Projects and Initiatives: The Home Project

The 'Home' Project 

How the project began - by Artist in Residence Ursula Rani Sarma

The ‘Home’ Project is the title of the work which Ursula have carried out while Writer in Residence for a project entitled Placing Voices - Voicing Places. Funded by the Heritage Council and being carried out UCD, DCC and CREATE, the project is exploring inner city heritages and cultural diversity.

What excited Ursula most about the project was the fact that the work would focus on the Clanbrassil Street area itself. Ursula spent time researching the history of the street itself and looking specifically at its association with cultural diversity. Looking at the many old photographs of the way the street used to look, Ursula began to formulate the idea of a project that would examine the past, present, and future of the street through the lense of the theme of ‘Home’.

Ursula ran a series of creative writing workshops with 10-12 year old students living in the Clanbrassil Street area. The twenty-two students spent that time creating a body of work that includes poems, definitions, short stories and journalist style reports under the theme of ‘Home’. Much of their work was in response to some element of Clanbrassil Street which Ursula exposed them to e.g. an old photograph or a piece of information about some aspect of the street which they were not aware of before. In one particular session she asked them to spend some time thinking about how they would describe home to a stranger. Ursula was very impressed by the response from the students and by the individual definitions and phrases which they came up with. Some of them seemed so simple and yet so profound for individuals of their age.

As her time with the students came to a close, Ursula began to think about how best to use the student’s work and to share it with the local and wider community. After brain storming with fellow Artist in Residence Sean Lynch and curator Ian Russell, Ursula came up with some ways of presenting work on the street itself. She very much wanted the work which had been developed to be presented in a way which would speak to an audience in an accessible way. Following on from this Ursula went back to the work and found some key phrases and words which the students had written which had stopped her in my tracks when she read them first. And so placing these phrases on Clanbrassil street itself seemed like the perfect solution, words which would quite literally stop people in their tracks and hopefully encourage them to think differently for even a split second about the street which they are standing on and about what home means to them.

These words on the street will co exist along side a city wide postcard campaign with pictureworks (www.pictureworks.com.) 10,000 postcards which feature these phrases are currently being distributed throughout the Dublin area. The idea is that while the words on the street itself will be accessible to anyone who happens to walk past them, a wider audience will be able to read them and to learn a little bit about the project itself, what we have been doing and even to visit Clanbrassil Street and to see the words for themselves if they wish.

For further info please visit http://www.iarchitectures.com/thehomeproject