Hullians can explore their home city through the collective memories of their neighbours thanks to an innovative performance piece orchestrated by London South Bank University (LSBU) PhD student Wayne Steven Jackson.
As part of the City of Culture 2017 celebrations, and linking with Wayne’s PhD research, Now|Then involves passengers taking a ride in a taxi around Hull, with a performer or soundtrack detailing the memories that have moulded the city into what it is today, was yesterday, and will be tomorrow.
Wayne has been collecting memories of Hull from locals through a series of workshops since last year and said Now|Then hopes to emphasise how staging autobiographical remembering can empower the renegotiation of a city's sense of place.
“The project aims to recollect the city of Hull from the position of its people, by asking them to share those moments that are important only to them,” he said.
“People have shared memories of the river, the ports, the parks, of the centre and the outskirts, the schools, of the ten-foots and the cream telephone boxes. There are memories of buildings that are no longer there, or those that are now abandoned and unused; those ghosts that inhabit the city’s forgotten spaces.
“Even the memories of the day-to-day, the mundane, the ordinary; those precious snippets of the past inform the very notion of what the city is to Hullians.”
Performances will continue until 30 June 2017, and can be booked online.
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