Culture Connects at PRIMEYARC, Great Yarmouth, was a day of activities that took place on Saturday 22nd of October 2022. The day involved FREE workshops, visual arts and more centred around cultural healing, wellbeing and community. Culture Connects; to healing and recovery through creativity, spirituality, ritual, dreams and the power of words.
Our culture will live on as long as our stories are told and our knowledge transmitted constantly through oral tradition for evolving, storing, and transmitting knowledge, art, and ideas. Reconnecting with our culture and ancestral roots today can help us find our sense of belonging in a world that can make us feel alienated, othered and alone as we attempt to weave stories together and recognize ourselves in them.
Living in a community that rejects aspects of your culture – such as identity, beliefs, or sexual orientation – can have negative impacts on your wellbeing. If you live where the dominant culture is different from, or lacks tolerance to your own cultural heritage, or you have parents from different cultural backgrounds, you may experience some conflict around your cultural identity.
Being disconnected from your cultural heritage can lead you to question who you really are and where you belong, however connecting with culture can have a positive impact on your sense of belonging and identity – and in turn, on your mental health and overall wellbeing.
Take a look back at the Culture Connects programme:
Connect, Celebrate, Create
: Illustration Workshop
This FREE family friendly collaborative workshop is a space for individuals to celebrate their identity annd culture, by connecting with one another. Each person will get to print, design and draw in a set area of a collaborative canvas. This will create a large group artwork that will then be put on display in the space.
All materials provided! 12 - 1pm
Drop-in Zine Workshop
Drop into Rosalyn McLean’s zine workshop anytime between 2-4pm! Rosalyn is a Graphic Designer and has developed her skills more recently as a zine maker, using her own voice and narrative to explore different social issues from both a personal point of view and an educational one.
Interested in grassroots activsm? Come and and create your own zine that can also be put up on display or taken home.
Families are welcome and all materials provided.
The Islands: A Carribean dance film screening
The Islands is a Carribean dance film screening of a stage show created and directed by dancer Rosy May.
Now, imagine this...You're in your bedroom mentally preparing for the madness of Notting Hill Carnival. The train is leaving in 30 minutes and you've finally decided on an outfit.
Carnival brings together the best of Caribbean culture, the food, the music, the party. But how did we get here? The evolution of Caribbean culture? And before that?
This film we be showing throughout the day.
We Are One: A series of short films on Norfolk Migration
We Are One is an essential watch in our current times. It is a series of short films which tackle the way migrants can be stereotyped in Norfolk and highlights how important migration has been for the county.
Drawing on local stories, talent and history, the series takes us on a journey from East Anglia’s beginnings to modern day. It inspires, educates, and entertains.
The stories are bought to you through BBC artists, COLL and Piers the Poet.
This film we be showing throughout the day.
Degrees Of Belonging: Building Togetherness
The collective, formed in 2021 brought together doctoral students and staff from historically under-represented backgrounds at the University of East Anglia to explore their sense of belonging and unbelonging. Drawing on creative methods such as collaging, body-mapping and using more-than-human methodologies, the group individually and collectively explored their experiences and envisaged alternative futures that could be more humane and welcoming. The zine is their joint output and the flip-format explores different sides to how they experience their times and their spaces at university.
Karis Upton
Karis Upton (b. 1988, Bedford) is a self-taught artist living and working in Norwich, Norfolk. Her intuitive practice focuses on working through personal and collective trauma, diasporic experiences and healing methodologies. She uses painting, writing, sound, video and installation to approach issues from a seemingly ‘safe’ distance – interested in how symbolism might unlock and communicate hidden, difficult or subconscious mental states and emotions about the world we live and our existence within it.
JMCAnderson
An artist, community curator and facilitator which is underpinned by her socially engaged practice; to share personal and group experiences or co-working with communities/projects, that explores collective thinking and it's meaning making process as finding your place/belonging as a citizen. This often includes research into political events, historical figures, communities and places.