Workshops / Timeline
The Silai Kahani Timeline was created by women at Silai, together with artist Gloria Olujari, over a 6-week series of workshops.
Information, old annual reports, newspaper clippings and the work of former students from the archive, inspired the Timeline designers to create 4 vibrant panels that represent era’s throughout Silai’s history. From the earliest days in Totterdown to 2008, the Timeline depicts the events and landmarks that have shaped the organisation and remain in the collective memory of students and staff. Students from the ESOL (English For Speakers of Other Languages) classes wrote comments and messages onto fabric in their first language, explaining their reasons for attending Silai as well their feeling and impressions. These were written in a selection of languages to be found at Silai: Somali, Russian, Punjabi, Kurdish, Urdu and Sinhalese.
The Timeline is a beautiful creation that gives a sense of the range of experience and rich history that makes up Silai for Skills.It will be included in the exhibition that is touring Bristol in November 2008.
Two one-day workshops took place in August: The first on the 20th August - 'Memory Bags' was an opportunity for student's and staff to bring a friend or family member and produce a simple cloth bag and personalise it though the representation of a shared memory. A selection of these bags will be displayed at the exhibition touring through November.
For the second workshop on the 27th August, 'Daughter Let Me Tell You My Story', participants were invited to explore aspects of memory and take part in activities that creatively examined memory and life experiences. They looked at issues such as; what is memory? What counts as a 'memory'? How can we express memory? The workshop was led by Eileen Haste an experienced community artist whose work focusses greatly on community heritage and interpretation of memory. One woman arrived to the day curious to know what would come out of it - stating that she felt she didn't have 'story' to tell. By the end of the day she had recorded some of her memories of childhood and early school life for her 4 year-old daughter who herself is about to start school. Each participant left at the end of the day with a audio record of a life experience or memory.
Throughout September students at Silai worked with textile artist Gloria Olujari to create twenty limited edition textile covers for this Silai Kahani book. Some of these we hope to distribute to individuals and communities across Bristol.
