Intercultural Dialogue, 2008- 2010
A partnership with the Borderland Foundation (Poland) and the New Culture Foundation (Bulgaria). The work was structured around creative laboratories and exchanges using artistic practice in diverse multicultural communities.
Each project partner undertook their own creative activities, in their specific locality and in multicultural communities - where the issues explored were matters of memory and experience, destruction of cultural heritage and environment, social and ethnic conflict, immigration and community development and cohesion. Exchanges between practitioners were a key element of this, offering the opportunity to work in different contexts and languages.
We organised creative laboratories in Birmingham, Wolverhampton, Leeds, Walsall, Solihull, (UK), Warsaw and Sejny (Poland), Bela Rechka (Bulgaria), Hania (Crete), Skopje (Macedonia) and Baku (Azerbaijan) - all working with stories, texts, images, performances, exhibitions, music and events, exploring issues of dialogue. The UK element culminated in a two day seminar event ‘Interchat’ in partnership with Birmingham City Council, which offered artist-led sessions to explore good practice in community engagement projects, with local and international examples from Birmingham, Bulgaria, Crete and Poland.
The work was celebrated with the opening of a new centre for dialogue by the Borderland Foundation at Krasnogruda (Poland) in 2011.
A publication documenting the work of Laundry during this project - ‘We No Longer Talk’ - with texts and images gathered from workshops, conversations and interviews during the project was published by Borderland Foundation. Download pdf.
The project website blog is now longer live, but you can view a small sample from the residency in Hania here:
https://icd.laundryline.co.uk
Project Artists: Beverley Harvey, Paulina Paga, Brendan Jackson, Alicja Rogalska, Paul Lacey, Pamela Wells, Geoff Broadway, Raycho Stanev, Jo Loki, Simon Walker, Naz Koser, Simret Cheema Innis.
The project was supported by the Culture 2007-2013 programme of the European Union, Arts Council England and the Department for Communities and Local Government, Birmingham City Council.
