Our Place is a vibrant celebration of community and creativity! Brighton Festival teams up with community groups to handpick, plan, and bring to life captivating art projects, performances, and events, which are all free! It also offers the chance for community members to get involved in a diverse range of free cultural events at Brighton Festival. This week's 'Postcards From' takes a look at what's been happening throughout this year's Festival.
Photography by Andrew Hasson
As part of Our Place's Artist in Residence project, Brighton Festival Guest Director Nabihah Iqbal invited London-based artist Boudicca Collins to collaborate with local Hangleton & Knoll residents, Hangleton Community Centre and the Hangleton & Knoll Project to create a mural for their community. This colourful and uplifting artwork appears on the front wall of the Community Centre, and will warmly welcome people to the venue for many years to come.
Meanwhile, in East Brighton, East Side Print are working with the community of Moulscoombe and Bevendean to create a project celebrating the cultural diversity of the area. Additionally, another artist invited by Nabihah, British Indian Photographer Vivek Vadoliya has been working with young people in East Brighton on an autobiographical project exploring identity.
British-Indian poet, playwright, writer and illustrator Nikita Gill treated young writers to a free poetry workshop at Hangleton Library called Fearless Voices, where 11-16 years olds were encouraged to learn how to craft and perform a poem.
Whitehawk Family Fun Day was a full-day event that included a morning of badgemaking and colouring for little ones, as well as a Baby Boogie time run by Library Services. Also, author Annemarie Anang ran Storytime for 3-8s and read her heartwarming book I am Nefertiti.
The afternoon at Whitehawk Library Family Fun Day saw a drop-in puppet-making workshop run by Brighton Festival and gave 7-11-year-olds the opportunity to showcase their creative writing to an audience with the Little Green Pig Open Mic.
Our Place originally began as Your Place in 2017 when Brighton Festival Guest Director Kae Tempest was inspired to initiate the project with the aim of taking the Festival out to the communities of Brighton & Hove, to people who might not otherwise participate in cultural and artistic events.
We have had a wonderful time engaging with this year's Our Place events and we hope you have too!
Click here for more of the free events Brighton Festival has to offer.
Supported by University of Sussex
