Facing East
Who is the community living in and around the Olympic site?
They are old people, young people, people with disabilities, Bangladeshi, English, Somali, Irish, Afro-Carribean.
All kinds of people.
Facing East tells their story...
About the project
Taking place during Summer/Autumn 2008, The Facing East project will produce a ‘portrait’ of this special community, recording individual stories, assembling a temporary museum on the Three Mills Island Heritage Site creating a series of high-quality, individual, photographic portraits and audio recordings for potential broadcast.
The project will be a celebration of the heritage of this diverse community and an opportunity for learning and sharing in the context of the past and present, and a history of migration and the far-reaching changes now taking place locally and across east London. The individual portraits will be displayed and made accessible through the media, a dedicated website, brochure, an exhibition at Three Mills and potentially large-scale posters and projections; and will be a way that the diverse community and heritage is identified and celebrated not just in Bromley by Bow, but across London and more widely.
The Facing East team will facilitate this project, working with specific groups and creating exciting opportunities for the public to access the work and ideas.
The team
Shamim Azad is a storyteller working in the community and already a familiar face to many local people. She will use her inimitable performance style and knowledge of story structure and the Asian and folk traditions to support individuals in thinking about their own story and local history. Many people don’t have a habit of writing anything down – so her aural skills are particularly useful in encouraging conversation and discussion which can then be recorded via audio and transcribed.
Sally Hampson is an experienced artist who has travelled widely and worked with local people in Egypt, Ethiopia, Morroco, Kenya, India and China. Her work focuses on collections, traditions of object display and object making and she has worked within museum contexts including Natural History Museum, the Horniman Museum, Pitt Rivers Museum, and Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. She will combine this rich and diverse experience in supporting participants to think about their own heritage objects and also making sessions whereby individuals will make objects to represent their own story. Sally will facilitate the object sessions which will comprise the installation of loaned heritage and personal objects into the Miller’s Office. During the duration of the Facing East project the Miller’s Office will gradually transform into the museum/treasure house for the Bromley by Bow Centre collection.
Colin Hampden White is a portrait photographer who has gained considerable experience working for both Financial Times and the Times. He has been strongly influenced by the diverse cultures in which he has lived and travelled, having grown up in the Sudan and spent time amongst the different tribes in Kenya. Having learnt about his own adoption in his late teens, Colin has a personal interest in story, background and the layers of culture and environment.
This team will enable all aspects of the project to be covered, personal story, collections of objects and photographic portraits.
For more details about Facing East, please email Lala Thorpe or call her on 07941 918244.
