HAFA - Healing Arts For All, Community arts by ZK major project - ON NOW

 

Healing Arts for All (HAFA) is a 3-year long innovative people-powered heritage and arts project. It will follow a creative investigation into Pendle’s heritage and its place in the textile industry, with a key focus on Brierfield Mill, and the ideas, voices, stories, and identity of the South Asian community that moved to the area to work there.

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Brierfield Mill, now a newly renovated business centre (Northlight Estates) where CAZK are based, is an iconic grade II listed former cotton mill built in 1832. Our community is fascinated by the heritage of the mill as their families worked there; indeed, many of Pendle’s residents are firmly rooted in the mill’s industrial soil. We will be exploring how far the next generation has come. Collaborating with creative practitioners, archivists, historians, and local cultural institutions, this project aims to revive this heritage: collecting oral histories and artefacts; undertaking research trips; and combining all of this in creative workshops.

 

Learning about heritage can evoke deep personal responses and emotional connection to places, allowing our community to ‘heal’. We will use high-quality, innovative art as a vehicle to respond to this heritage, and the socio-economic circumstances that have shaped the nature of Pendle today: to excite, inspire, and engage a wider audience with heritage. We will have a new creative practitioner for each 12 week phase of the project, providing participants with training in a new technique or skill to explore the heritage.

 

By using different mediums to tell the heritage stories that the participants will be uncovering, we will be broadening the reach of the project, engaging audiences that might otherwise not engage with heritage, particularly ethnic minorities - for example creating public sculpture that people do not have to go out of their way to engage with, or creating a digital AR app that will engage a younger audience. Participants will gain a thorough understanding of working within heritage: they will be introduced to a wide range of topics, given professional-level oral history collection and archiving skills, and will ultimately design and undertake their own research proposals.

 

Participants will use materials that are significant to the heritage of our community, drawing upon culture and tradition: striving to make each final piece a meaningful, unique and authentic representation of the history of Pendle, made by the hands of the people who live here. This project will be displayed

in a prestigious final exhibition using the stories and words of our South Asian community in contemporary artworks or installations. A primary output

will be a fresh and contemporary online archive of heritage resources, with some outputs also held by Lancashire Archives and North West Film Archives for all to access. This will be diverse and eclectic in terms of creative techniques and presentation, and thus will engage more people in heritage. It will contain, for example, high-quality portraits of members of our community from multiple generations, sound records, historical artefacts etc. It will create a legacy that will inspire future generations.

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Landing page coming soon....