| << back |
Past participation
Newmasmedia - Summer 2002 >>
In partnership with Leeds West Indian Carnival and funded by Heritage Lottery Foundation, Yorkshire Forward, Leeds City Council, PRSFoundation for New Music and Yorkshire & Humberside Regional Development.
Image: Max Farrar 'Coral Reef Troupe Portrait' (detail), 2000.
Newmasmedia was a project which celebrated the 35th anniversary of the Leeds West Indian Carnival. This was achieved through the development of an online archive of festival memories and photographic documentation collected from the residents of Leeds.
Six artists were commissioned to engage with the carnival, working with local people to celebrate its history, respond to its role as a contemporary touchstone and to add to its future legacy:
Khadijah Ibrahim is a playwright, poet and performer who devised and led a series of writing projects alongside Dorothea Smartt, a writer, editor, poet and live artist. Under the title ‘Talk and Flex’, the programme was structured around oral history and storytelling, African drumming, creative writing and art. Young people attending the workshops wrote their responses to the experience of carnival.
The writers also visited centres of carnival activity to record activities and reminiscences with the community elders.
Graham Maynard is a musician and sound engineer working across Gospel, Jazz and Pop. He was musician-in-residence at Host Media Centre in Chapeltown during the newmasmedia project. A series of intensive workshops were held with a group of young people, resulting in a track called “It’s Carnival Time”.
Tomas Valenzuela Blejer is a London-based Chilean photographer, specialising in documentary photography. Cath Gillo is a photographer whose recent work included images of Trinidad, Circus Ethiopia and the Chinese State Circus. Michael Forbes is an artist photographer and curator.
Each photographer made images that captured the vibrancy of carnival – portraits of the Carnival Queens, portraits of local people and the urban landscape which forms the backdrop of the carnival.
The online archive was temporarily removed from the internet in 2004 and will be re-installed by Leeds West Indian Carnival.
A celebratory booklet marking the carnival’s 35 years was published by Pavilion along with a postcard set. Copies are available from Pavilion for £3. E-mail admin@pavilion.org.uk for more details.
Related websites
Leeds West Indian Carnival: www.leedscarnival.co.uk
Tomas Valenzuela Blejer: www.tomasvalenzuela.com