Song Lines to Impact and Legacy

The Songlines  project worked with Community Tarot technique, music, film and community radio to revisit the Legacy Ghost Labs. It held new meetings in five new communities: three in the NE of England – Seaham, Horden and Willington on the Durham coalfield – and two in the NW – Rochdale (two Ghost Labs), and Hyde, Tameside.These extended impact not only in new coalfield areas, but beyond them into more diverse UK communities.  Creative materials generated through Community Tarot readings stimulated the creation of a set of contemporary ‘video ballads’ that ally with local traditions of dissenting song and will be specially written and recorded by folk musicians, Ribbon Road. The video ballads  initiated “song lines” of living knowledge exchange outwards from, and back into, the originating communities as impact generation is circulated through a series of creative knowledge exchange, interactive public engagement and public dissemination channels that have had local, regional, national and international reach. These channels include pop-up theatre, community open-air video projection, national and international interactive community radio, a specially commissioned website, a practitioner and policy maker conference, and film material illustrating the Community Tarot process and life of the Ghost Labs.

Led by early career researcher, Dr Geoff Bright, Song Lines to Impact and Legacy: Creating Living Knowledge through Working with Social Haunting, has significantly enhanced the value and wider benefit of  two earlier projects. The singular impact of the repertoire of creative practices developed in those projects lay precisely in their establishing a space of community inquiry in which participants were able to respond creatively to troubling affective legacies of rapid and contested social, economic and political change and re-animate the subjugated living knowledges that those legacies often foreclose. Our unique approach helps enable new partners and users to creatively generate a living knowledge of the “flow[s] and fixit[ies]” (of collective affects as they relate to strongly classed and racialised processes of subjectification under conditions of social haunting. By generating arts-based responses to an easy to learn three-card (‘past’, ‘present’, ‘future’) reading from a pack of cards bearing words and images generated in previous Ghost Lab practice (see Visual/Other Materials). Such readings, facilitated by poet and project Co-I, Andrew McMillan,  explored the complexify the affective life over time of our participating communities and will generate the textual and visual materials which our partners have crafted into collaborative creative responses.