Encounters

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We hope this newsletter gives you a flavour of some of the work Encounters is involved in at the moment, as well as an update about recent projects we’ve just completed. The Invitations to Join in programme in our shop space in Sheffield continues this month with Swap Shop, alongside creative consultation projects in Sheffield, Creative Partnerships projects in local schools and a city- wide performance project in Liverpool which builds on the work we did last year during the year of Capital of Culture.

Invitations to Join in 4: Swap Shop

Thursday 12 – Sunday 15 March
A series of events at the Encounters shop where you can come and swap items, share their histories and take away something new. The event will include a variety of interpretations of the theme and will include the swapping of things, ideas, experiences, stories and information.

Highlights include International Song swap on Friday 13th March and a Women only story swapping over a shared lunch on Friday 13th; Skills swapping on Saturday 14th and a Clothes swap disco in the evening of Saturday 14th.

Also running monthly throughout the programme is Talking Place, a series of open monthly sessions on the first Tuesday of the month, inviting discussion and networking between practitioners, professionals and residents, around participation, action and interdisciplinary collaboration in local urban contexts.

Invitations to Join is a programme of participatory projects delivered collaboratively by Encounters and a group of local artists, architects and residents interested in participation and dialogue. The group is open and welcomes new members, suggestions, comments and ideas.
For further details Email: invitationstojoinin@googlemail.com or stay in touch via Facebook.

City Road Placemaking

Encounters have been on the streets of City Road in Sheffield wheeling a Bureau of Exchange up and down the road, allowing people to add memories, stories, directions and maps about City Road and how it connects with people’s everyday lives, past, present and future. Artist Rupert Clamp joined Ruth Ben-Tovim at Encounters to devise the project and Rupert spent time talking to residents and users of City Road, engaging them in activities to capture their views about what the area means to them and what it should be in the future. Encounters then ran workshops which involved council employees, representatives of community groups and venues, and people who took part in the on-street consultation.

The project was commissioned by Sheffield City Council with the aim of bringing an innovative and creative approach to community consultation and a way of understanding what City Road means to residents and users. Encounters work will feed into the Council’s wider City Road Placemaking project aimed at helping build an identity for and bring improvements to City Road.

Creative Partnerships

Creative Partnerships is the Government’s flagship creative learning programme, designed to develop the skills of young people across England, raising their aspirations and equipping them for their futures.

Rules and Stuff: Hunters Bar Junior School
Encounters are collaborating with Sheffield Now  to deliver a project with staff and pupils from Year 3, to look at how we use and shape our physical spaces and how the physical environment influences and effects learning. Each group of pupils will focus on different spaces in the school - the classroom, the playground and other spaces beyond - and workshops and creative consultation activities will involve pupils, parents and staff to create a shared vision and models for transforming spaces. As part of the reflection process the pupils will work with creative practitioners and teachers to create a toolkit or guide that can share the findings with the wider school and be a future resource. You can view the progress of this project via a blog .

Documenting Change : KS3 Inclusion Unit
Artist Ben Yeger is delivering this self reflective creative project that involves working with staff and four pupils to chart, document, realise and then celebrate the small yet significant changes pupils make during there stay at the unit. The project will recognise and reflect on the process of universal and personal change and pupils will create video/drama/writing that will share these own observations and self-reflections with others in a creative way. 

Invitations to Join in Update

Following Invitations to Join in 1 : Encounter Abundance other Invitations to Join in events have continued to take place at the Encounters shop over the last few months.

Inivtations to Join in 2 : One Word: Passersby were invited to leave a word they would like to see projected onto the shop window and each day one word was randomly selected and projected onto the window in the 20 days leading up to 25th December.

Invitations to Join in 3 : Love Shop: for 10 days in February the Encounters shop became the Love Shop. Local artist Mel Pearson, invited people to talk about, reminisce and proclaim their feelings of love! Stories were told about love, photos were taken in the diary booth and the local radio played samples of visitors ‘our song’.

What’s Your Wybourn Way?

At the end of last year Encounters completed What’s Your Wybourn Way, the six month creative community involvement project that we were delivering in Wybourn and Richmond Park in Sheffield, commissioned by Parkway Housing. The project involved Encounters artists Ruth Ben-Tovim and Sorrel Muggridge taking personal walks with 48 residents of all ages around the area collecting personal memories and stories.

The project culminated in an interactive installation in a disused house in the heart of Wybourn that attracted hundreds of local residents.  We invited a group of final year architect students from the University of Sheffield to take part in this phase of the project as part of the annual Live projects that the university is involved in. They set up a series of house and street-based creative consultation and engagement activities that enabled local people to have an input into ideas and physical developments happening on the estate.

We hope that this project will be the start of a process of creative community involvement that can be developed and built upon over many years. The architect students created a book of ideas from their work called on Up on the Hill, which can be downloaded or purchased from www.lulu.com (search for Up on the Hill), and Encounters put together a report that is available from us - email info@encounters-arts.org.uk

Four Corners Liverpool 09

Following the success of our Liverpool Capital of Culture project, Be My Guest, we are really pleased to have been invited to deliver a city wide performance project that will link and bring residents of all ages together from across the city as part of this years Four Corners programme . This performance will be premiered at the Bluecoat Arts Centre in July 2009 as part of the Four Corners exhibition, which documents and celebrates the five projects involved in the programme.  2009 is the year of the Environment for Liverpool and Four Corners will have this theme at its heart. As well as delivering the linking project, Encounters Creative Director, Ruth Ben-Tovim, has been asked to be the Artistic director of this year's Four Corners programme.  She will curate the exhibition that brings together the work of the other organisations (Bluecoat Arts Centre, Everyman and Playhouse, AIR, and ICDC) who have been part of the Four Corners programme alongside Encounters for the last two years.

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Encounters create participatory arts projects using disused spaces, street based interventions, installation, text performance and photography. They co – author artworks with people and places, mapping and collecting urban histories and evidence of everyday life.

Encounters, 16 Wostenholm Road, Sheffield S7. Tel: 07870 698333
Email: info@encounters-arts.org.uk   Web: www.encounters-arts.org.uk,

For more information about Encounters, please visit our website