You can listen to the audio trail here
What sort of a future will it be a generation from now, in 2050? What can we leave for our descendants that is worth having?
We know for sure that if we do not choose our future then someone else will choose for us. Someone who does not know us and maybe does not care. So we need to envisage a future worth having, and set it in dialogue with the voices of the past and present. That’s how we arrived at the Restorying project – tellling old and new stories in a more empowering way that gives us agency.
Thanks to the generosity and support of Borderlands we were able to work with lots of different people in and around our community:
- people made the Banners of Hope with lovely gifted artist Edith Reeve
- wrote songs about the ideal future, with Guisborough’s own Trish McLean, and performed them at the Guisborough Folk club – and we recorded them on our audio trail (you can find it here)
- wrote poems and stories, and reimagined the future with literary activist and poet Bob Beagrie
- Guisborough’s Art Lab with inspiration from artist Vanessa Langford developed their making skills even further as they reimagined the town to include more places of calm tranquillity – quiet benches – and conviviality – chatty benches – visualising places where you can feel comfortable and safe right in the midst of busy urban life, and making some of the props necessary to settle in – cushions of comfort and benches of beauty. Spotting good benches became a bit of an obsession for me, I even found some good ones on mountain tops abroad…
- we did vox pop interviews along the high street of Guisborough – met those extraordinary ordinary people who make it a joy to live in our place
- we spent a day at Lawrence Jackson school where the brilliant students and staff vividly imagined the future and remembered the past with affection
- with the kindly folks at Guisborough Museum, we spent a Saturday meeting a whole cross-section of the town’s population, all ages, where you could do things like pick up the marvellous chronophone and speak with the voices of the future: generations separated by time in dialogue through this marvellous technological innovation – and we tried to guess the improbable uses of the museum artifacts which were also on display.
In short, we had a complete blast of fun and friendship and laughter.
Then we pulled all the audio together into a collage of voices, music, ambient sound, poetry, speculation, the opinionated interjections of the ideal future and the voices, full of character, of older residents recalling true stories full of humour, poignant moments, details which really made us stop and think, celebrate, remember with gratitude and look forward with hope. We were really fortunate to have a great audio producer to perfect it, Michael Perry.
We wrote incidental music and bits of connecting script…
We created a mobile quadrophonic sound stage which travelled with us, and around us, as we walked the very cold, damp streets of Guisborough – visiting all the locations on our sound trail which were important to people – and we couldn’t include them all, some were outliers which we will include later … bless you all those folks who walked with us and shared the memorable experience as well as the shivering when November sent us its best worst weather…
You can hear the entire audio in the comfort of your own home, for best audio quality be sure to use good quality headphones or good quality loudspeakers – find it all here
and … we combined the whole immersive audio and visual experience and celebrated with loads of other community groups, our partners the Nest, people who just drifted in to enjoy the free coffee and cake and amazing delicious biscuits, and invited everyone and anyone to join in. A fantastic community day – and I won’t tell you of the nightmares at back of house as we discovered that the venue is a connectivity blackspot…! Despite all that, we did manage to run the entire 2-hour audio track and associated video on a loop.
Thanks to Laura Degnon for working long hours the evening before to get the final edit of the video to us! She’s not to blame for the deliberately naive content of the video, it is a community project after all and our collective skills have skyrocketed through doing this.
There’s a bit of legacy coming out of this too:
We have far more content than we could use in 2 short hours of audio. Historic audio recordings will be preserved in the Teesside archive;
we aspire to create a small but beautiful book with some of the poetry songs and stories;
we plan a spinoff Restorying podcast which – all being well – will be broadcast on Zetland FM.
and if you pick up a trail map from here or (coming soon) from leaflet locations around the town, you can walk around and see what an amazing place it is. Best to do it in summer when it is not snowing hailing or raining…
Later on, we have the option to run the entire audio visual experience again in a perhaps quieter venue
we have the makings of a repeatable pop-up art centre because we have the sound system, the projectors and big screens to transform a space into a magical enchanted alternative universe
It’s all made with love by people who love what they do. With our partners we continue to work towards opening that home for the arts which our town and area needs but lacks. We are so grateful to Borderlands for enabling us to go on this journey with help and friendship and support, and to all of you travelling with us and helping to make that thing which people were so unanimous and enthusiastic about – that “future worth having”.