Reflections on ‘Alternative Futures – Who Decides?: A story of lived experiences told through art’

Earlier this month we ran an exhibition at Dovecot Studios in collaboration with The Ripple, showcasing artworks made by the people of Restalrig, Lochend and Craigentinny that told the story of their area. You can read our blog that details the first exhibition of these artworks and learn the story behind each piece.

We welcomed almost 200 visitors over three days, forged new connections and created art together. Our huge thanks to all those who came and engaged with the exhibition and helped make it possible. We have been reflecting on the exhibition as a whole and its wider impact, and here we would like to share some of our key thoughts and learnings.

Rachel Green [exhibition co-curator, Ripple Director]

There is a crack, a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in
‘Anthem’ – Leonard Cohen

Three fundamental things struck me during the three days at the Dovecot exhibition:

  1. How many people totally ‘got’ what we were trying to convey without much explanation. The tapestries spoke for themselves and people were not surprised by the difference between the statistical tapestry and the data held in the community tapestry. The way we define poverty has consequences for the explanations, causes and possible solutions, and if definitions are typically developed by the “non-poor” there is a risk of mis-conceptualising poverty, leading to flawed mitigations.
  2. The inclusion of those with lived experience in poverty discourses allows for a fuller picture of poverty to emerge that moves beyond the reductive nature of statistics and could, if listened to, provide other avenues for longer-term sustain regeneration.
  3. That this research is just the latest in a long history of poverty research from Booth and Rowntree at the end of the nineteenth century to hundreds of years later – now. We have all the research we need.

Which leads me to my question: how do we move from what we know and what we can evidence to action?

If anyone doesn’t know the Portia Nelson poem ‘Autobiography in five chapters’ then click to read here – and consider what our memoir would be if we actually walked down a different path.

Mallory Hybl [researcher, Ripple Youth Worker]

I think spaces like these allow us to dream up what a future could look like and then take actionable steps in order to make that future more possible. In this way, dreaming is not a frivolous exercise, but an intentional practice with real meaning. As Rachel noted, the future is ours to write, and it is so important to be including all voices in envisioning what that future may look like, rather than just a select few politicians and policy makers. Along with this, the collaborative, creative nature of the process made it such a joy to engage in as a community which was so lovely.

Autumn Roesch-Marsh [Co-Director of The Binks Hub]

I had the joy of co-facilitating a collage workshop as part of the three-day exhibition with one of our MSc graduates Mallory Hybl.

We had 4 children and 5 adults take part in the drop-in workshop on Saturday. The aim of the workshop was to encourage participants to think about their hopes and dreams for a future Edinburgh and make an individual collage that we could piece together with others.

As a social worker and social work academic, much of my work over the last 15 years has focused on thinking about problems and issues. This project with The Ripple, and the exhibition, reinforced for me a key piece of learning which being Co-Director for The Binks Hub has been developing in me: the value of dreaming and visioning and the importance of the arts in creating a space for us to do this. Thinking about problems all the time can limit what you see and understand, it feels exciting and generative to start with dreams, wishes and hopes.

For me collage is a very organic art form that lends itself to dreaming. It relies a lot on what materials are there and how I am feeling about and engaging with those materials on a given day. On the day of the Dovecot workshop I arrived having had a very busy morning with my own family. But putting out the materials for the collage workshop grounded me right away. In my work with The Binks Hub I have been learning to trust the materials and the space more and more, and have continued to be inspired by what happens. The children who made collages at the workshop were drawn to pictures of animals and nature. Like the children who made the collage map with Jenny Capon at the Ripple, they were thinking about what was fun, what was beautiful and what they admired. Several of the participants made multiple collages and I felt excited by how much we all have to say about our dreams. With so much heaviness around us in the news, it can seem that dreaming is inaccessible. But when we give them space they are there, especially when we can coax them out gently with images and pens and paper. It is okay if they are vague at first, finding first one image and then another and then a word, letting the dream unravel. And, as with the workshop, the exhibition and this project, beautiful and important insights emerge when we work collaboratively with others, taking our time in the making and valuing being together and learning from each other.

Jimmy Turner [exhibition co-curator, Binks Hub Research Fellow]

All in all it was a huge success, surpassing the expectations of those of us who organised it. This success was due to the work put in by a wide range of people, both those who contributed to the work exhibited, its curation and the activities we put on during the three days of the exhibition, and, crucially, those who can to see it and participate in it. Across the three days we had nearly 200 visitors who engaged with the exhibition and associated activities, and they represented a fantastic range of types of people. This included members of the Ripple and residents of Lochend, Restalrig and Craigentinny who travelled to the centre of the city to see theirs and their neighbours work exhibited; people from a range of other community centres and arts organisations across Edinburgh; many staff from the University of Edinburgh, both researchers and community engagement and participation specialists, and students from the University of Edinburgh and other universities, including many PhD students who are using, or were looking for inspiration to use, artistic and creative methods.

By our estimations roughly a third of the visitors were people who had come to the Dovecot for other reasons, typically the magnificent Chris Ofili exhibition downstairs and workshops that the Dovecot were running in other parts of the building. These people stumbled across us whilst in the building, and many stayed, sometimes for hours participating in the tapestry-weaving and mapping activities. Typical amongst them were a group of four people unknown to each other prior to the exhibition who met at the table where Bobby was running the mapping activity. They were artists, community workers and researchers, and most wore at least two of these hats, and watching them spend ninety minutes together making links and connections which might hopefully spark new and exciting collaborations was an undoubted highlight.

We owe a huge debt of thanks to all who came and joined in, and to the many people who facilitated the exhibition. Alongside Kirstin, Autumn, and Jimmy from the Binks Hub these include: Rachel, Tristan, Dawn and Todd from the Ripple; Bobby and Mallory for designing and running our activities; Nel and Rebecca from the University of Edinburgh library for helping us prepare our literature; and from the Dovecot, Jane Carey for helping us create the exhibition and the free VIP tours of the Chris Ofili exhibition she generously offered for visitors from the Citadel Youth Centre and the Ripple, Elinor Brown for advertising the exhibition and workshops through the Dovecot’s site and social media, and all the reception team and cleaning staff who helped make the exhibition a pleasant place to visit.

For anyone who was unable to join us at the exhibition we would like to invite you to read about our work and see some images of the artworks here and read in depth about the calls made by the community for action by policymakers here. This was the second of three exhibitions of the fruits of this project. The first was held at the Ripple Project itself in June 2024, and was written about by Rhiannon Bull here. The third is currently being planned, and will be hosted at the Scottish Parliament in June 2025. The whole team has a lot of thinking to do in the next few months about how best to use this third exhibition in the seat of national power to prompt the kinds of changes that the people of Lochend, Restalrig and Craigentinny have expressed through their artworks that they want, and we hope that you will rejoin us in future posts when we discuss the curation of this third, and potentially most important, exhibition.

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The Binks Hub will work with communities to co-produce a programme of research and knowledge exchange that promotes social justice, relational research methods and human flourishing.

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