Collective Impact at Ipswich Museum

COLLECTIVE IMPACT @ IPSWICH MUSEUM

VISIT THE VIRTUAL SPACE

When: October 2021 – July 2022

Where: Ipswich Museum

With:

Colchester & Ipswich Museums – Local history museums

Story Makers Company – Drama & creative writing for youth

Volunteering Matters – Volunteering & support charity

Hannah Aria – Performance & multi-media artist

Young Artist Anna Dupont – Illustrator

Participants: 10 young people

Working with Story Makers Company, young participants from Volunteering Matters’ Peer Action Collective creatively interpreted Ipswich Museum’s collection to design and create content for an online space telling stories meaningful to young people.

The project combines visual storytelling with live art making, in a process Story Makers call a ‘story weave’. During online workshops, the young people discussed ideas and co-created concepts for their online space. Artist Hannah Aria and young community artists Anna Dupont led in-person creative media workshops at the Museum, where young people explored the collection in relation to their chosen themes of youth violence, crime and voicelessness.

Our aim was to create a youth-led project, working with a lead artist and a young community artist to co-create a new interpretation of the museum. The goal was to engage more young people with the museum and allow the interpretation of the collections to be accessible to young people.

Young people were recruited to the project through Volunteering Matters, an organisation which tackles societal issues through volunteering. We invited 16- to 25-year-olds from Volunteering Matters’ Peer Action Collective to join the project. This allowed us to work with a diverse group of young people engaged with local issues.

We commissioned Story Makers Company, part of Leeds Beckett University, as our lead artist. Story Makers facilitates practice-based research, addressing issues relevant to young people through drama and creative writing. We also commissioned young community artist Anna Dupont to support Story Makers and act as a bridge between the artist and young people.

Story Makers led a series of online workshops over 6 sessions which identified the young people’s interests in the museum’s collection in relation to their own lives, as well as developing the design of a narrative story experience for an interactive online platform. The young people worked together with the artists through a process of co-creation, considering the audience and message of their story.

Local artist Hannah Aria was commissioned to deliver in-person workshops at the museum along with illustrator Anna Dupont, using creative media to develop the young people’s understanding of the collections and themselves. The young people created masks which represented experiences with voicelessness and labelling, as well as signs and photographs exploring identity.

Throughout the project, objects from the museum’s collections were used as starting points to spark discussion and inspire new creative work. The group chose three items from the museum’s collection alongside prompts around power, voice and representation and creative media to explore which stories and issues were meaningful to them.

The group were drawn to items relating to crime and punishment, making observations on their relation to oppression, power, voicelessness, punishment and control. The young people were interested in how objects might be used to punish criminals and those who are oppressed and marginalized. This focus on objects relating to youth violence, crime and oppression/voicelessness guided the project outcomes.

The outcome of the project is Collective Impact: Voices of the Voiceless, an online virtual tour of three imaginary spaces, filled with objects from the museum’s collection along with poetry, video, photography and artwork created by young people. The online spaces take viewers on a tour through the objects, ideas and issues meaningful to the young people. Through their work the group wanted to highlight how artefacts of the past still reflect many injustices in our present.

The participants wanted the online experience to inspire other young people to tell their stories in a safe space. The virtual tour includes questions (e.g. ‘who belongs in a museum?’) and creative prompts to the viewer along with a comment section, encouraging engagement with the issues raised.

Through the project, we engaged 10 young people from Suffolk and Norfolk. The group was diverse in age, gender, ethnicity and background, including young people from amongst the most deprived neighborhoods in the UK. The project engaged those facing challenging circumstances including disability, homelessness and being a refugee.

Only 40% of participants had visited the museum before, with many not knowing it was there at all. Since participating in the project, over half said they were definitely more likely to take an interest and seek out opportunities or employment within heritage. The young people described the experience as empowering, inspirational, collaborative and, importantly, fun.

Collective Impact helped Ipswich museum to understand how young people viewed and engaged with the museum and its collections, giving insight into personal and cultural perceptions of objects and stories. The young people shared their feedback on how they would like to change the museum to help them feel more engaged and connected to the stories told within it. This will input into the redevelopment of Ipswich Museum in the coming year.