YOUR VOICE 2
Your Voice 2 is a collaborative community arts and heritage project with the Portsmouth based charity Motiv8. The Your Voice 2 project gives a voice to young people, and provides new creative experiences along with the tools needed to help develop valuable and transferable job skills within the creative industry. This project was made possible with funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund and Arts Council England.
Motiv8 South is a Portsmouth based charity that supports young people by building trusting relationships and helping equip them with the skills, resilience and opportunities to thrive. Project Caboodle collaborates with charities and organisations using art and educational activities to help tackle some of the challenges that society is facing. Our projects are designed to bring art to wider audiences, especially within under-represented groups. We do this by promoting inclusion, developing sustainable job skills, and enhancing cross generational connections that help bring people together.
Our key long-term outcomes for this project are to empower and inspire young people by helping them work towards their career goals across the various creative industries.
The opportunities we provided have helped develop new interests in arts and heritage through learning, documenting, archiving and re-appropriating unheard stories whilst working on a unique heritage project that contributes to our community.
During 2022, we commissioned a series of creative workshops, produced a podcast of audio recordings for Portsmouth City Archives, ran an artist residency programme, and had pop-up exhibitions. The project was funded by Heritage Lottery Fund and Arts Council England.
The Your Voice 2 project involved commissioning a team of professional artists to deliver workshops that provided transferable creative job skills. Working from archives that the young people had previously created about their own life experiences, and what its like to be young in today’s society. To help develop connections between the young people and other members of the community, they also interviewed mature and elderly people about their lived experiences of historical events taking place during the Queen’s jubilee, and the Falklands War. These oral recordings can be heard on the project’s podcast, and are held at the Portsmouth City Council Archives for future generations.
We also commissioned 6 artists to make new work inspired by the oral recordings during a residency programme at ArtSpace Portsmouth. During each 2 week residency, the young people from Motiv8 attended artist-led workshops to learn new skills. Each Artist had a pop-Up exhibition, then a large scale group show with all the collaborative work made with the young people that was exhibited at the Round Tower, Portsmouth in Easter 2023.
Artists residency workshops
The Exhibition
Thanks:
Throughout the project we collaborated with several organisations, and we would like to thank our creative partners who helped us deliver this project, these include all of the team at Motiv8 for their hard work, all at Artspace Portsmouth for their involvement and especially Rachel. Senior Archivist Michael Gunton and Lorna Knight Community Connector from Portsmouth City Council for their time and support, as well as Harry at Hotwalls, James Court for his work on the podcast, Billy Stevenson for his commitment to making the film, and finally our thanks and gratitude to all the young people who got involved in this project.
We would also like to extend our thanks to the creatives for all their dedication; Tom Boulton, Kim Burton, Lauren Fry, Charlotte Griffiths, Ashley John, Rachel Johnson, Karl Rudziak, Tony Spencer and Michael Whelan.
