The Summer Feast- Let’s talk about heritage!

What a glorious day. We couldn’t have wished for more: sunshine, delicious burgers, amazing new people to meet, rounders on the grass, and a chance to talk about what heritage means to us!

Activities included:

1-      Project Mazi Activities: gathering ideas for Mazi recipe boxes, paper with post-it responses exploring questions around ‘What dishes and food that you value that you’d like to learn how to make?’

2-      Heritage- Interactive Mapping- ‘Our Bristol”

 . Using an OS map of Bristol, we invited attendees to add their responses to 3 prompts,

• Somewhere in Bristol you want to celebrate
• Somewhere you want to rename
• A memory you want to share

This prompted a variety of interesting responses, including the name change of Kingsley Hall. Some people mentioned locations very personal to them, and some significant sites they felt should be recognized. Some young people became very focused on finding where they lived and used to live on the map and engaged in discussion about this and the context. The Map will be brought out at other engagement events, and people will be able to view the initial contributions.

3-       Mind map with prompts: What do you think of when you hear the word heritage? What’s been passed to you that you value? What’s in your life and your story that you want to pass on to others and to be remembered?

• Prompts: where you’re from, your culture, your story, the people in your life, your identity and community, the history of your area and the buildings around you, the natural landscape and wildlife, the music you listen to and the food you eat

Outcomes included:

My mum’s fufu recipe

My knowledge of staying safe

The importance of fighting for your rights

4-      Canvas activity- senses of identity. Using the prompts: I am the taste of, I am the smell of, I am the sight of, I am the touch of, I am the sound of, participants were asked to add images, pictures, symbols of anything they related to the senses that showed who they are or their past were. The contributions will come together to form a collective canvas. Seeing these alongside each other is a way to talk about what different things identify us, and what we share which links to shared heritage and image.

Contributions included: the smell of incense burning in a childhood home, the sound of the wind, the sight of green rolling hills, the taste of raspberries. This piece will also be added to at other events as a chance to collate a collective collage of ideas.

We also had available some of the sources we have gathered, which we showed to people who expressed further interest in the project. These included posters of the suffragettes meetings at Kingsley Hall, Images of Kingsley Hall in 1860 and selected quotes from discussions that had occurred from the M shed visit.

A brilliant start to the HERITAGE ENGAGEMENT PROJECT at 1625IP!