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From Music and Making to
Design and Debating
- Welcome to The FOLD
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In 2018, Great Place Lakes and Dales commissioned Deco Publique to produce a programme as part of the Great Place project, funded by the National Heritage Lottery Fund and Arts Council England.
The FOLD was a programme of cultural activities focused in three locations in the Lake District and North Yorkshire - rural locales each selected for their distinctive identities and communities.
Led by young people through a series of co-design sessions in Bentham, Kendal and Settle, The FOLD was initially planned as a series of physical, pop-up programmes for Spring 2020 specific to each location, before the Covid-19 Pandemic forced a halt.
Reimagined to exist physically and digitally, the purpose of The FOLD remained the same: to produce a relevant cultural programme that engaged and supported young people to become creatively empowered in their own spaces.
Through an Open Call, local and national artists, speakers, creative business owners, musicians and performers were invited to participate in the programme. The final selection was finalised by the young people in the co-design sessions. Despite the adaptation of the programme due to the pandemic, over 40 creatives were commissioned as part of The FOLD.
Date
2020 - 2021
Location
Kendal, Settle and Bentham
Client
Great Place Lakes and Dales
Funder
National Lottery Heritage Fund and Arts Council England
Collaborators
Bentham Playing Fields, …
Project highlight
Meeting young people from three areas and hearing the passion for their hometowns.
Project Areas
Research | Concepts & Creative Direction | Curatorial and Programming | Arts Commissioning | Project Management | Arts Commissioning |Budget Control | Operations, Logistics & Planning | Design, Marketing & PR Direction
Co-Design
At the beginning of 2020, a series of co-design sessions took place in Kendal, Bentham and Settle with PhD candidate Laura Wareing from Lancaster University. The sessions utilised bespoke tools and activities designed by Laura, with the aim of drawing young people into a creative process. This enabled them to voice their views on the challenges they faced living in these locations and how they felt about their future there.
In the sessions, the co-designers selected activity types and Creatives who had applied through the Open Call who they were most interested in. From this, three live programmes of events specific to each location were scheduled for Spring 2020, however had to be cancelled due to the pandemic. Instead, we worked throughout the lockdowns with an engaged number of co-designers to adapt The FOLD into a programme existing physically and digitally, whilst staying authentic to each place and the conversations that were held during co-design.
Kendal
During the co-design sessions in Kendal, there was a particular interest in theatre and building a network of young creatives there. The young people were keen to work with Kendal based theatre company The Knotted Project (TKP). This resulted in a collaboration during lockdown in which The FOLD supported TKP to realise a piece with young people, Forge the Future. The FOLD in Kendal also saw the birth of Folded - an online zine led by some of the co-designers, populated by work, articles, words, sounds, visual art and more, by young creatives in the South Lakes. Folded continues to release quarterly issues online - a space to share, connect and uplift, created by and for young people in the rural North. You can read more about Folded on our website here, or visit the zine here.