SO FESTIVAL COMMUNITY PROGRAMMING TEAM
Vessel Projects was commissioned by Magna Vitae to develop and deliver a community engagement project to democratise programming for SO Festival.
Building on the ‘Day Trips’ initiative in 2019 which curated a series of go-see experiences for people in challenging circumstances on the Lincolnshire coast, taking them to cultural venues in different cities as audience development and research for SO Festival.
Over three years, we hosted visits for a committed group of participants from Mablethorpe and Skegness to internationally significant festivals across England. This involved supporting people mental and physical health issues to fully engage with outdoor performances, work as a team, develop a cultural language which enabled them to review and reflect on what they’d experienced. This successful project has now been embedded in SO Festival’s core delivery.
ENVELOPE/BREV
As part of SOfa Fest 2020 Vessel Projects created ENVELOPE/BREV, a project that invited people from the Lincolnshire coast to communicate in a creative way with people from Helsingør in Denmark during COVID lockdown. SOfa Fest was an online event, replacing the annual SO Festival in Skegness and Mablethorpe, presented in conjunction with prject partners Passage Festival in Denmark.
Through the act of sending an envelope (brev, in Danish) through the post to an unknown recipient, the project enabled anyone to be a participant in SOfa Fest. The envelopes did not contain a letter, but instead participants created a personal ’map’ on the inside, to reflect their own experience of life during the pandemic.
Many thoughtful and beautiful artwork envelope-maps were created and exchanged, so that each person received someone else’s map in the post to keep.
Click here to see the gallery of wonderful envelope-maps that have now found new homes in the UK and Denmark.
