah Gwonyoma from @WhatSarahReadNext will be invited to curate a series of author talks. Inviting BPoB authors from across the country to share their latest work and their journey as authors. These conversations will be lead by Sarah and then opened out to the room to create space for community conversations about the themes within the work and how they affect the lives within our community. In our piloting & creating of this offer we have spoke with Claire Ratinon, Claire Amuah, Kate Sawyer and Uju Asika.
Pop-Up Artist Shop
To take place over Easter & Summer busy periods.
Taking advantage of our location and the increased footfall over the Easter holidays and Summer months, we will set up an artist pop-up shop. Through an open call and working with artists, crafters and creatives we have supported in our first years we will support this group to create a dynamic Pop-up shop for them to sell their products and creations. This will also allow locals and visitors sample the creative talents of locals- often only found selling online. It is a chance for makers to see the reactions to their products, test our new ideas, find new audiences and also create an independent and diverse shopping experience, whilst supporting local economy and building on the offer of St Leonards being a creative and hip destination.
Artist In Residency
1 artist in residence over 2 weeks.
Through an open call we will choose an artists to be in residence in the Afri-Co-Lab space, offering a fee of £500 plus a materials budget of £200. There will be no finished output required but one public facing event where the artist can present ideas, or talk the community about their practice or what they have been working on. What this is will be determined by the artist. They will have full access to the space and its resources, plus mentoring support form the lead artists.
Community Advisory Group
6 monthly sessions & 3 explorative day trips
We have always been in conversation with the community, but through the open recruitment of an advisory group we will host 6 dinner sessions, where over food we will create an agenda based on questions around racial diversity, representation, artistic offers for professionals, access for the community and participation within the arts ecology of our town. Through the 3 explorative trips we will build on relationships with organisations and community groups in Eastbourne, Folkestone & Margate where BPoC creatives are organising and creating community through arts and creativity- as a place to exchange and build relationships for future collaborations and sharing or resources.
afri-co-lab
Afri-Co-Lab Is a community dreaming space.
We seek to provide space for artists and community to co-create, dream experiment and gather. We are a multidisciplinary space working through and across all mediums.
We're an inclusive space founded on anti-racist, community-led principles. We deeply understand the complexity of poverty, racism, and displaced trauma. We also understand and have experienced the power that community and creativity can have in overcoming obstacles.This is the why at the heart of everything Afri-Co-Lab does!
What our community says...
co-lead artist: Lilly Babirye
Lillian Babirye, Afri-Co-Lab Co-Artistic Director is a creative artist with a focus on textiles, fashion, storytelling and interactive educational experiences. Co-directing two organisations, Lilly also leads a public engagement team at the Science Museum, creating youth-focused careers events and programmes and curating out-of-hours events such as Lates and Astronights. Co-founder and co-creative director of AfroRetro Lilly heads this company alongside Anna Maria Nabirye Manyhisa, creating ethical and upcycled garments, accessories and homewares inspired by the culture found between her Ugandan and British identity. Building on the work participation of AFRORETRO, Lilly co-founded and co-leads Afri-Co-Lab. This community interest organisation has taken on the social practice, creatiive participation and story-telling work. Lilly studied fine arts and then moved into Fashion, graduating from Westminster University. Through Lilly’s 17 years of public engagement, Lilly has devised, coordinated, and produced public engagement projects that bring communities together in creative and engaging events. Lilly has collaborated with Black Cultural Archives, Victoria and Albert Museum, Brighton Museum, De La Warr Pavilion, Hastings Contemporary, South Bank Centre, Barnet primary Schools, Fab Lab, Pop Brixton, Pupil referral units and many more cultural and community groups.
co-lead artist: aNNa maria Nabirye
Outside Anna Maria's work with Afri-Co-Lab she is an initiates, produces and delievers work across theatre, film, visual arts, social practice and community gatherings.
Social Practice is at the core of the work that Anna Maria creates independently and through multiple collaborations. Her most recent work Up In Arms is made in collaboration with multidisciplinary artist Annie Saunders, it is an Artsadmin project and was commissioned by the De La Warr Pavilion. This work
Other collaborations include work with Jess Mabel Jones under the name Motherhoody. They have created inter-experiential workshops around motherhood commissioned by The Albany Theatre & Canada Water Library. One Prick At A Time was an experimental documentary centring the voices of those with lived experience of Gestational Diabetes for King's College London. This production won an engagement and participation award. Motherhoody is currently working with Rivelinco in developing a project for unlikely hikers working with learning disabled adults and members of the elder Black and PoC community.
Anna Maria has coached actors, directed productions for LAMDA and Mountview Academy and created performance workshops for non performers for Afri-Co-Lab, London Philharmonic Orchestra, Half-moon YPT and many other organisations.
Anna Maria and Darragh worked closely on the pilot production of When The Day Met The Night And The Night Met The Day as well as through various other projects within Afri-Co-Lab.
work samples
The Funnest Room In The House - Afterword.Whitstable Biennale 2022
One Prick At A Time: Motherhoody for Kings College London
Up In Arms
The Funnest Room In The House - Afterword.Whitstable Biennale 2022
This sound piece was made in response to the fire that destroyed my installation piece. It speaks to the work I was making and also explores the community participant responses that was at the core of the work.
Taking inspiration from the kitchens of Anna-Maria’s childhood and those of her diaspora peers, The Funnest Room in the House invites visitors to travel through time and space to explore a Black British kitchen collected from many pasts. These intimate spaces were individual to each family’s life but were also a performance of collective culture, containing expressions of ancestral homelands and nostalgia for back home, mashed up with British culture.This slice of social history is quietly disappearing, for the most part unrecorded, with kitchen renovations filling skips around the country and links to homelands feeling further and further away as elders pass on to become ancestors. The Funnest Room in the House joyfully brings these kitchens into the spotlight, with playful interventions that track the changing roles that have always taken residence in the kitchen from the 1980s to during the lockdowns of the last two years. If visitors linger and make themselves at home, the kitchen will reveal surprises that give space for celebration, joy and healing through nourishment, dance and movement.
One Prick At A Time Motherhoody
An experimental documentary made during the lockdown amplifying the voices and experiences of folks who have experienced Gestational Diabetes.
Up In Arms: Anna Maria Nabirye an Annie Saunders
Up In Arms De La Warr Pavilion presents a major new multimedia commission by artists Anna Maria Nabirye and Annie Saunders, exploring friendship, anti-racism and feminism. Removing the boundaries between process and outcome, artists Anna Maria Nabirye and Annie Saunders bring together social practice, visual art and performance in their interdisciplinary project, Up in Arms, to create meaningful dialogue amidst the complexity of interracial friendships.
Up In Arms is an ongoing collaboration initiated by Nabirye and Saunders in 2016. In each new context the artists start with a series of sessions in which they extend an invitation to Black women to bring a friend of a different race and together re-create and re-embody the iconic 1971 portrait of activists and friends Dorothy Pitman-Hughes and Gloria Steinem. This process becomes a ritual that opens up the space for transformative conversations around female friendship, feminism and anti-racism. As part of their latest iteration of Up in Arms, commissioned by De La Warr Pavilion, Nabirye and Saunders have invited Black women with a friend of their choice from across the local area – Bexhill, Hastings, and St. Leonards – to participate. The resulting documentation will be incorporated into an expansive exhibition comprising photography, film and archival material in DLWP’s First floor gallery, and will be the most ambitious presentation of the project to date.
The Rooftop Foyer space will be transformed into a space for gathering, where visitors can engage in conversation, reflection and explore further reading and audio materials.