Our new project will be called #MappingUs and it will be a collaboration between Brunel University London and In Our Hands @InOurHands_.

We are producing this series of workshops as an opportunity to offer the space to six young artists from Becton, Poplar, Elephant and Castle, Brixton, and Landbroke Grove to elaborate on what it means to create new maps for our ends through film, photography, and zines.

These workshops aim to explore how specific communities use the media, film and creativity to challenge exclusion. The following questions will be the focus of the three workshops that structure this series:

1. What are the historical lessons learnt from past screen-based ‘interruptions’, specifically those led by Black and Asian film practitioners in the UK?
2. What are the screen-based creative and artistic strategies that the UK’s Black and Asian communities have employed to resist structures of racialised power they consider oppressive?
3. What kinds of narratives do people tell to stand for or against the ongoing racialised processes that generate disconnection, division, and exclusion in the UK?

[Sameer Qureshi ArtByResistant]

The first workshop took place in the MayDay Rooms on Sunday 17th where each young person was given a disposable camera and took photos of their ‘home’/community. We developed and spread those photographs around the room and then discussed their representations and meanings. This session also investigated media reporting and stereotypes of “truth”, “history”, and “art”, whilst also reflecting on the business of advertising and media representations and why these narratives exist.

The rest of the programme will develop on this and focus on creating alternative narratives around our neighbourhoods from youth perspectives. Through this first part of the workshop we aim to examine the local and global dynamics that rupture, alienate, and marginalise as well as the creative tools used by communities to cope with such processes of disconnection that result from being disenfranchised through media representations and power structures in our society.