Filwood Community Centre hall Photo: Megan Wilson-De La Mare
Four artist commissions. Five artists in residence. One summer. What’s the story?
LIVING, WORKING, MAKING TOGETHER How do artists and communities live, work and make together? How do we move beyond the idea that city centres are the home of culture? What could a collaborative relationship between artists and communities in suburban areas look and feel like? During 2018, Knowle West Media Centre (KWMC) commissioned five artists; Myah Calista, Marc Blazel, Gill Simmons, Paul Lawless (Brave Bold Drama) and Ellie Shipman to explore these ideas by working, making and on occasion - living in Knowle West. Myah, Marc, Gill, Paul and Ellie have been busy. Gill and Paul have created a song about Knowle West; Ellie has collected drawings to be made into souvenirs; Myah has been growing a new kitchen garden; Marc has been putting on performances and making a new Knowle West TV experience.
Artists: Gill Simmons, Ellie Shipman, Myah Calista and Marc Blazel. Photo: Alistair Campbell
This book shares what they did, learned and made.
context: Knowle West is a neighbourhood in South Bristol. When it was first conceived almost 100 years ago – it was seen by many as the future of housing, founded on Garden City principles. Dubbed "the five thousand island forest" by the workers who built the estate in the 1930s, it is built on a hill surrounded by wild green space, and comprises approximately one hundred streets, five thousand homes, and twelve thousand people. Its utopian and geographical inheritance continues to shape the neighbourhood today - creating dislocation and isolation from the rest of the city but also a sense of escape, a pioneering ‘edge-place’ spirit, and space to tinker. At the centre of the new Knowle West neighbourhood that emerged in the inter -war years was Filwood Broadway. This parade of shops, cinema, community centre and swimming pool was designed to be the social hub of the new neighbourhood. For many years it proved to be so - with crowds out on a Saturday night enjoying dancing and boxing and bingo, and a bustling high street with shops and services during the day.
The rise of mass car ownership from the 1970s onwards made it harder for Filwood Broadway to compete with shops and attractions in the wider city, and it entered a period of decline. It is now re-emerging, with new shops opening, homes being made on site according to principles outlined by the community, and local groups leading ground-up efforts to rejuvenate the place. Throughout its rise, decline, and re-invention, Filwood Broadway has bristled with characters and stories. And in 2018 Filwood Broadway and Community Centre celebrated their 80th birthday. This anniversary marked a collective moment for the estate and community to come together, get to know its past a little better, celebrate its character, and reflect on what might come next.
I
n September 2017, KWMC hosted a pop-up Artist Hotel in Filwood Community Centre (FCC) raising questions about where artists live, work and make in the city, and exploring collaborative approaches to urban planning, beyond the often repeating patterns of ‘re-generation’ where artists and communities become pushed out by rising house and studio prices: forced to leave the neighbourhoods where they previously lived, worked and made. a-n covered the event and writer Rowan Lear penned the piece: Bristol’s Artist Hotel: awake with ideas about art, community and ‘regeneration’. She described how "the event was pitched as an opportunity to question how an artist hotel might operate differently, or even be distributed across a community: importantly, to become ‘not a retreat, but a space to engage’". Rowan concluded that "if the Artist Hotel demonstrates anything, it’s that constructing pseudo-borders between artists and ‘communities’ is over: it’s time to imagine possibilities and realise solutions to housing, employment and welfare – together, as neighbours." You can read the full piece at: a-n.co.uk/news/bristols-artist-hotel-awake-ideas-art-community-regeneration
Photo: Ibolya Feher
At the Artist Hotel event Filwood Community Centre expressed a keen interest and need to explore new uses for their building. The centre already runs an active programme of classes; including boxing, Slimming World, tap dance, IT/ job skills training, bingo and more. However, in light of recent funding cuts there is a need to animate the centre in new ways. FCC had an appetite for experimentation, a will to practically explore new uses for its spaces and a desire to build new relationships between local people and artists. FCC and KWMC collaboratively wrote an artists brief and commissioned the four artists projects they were most excited about and which seemed to have the most potential to explore new ways for artists and local people to work together.
Filwood Community Centre. Photo: Ibolya Feher
Read the following pages to find out more about what happened during the residencies in the artists’ own words...
Myah Calista: We are so detached from the production of food that we have no real understanding of the time and energy invested in what goes into what’s on our plate. Bristol is at the forefront of food growing organisations, charities, collectives and community gardens. Don Jones, local resident and Filwood’s volunteer garden pioneer, has got the ball rolling for a communal garden in Filwood Community Centre. Over the summer the garden bore dozens of beans, hundreds of tomatoes and some ginormous squash to name a few! The Cafe, part of re:work on the Broadway, are advocates and great appreciators of fresh food, making lots of delicious food from ingredients grown in Knowle West and now the centre’s garden. The ladies produced some delicious chutneys which were tasted and then sold after Knowle West Fest making use of every last tomato. They were known as ‘The Cafe’ but now have the newly coined name and identity ‘re:fill’ which combines both their own and the Community Centre’s brands. Throughout the summer, drawings of vegetables were collected from local residents and cafe customers that were then translated into an information board using gardening knowledge and expertise from Don, explaining how and when to grow these ‘doodled foodles’. The garden is still starting up, but the summer has seen a massive change, with lots of food produced, residents helping to create and control a compost pile, gardening tools donated from a local resident, more plots dug out and the foundations for a greenhouse being put into the ground. Don has worked relentlessly to transform the exterior and interior gardens of the centre and has such vision and drive. He once said, and definitely lives by the mantra "be brave, be bold, get out there and get on with it" - with this passion, Filwood’s garden can only grow! Photo: Ibolya Feher
Photo: Alistair Campbell Photo: Alistair Campbell
Photo: Ibolya Feher
Marc Blazel: The idea of community flows through every aspect of our lives. From social media to the physical spaces that surround us, community is an ever evolving concept that we cannot escape. Nor is it one we would want to. I believe that community more than ever exists as an ingrained evolutionary trait, an essential attribute that allows humans to not only survive but thrive. The bell curve of self sustaining internet communities is testament to this. While chat rooms, forums and 3D virtual worlds are quickly becoming abandoned relics of a simpler time, their DNA (and the revolutionary work of early pioneers) has carried through social media to all our daily lives. However, like every wide reaching technological revolution there are positive things lost in the transition. The current juggernauts exist as platforms for individuals, and while there has always been an element of untruth to the web it seems that anonymity is more and more being exploited for deceit rather than self expression. These now defunct online spaces existed as free states of self expression and are interesting case studies for both digital and physical community practice. Having spent years researching these ideas and exploring online place, I was encouraged by the shared history of Knowle West and its inherent connection to innovation and new technology. It seemed like the perfect place to put some of these concepts into practice. Using my experience with live-streaming and Knowle West’s connection to community television seemed natural and an exciting way to engage with the area: looking at community arts projects as not only local immersion but also a chance to create new collectives and spaces for expression. These past months have been about the ‘we’, connections that will hopefully continue well into the future.
Photo: Alistair Campbell
Photo: Ibolya Feher
Photo: Ibolya Feher
Photo: Alistair Campbell Photo: Ibolya Feher
Photo: Alistair Campbell
Ellie Shipman: Filwood Community Centre sits on a remarkable 80 years of history, as the community and city around it has ridden the waves of regeneration and decline, bringing new opportunities and challenges as it does so. My practice explores urban regeneration and sustainability through a participatory, craft-based process inspired by my love of encouraging the creativity in everyone and my background in community development. My work often questions the significance of cultural and personal identity, and how that is portrayed in communities and individuals. I am interested in the secret skills living behind closed doors - the making, growing, caring and imaginations lying apparently dormant to the outsider, but which are in fact active or have potential to be activated. The possibilities of these skills correlating with new waves of DIY learning and opportunities for self-employment offered by online courses and resources are huge. The Living, Working, Making Together residency seemed the perfect opportunity to explore these ideas - from, in and with the community they are responding to. This immersion enabled the project to explore local nuances of the past, present and future of Filwood (known locally as Knowle West) and use those as the creative starting point to make patterns, fabric and products which culturally represent local individuals and the wider community. In practical terms, this consisted of distributing flyers inviting local people to draw, write or scribble things which remind them of the past, present and future of Filwood. These drawings were then digitised and designed into patterns to be used on fabric souvenirs of the area, and explored further in drawing, making and sewing workshops. This became FILWOOD FABRIC. I hope FILWOOD FABRIC acts as a catalyst for people living and working in the area to explore new outlets for their skills, knowledge and imagination, and to create new things which represent this brilliant community in new ways.
Photo: Alistair Campbell
Photo: Alistair Campbell
Photo: Ibolya Feher
Photo: Alistair Campbell
Photo: Ibolya Feher
Photo: Ibolya Feher
Brave Bold Drama: Brave Bold Drama are an award-winning theatre and community arts company based in Withywood, South Bristol. We were delighted to be invited to work with Knowle West Media Centre on this project. We already work with a wide range of community groups in our home patch of Withywood, so we decided to find the equivalent groups in Knowle West and Filwood for this project. We visited Illminster Nursery to work with pre-school children and the carers, worked with young people at a Jump Into Music workshop day at Knowle West Media Centre, visited a group for adults with learning disabilities at The Park and met older members of the community at a tea dance at Filwood Community Centre. We also met many different local residents at Knowle West Fest and had a great time improvising and jamming songs about things like swimming, building with Lego and running around at Cubs! We gathered ideas for lyrics, riffs (snippets of tunes) and rhythms from everyone we met. We recorded them using KWMC’s kit, and then took them all away and composed a brand new Song for Knowle West. We have written many songs before, including songs inspired by communities in Bath and North East Somerset, where we have worked in the past on community songwriting projects with Bath-based Kilter Theatre. But the songs that came out of those projects were always low-tech and intended for live performance. We have used this residency at Knowle West Media Centre as a great opportunity to learn more about producing and mixing tracks digitally, and how to use sampled sounds. We hope you enjoy our song and we look forward to hearing what new sounds you create using our Songs for Knowle West Sound Station!
Photo: Brave Bold Drama
Photo: Brave Bold Drama
Photo: Alistair Campbell
Photo: Brave Bold Drama
Photo: Lauren Flook
Photo: Alistair Campbell
Photo: Alistair Campbell
What did we learn? During the artist residencies, artists and local residents have acknowledged that working together can sometimes be challenging and that time, resources and miscommunications are often barriers to this. However, everyone reflected that setting clear parameters around partnerships, proper research into and respect for the past, present and future of the place, and a consistent approach to and investment in developing relationships can lead to unexpectedly wonderful results. This sometimes takes the form of physical things, such as new cafe branding or a collaboratively made cushion, and other times is more subtle, such as enabling people to connect, new temporary communities to form and space for new ideas to flourish.
‘It all helps people think the unthinkable’ local resident
‘These artists gave us the chance to develop what we do and I think we’ve embraced that opportunity’ Filwood Community Centre volunteer
‘The cafe can be quite a solitary pursuit, but by having artists around they have helped tie together the two organisations.’ re:fill cafe staff
Tips and tricks We asked everyone who was part of the residencies to share something they’ve learned or a key piece of advice they’d give to others - their top ‘Tips and Tricks’ for artists and communities working together. Here are some of them:
During the exhibition we are inviting visitors to contribute their Tips and Tricks. At the end of the exhibition the top 20 will be turned into a set of cards.
What’s next? As well as gathering lots of useful learning, great suggestions have already been made for future creative activities. For example: the staff at Filwood Community Centre and re:work are keen to do more sewing activities, set up a repair cafe and develop a business model for the souvenir shop. The community garden project will continue, with building a greenhouse next on the agenda. The local Cubs, Beavers and Scouts are especially keen to help out with watering and planting. Ideas are brewing for more live music, film, open-mic events and annual song-making workshops. Local DJs, record labels and performance artists are excited about booking Filwood Community Centre more often to run events and the Community Centre plan to develop more community-led arts activities over the next three years. KWMC will continue to work collaboratively with artists, local organisations and residents to grow these ideas - from the seeds sown during the residencies into new projects!
Photo: Ibolya Feher
Photo: Hannah Blisset
The Living Working Making residencies were supported by KWMC and KWMC: The Factory in collaboration with Filwood Community Centre and re:work. HAVE FUN • MAKE FRIENDS • EXPERIENCE THE FANTASTIC!
Filwood Community Centre
EVENTS
Barnstaple Road, BS4 1JP T: 0117 914 9216 info@filwoodcentre.org.uk www.filwoodcentre.org.uk +'what's on' email updates Follow us on facebook
HALF TERM - SPOOKY TALES IN FILWOOD (7-12 YRS) NOV 1ST 10-3.30PM
Join Tobacco Factory Theatres here for scary stories and creepy creations! £15 for locals, call 0117 963 0942 FUNDAY 2PM / 80'S NIGHT 7PM NOV 3RD Local fundraiser £5 night
MOTOWN NIGHT NOV 10TH 7PM
Heart Foundation fundraiser £5