HERITAGE
KEEPERS
Mapping the Terrain through Art
Art and culture make considerable and well being of community development and positive change in the society. Arts and culture are powerful tools with which to engage communities in various levels of change. The Art and culture are powerful tools to engage the communities of change. They are meant for public dialogue to create a strong community development of creative learning industry for community development of creative learning, create awareness of community social challenges, create a healthy community capable of action, provide a powerful tool for community mobilisation, help to build community capacity and leadership. The communities use art of dialogue to express difficult issues, emotional and exciting moments as well as raising awareness of important issues of affecting the communities. A positive means a positive means to be visible and heard provided by arts. Arts helps us to understand our value and means of communication of what matter to us, our values, reflect what matters to meaningful and sense to us whether this is through the song, identity painting, play and acting. Writing and history project brings to us general understanding of one’s family heritage neighbourhood. Culture learning begins with social capital stories we share and helps to build person sense of belonging and stories helps to enter into person’s sense of changing attitudes, characters and beliefs. We each have a story which tells about who we are, where we have come from, where we are going. Story telling is powerful facilitator of culture and spiritual identity and development. Creativity allows people to explore values, meaning and dreams and rise their expectations what is possible and needed. Arts empowerment through the use community and art also helps for policy change and link local to national politics.
Professional Artists work with the African Descent young Arts Heritage Keepers to explore the power of art heritage of Vancouver African Descent Community through instilling new skills of story-telling, music, painting, music and art craft empowered by creative art to understand their power in community development with ideas of Sankofa African bird literary means People of African Descent , moving forward guided by the past which teaches us that it’s not wrong to go back for that which you have forgotten. This project intends to professional artists engages with the community to develop new art practicing skills and their art form burning the social issues to the work they do together. The artist and young community partners using the art for rediscovering the power of art in revitalization of heritage and culture of African Descent community. This can help for using art to focus on certain issues of community concerns like educational goals, political life, health recovery, community regeneration, community rejuvenation and awareness of arts and culture still relevant to community members for preservation in Downtown Hogan’s Alley and Black Strathcona. We hope to see real change start through these collaboration reaching across racial discriminations by bringing young people together and avoid while preserving history, art and culture that might have been lost due to the removing of the Viaduct and major changes being proposed by the City planners.
Our project will contain various engagement interactive events such as:
- Archiving
- documentation of community issues
- interviews
- website development
- creating blog project for the activities
- music hip hop workshops series
- storytelling
- mini museum
- art workshops
- painting the community and;
- mapping terrain for a community
The project intends to educate and awareness of major contributions, stories, stories and issues faced by the people of African Descent in Vancouver since 1859 to 1972 following the construction of Georgia and Dunsmuir Viaduct destroyed the community.
The project will explore how transform community struggle to survive through art based practices in the community by bringing diverse communities together to work with professional artist to see their strength as a diverse community collaborate to deal with community issues through the power of arts and build their capacity to work together as unlikely collaborators to solve community development. The artist collaborates with some of our community members as creators, performers and active participants in the community which can leave a lasting legacy for our community neighbourhood. Our artist program will make our neighbourhoods more vibrant. We use art as a catalyst for young people explore art impact in their community development. African Descent Art Keepers as an art collective believe that reclaiming or transforming our cultural spaces is both in power of, and the duty of artists in the community. The learned skills and opportunities on the rich legacy of the Black Strathcona and Hogan’s Alley and Vancouver African Descent history of art impact in our community space is a way of showing that art can be a tool for revitalisation and rejuvenation of a neighbourhood and reduce or permanently prevents displacement in the community.
