Alongside the young photographers, Storyhouse and writer Lekhani Chirwa worked with community groups and primary school children to create a Manifesto for Freedom based on the experiences, hopes, and ideas of Winsford residents. Art in the Place turned the manifesto into two banners which now welcome people to Winsford library as a legacy of the project.
TD: Freedom is often taken for granted and something that people don’t think about very often. How did the young people initially respond to the theme and what were their thoughts?
LL: When discussing the title of our exhibition ‘Our Freedom, Our Future’, the group talked about freedom to exist, freedom to be yourself, freedom of expression, freedom of speech. To have the option, opportunity, or access to the things that they may need or want. We photographed some of the key landmarks in Winsford such as the Library, the Market and the Leisure Centre, taking note of what Winsford has and doesn’t have to offer young people.
TD: How did you find working with the young people and did your idea of freedom change as a result of the project?
LL: In my role as Children & Young People Programme Manager at Storyhouse, I work with a range of young people on a regular basis. I sense an undercurrent of anxiety and dread from young people in regard to war and the conflicts that are happening in the world. Unlike previous generations, most young people have access to a smart phone or the internet, exposing them to a live stream of information-and misinformation-at an overwhelming pace and quantity that no one could be expected to fully process. I think this makes it difficult to decipher the truth amidst all the noise, making it easier to disengage.
I overheard a conversation between two young people on a bus the other day, they were scrolling on their phones, one of them showed their screen to the other and said ‘apparently Russia is going to bomb the UK’ to which the other responded ‘yeah, we’re cooked’. They paused for a second before returning to their scrolling. As an adult, I feel a responsibility to offer some reassurance, but I can’t help but think that this isn’t how freedom should feel.
TD: What were the biggest challenges you faced working with the young people?
LL: As an organisation based in Chester city centre, when we are working with young people in Winsford we don’t have access to the resources in the building that we would usually have like the library, cinema, theatre and so on. However, we were pleased to partner with New Images Youth Centre in Winsford, which is a fantastic venue for children and young people in the area with amazing facilities like meeting rooms, sports halls, a café and computer room.
Although Winsford is in Cheshire West, it is the furthest point in the region from Chester with limited and indirect transport links, making Storyhouse inaccessible for most residents without a car. Thanks to Our Freedom, we were able to reimburse travel costs for the young people to visit Storyhouse to see their exhibition. We combined this with free tickets to our pantomime so that the young people and their families could experience more of what Storyhouse has to offer.
TD: How did you go about selecting and editing the work for the exhibition at the library?
LL: We worked with Morven Currie, an experienced facilitator and one of the Creatives responsible for the exhibition space for Shakespeare North Playhouse. Morven collected all the photos that had been taken throughout the process and presented them to the young people to shortlist.
The shortlisting process was challenging because the group were required to be critical about the photos they had worked so hard to capture days before. However, Morven highlighted the importance of a well curated exhibition in order to tell the story, even when the artists aren’t present to explain it. The young people decided to caption each photograph with a line from Simon Armitage’s poem ‘Freedom Road’ and decided to hang the photos in order of the poem so that viewers could experience them chronologically.
