Conception and pre-production:
Over the past few months I have collaborated with other creatives in my community to produce this series of creative workshops. This idea began as we wanted to create a participatory event to host during Kilkenny Arts Festival that could act as a celebration for the community after a difficult year.
After much collaborative divergent brainstorming the project eventually took shape around The Work that reconnects by Johanna Macy.
This framework consists of:
Gratitude
Knowing our Pain
Seeing through new eyes
Going forth
We combined this framework with our chosen theme of imagining the future of our place together. We designed three participatory workshops consisting of a textile design & flag making workshop, a seed paper making workshop, and an introductory imaginative planning workshop.
Learning:
This was the largest co-created project I've been involved in to date as there were 11 people involved in its development. A lot of learning comes along with working in large groups and working with people with different expertise and interests.
Myself and two others developed our specific workshop together including specific details down to the words we will use, the timing and our individual and supportive roles.
Event cancellation:
We were really looking forward to hosting this event however unfortunately we had to call it off due to a bad weather forecast. Even more unfortunately, the bad weather promised never appeared. Were were trying to balance the amount of event pre production we needed to do with the amount of notice participants needed if the event was to be called off, unfortunately we called it too soon.
In future we will prepare to go ahead and wait until as close to the start time as possible (and respectful) to call it off if necessary.
The rescheduled event is due to take place in September.