4 minute read
4.5 STRATEGY
Weaving The Legacy of the African Caribbean Community In Sheffield
This general strategy seeks to build upon the existing work done by the BAP and it revolves around weaving, expanding and exposing the archive. We believe that the archive can serve to make ‘noise’ and make the SADACCA building and the community it represents ‘louder’ within Sheffield.
Advertisement
This strategy has the objective of weaving the ‘way’ to and from the SADACCA building as it comes to represent the living archive of the community. In this way, the presence of the African-Caribbean community will permeate the city, and through different tools, visualise its on-going legacy at different scales throughout Sheffield. This increased visibility could then serve to root the community in tangible and intangible ways, allowing the community to grow within an evolving city. This strategy is multifaceted and multiscalar, working at the building, neighbourhood and city levels. The tools within each of these facets can take a number of forms of which our initial proposals are detailed in the following proposals section.
Building Level
The SADACCA building currently hosts a number of activities that contribute to the living heritage of the community. The sewing club, boxing gym, and day care centre are examples of such activities. Expanding and documenting these and other activities and events can feed into the existing research and documentation in the Bantu Archive as a way to increase it but can also weave different voices and interests within the community, contributing to stronger social
cohesion within the African-Caribbean community. At this scale, it is important to understand the building itself as a living archive, as it houses and fosters present and future traditions of its community, as well as integrates the (hi) stories and memories already recorded through the BAP.
The main focus of this strategy is to create programs and sub-strategies to increase these activities, allowing them to converse with each other by archiving the living practices occurring within the building. In addition, the building as a living archive understands the importance of historical events, spaces and people reflected within the research done by the BAP and integrates its findings into a representation of them, translating these into space within the building itself.
Neighbourhood Level
The BAP is currently working on expanding its oral interviews and consolidating its walking tour. This strategy centres around the expansion of formats in which the archive can take form at a tangible level within the urban fabric. The appropriation of existing urban furniture and infrastructure could help increase the visibility of the community and highlight the legacy of the AfricanCaribbean community. These urban interventions can take a number of forms, leading the way to an also intervened SADACCA building. One example is the recent naming of Windrush Way, a strategy led by the community itself, which commemorates the arrival of an important part of the community, the Windrush generation.
These interventions can increase the closer one approaches the building as a way to create spatial and visual tension that attracts the passers-by and connects the community to the wider city scale. The objective is to, intervention by intervention, continue to permeate, in a very physical way, the presence and heritage
Fig 9. Conceptual Diagram (Source: Authors)
of the community, making their presence and contribution more and more undeniable.
City Level
At this level, the objective is to expose the archive to a wider audience. This can serve to strengthen ties within the community and its presence in Sheffield. The walking tour plays a big part at this level as the entry point to address this scale with the information already gathered. The marketing strategies already designed by Live Projects from the University of Sheffield also play a role in exposing the archive. Here, intangible, mobile, and digital tools serve to weave the way back to the BAP, the SADACCA building and the African-Caribbean community.
To build upon the work already mentioned, our strategy takes the shape of a zine, a booklet of spaces to be visited during the tour that can act as a companion to it. This document translates the information and spaces visited into print and digital form with counter-archiving strategies of graphic representation and delivery: collages, poems and diagrams that add depth to the (hi) stories of the African-Caribbean community in Sheffield that have played a significant role.
AIMS STRATEGIES
EXPOSING
EXPANDING
WEAVING
multifaceted and multiscalar
Fig 10. Strategic Diagram (Source: Authors)
