Youth Landscapers Collective is a youth arts organisation based in the National Forest area of England. We’re a collective of young people, artists and technicians who collaborate with our local community to explore this landscape’s industrial past and forest future.

In this episode we want to give you a sense of how we work together. YLC member Kris Kirkwood has built a sound narrative of our 2024 song-making project, using audio recordings from our sessions - from the seeds of our ideas through to performance. Here’s a bit of context about the project, to help set the scene:

In 2023, YLC created The Stage of Possibility – a vibrant, democratic space designed, built and curated by YLC to showcase stories and voices from the National Forest at Timber Festival. The project connected us back to the creative and resourceful communities that grew from the former coalpits and pipe works of this area. 

In 2024 we wanted to strengthen that connection and also perform together on the stage too! We created a set of locally inspired songs, in a project we called: WAYANNAEYINANYONNIT  (A Big Story).

Working with artists Rebecca Lee and Jessica Harby and our community we sought out the hidden stories of our local area, finding them in discussions with former mining engineer, pipe worker, and co-founder of Moira Replan Graham Knight, research visits to Moira Furnace Museum and The Magic Attic Community Archive, and sharing our own personal experiences. 

From Graham we learned stories of injustices small and large in the mine - the disappearance of cakes sent down for overtime workers and the tragic death of a young co-worker in an accident. From Clyde at Magic Attic we learnt local dialect and the definition and pronunciation of our title: WAYANNAEYINANYONNIT. 

More than anything we responded with heart to what it must have felt like to take part in each of these stories and what it's like to be living here today, many of our houses built over the unfilled mining tunnels.

The songs we made and performed share our experience of the National Forest, as the past, present and future overlap, canaries sing, children climb on the lime kilns, new words are shouted, and we make sure we're all alright.

How we work together

The General Election of June 2017, and the massive Labour surge under Jeremy Corbyn's socialist leadership, has provided a new sense of optimism for those hoping for an end to utilitarian approaches to culture and swingeing cuts to arts funding. This month, Juliet talks to Loraine Leeson, Hassan Mahamdallie and Hilary Wainwright about the concept of cultural democracy, the recent The World Transformed conference and the Arts for Labour initiative. What are Jeremy Corbyn's arts policies, and how are they informed by the anti-austerity movement? What has been learned from the Greater London Council's arts programmes of the 1980s, or the Attlee government's cultural policies? How did writers and thinkers such as William Morris, E.P. Thompson and Raymond Williams establish a long British tradition of 'cultural democracy', and what can we take from them in the 21st century?

WORKS REFERENCED:

Campaign to save The Cinema Museum: www.cinemamuseum.org.uk

'A Creative Future for All' - https://www.policyforum.labour.org.uk/news/a-creative-future-for-all
The Great Exhibition of the North - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-tyne-43324069

The Gay Sweatshop Theatre Company - http://www.unfinishedhistories.com/history/companies/gay-sweatshop/
LORAINE LEESON, Art : Process : Change (2017) - https://www.routledge.com/Art--Process--Change-Inside-a-Socially-Situated-Practice/Leeson/p/book/9781138670631
KEN LOACH, The Spirit of '45 (2017) - http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/reviews-recommendations/film-week-spirit-45
HASSAN MAHAMDALLIE on William Morris - https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/isj2/1996/isj2-071/mahamdallie.htm
WILLIAM MORRIS, News from Nowhere (1890) - https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/from-the-archive-blog/2011/may/17/guardian190-william-morris-news-from-nowhere
HILARY WAINWRIGHT, A New Politics from the Left (2017) - https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/persuasive-points-on-new-politics-from-the-left

Cultural Democracy

Episode 1 of of the first series of Meanwhile In An Abandoned Warehouse, a discussion about cultural democracy in theory and practice. All the episodes with additional commentary and linked references at http://miaaw.net

Meanwhile in an Abandoned Warehouse - series 1

Cultural Democracy in Practice

An interpretation of urban decay. Mix of field recordings, voice, synthesis, narrative soundscapes and elements of pop.

How we work together

miaaw.net

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