Here’s an extract from Danny’s Rochdale piece. Danny says: “ I took a slightly different approach as originally planned, as there wasn’t chance to construct an installation which directly engaged through sensors with people/noise/movement in the museum space. Instead I took inspiration from the ‘uncovering’ going on in Rochdale town when I visited (the old river I think) as well as in the Ghost Labs. There were also some very interesting sounds behind the conversations you captured Max (almost machine like, with what sounded to me like tills/sales ringing away in the background…) so the piece involved some spectral and rhythmic analysis of those too.”

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An extract of the documentation from our project sound artist, Danny Bright’s, South Yorkshire installation

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How wonderfully encompassing of answers and questions is the experience of participating in the Social Haunting Ghostlabs!

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Ghosts of Hem Heathor things that will always be there, even when they’re not.

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End of project event in Sheffield, 6th Jan 2016. To mark the end of the project (although hopefully only for the time-being!), we returned to the Unite community in South Yorkshire to share the project outputs.

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I came across this organisation that does some really interesting work that seems closely related to our project. They organise community workshops, mostly in South America, where participants produce shared story maps to illustrate struggles in their communities. They’re in Spanish, but here’s an example of a map created by members of the 15M movement in Spain that should make some sense even if you can’t read the text:

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A friend brought this video to my attention after I told her about Social Haunting. It is rather terrific. I love the line “Just when I think I’m winning, when I’ve broken every door, the ghosts of my life blow out of their before.” Also, given the theme of my 100 word story that I just posted in ‘After Manchester’ will you allow me to find it uncanny that the singer refers to daylight leaving his room, that it is raining everywhere, leaving him no particular place to go?!  

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So, ghosts from our people’s unresolved pasts linger in our present. Do they curb our horizons or spur us toward the margins wherein and where from our utopias can be dreamed and acted on again?

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Stuart, one of our project participants from Unite in Barnsley has drawn our attention to this online comic strip by Kate Evans (whose biography of Rosa Luxemburg, Red Rosa, I’m looking forward to reading soon!).

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Sometimes you can’t help but reveal a seam. The surface breaks up, just enough, and it becomes obvious – sitting there just below, behind and in front. Maybe you knew it was there, maybe you had been digging for it for a long time, missing, or thinking you caught a glimpse but just finding dust. Perhaps you thought you were looking right at it, but it was, in fact, obscured. Or maybe you’d forgotten, presumed it had been exhausted, thought you’d escaped it.

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Here are some examples of the comics produced.

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Our Barnsley group finished the project with a comics workshop led by Jim Medway. They explored how to use comics to express a range of ideas from physical divisions within their communities to their own experiences of transitioning between different communities.

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Meanwhile, Andrew was working his usual magic in the parallel poetry Ghost Lab :)

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Here are some of the comics they created - fantastic work in under an hour!

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Yesterday, we were at Rochdale Literature & Ideas Festival. Andrew ran another poetry Ghost Lab and comics artist Jim Medway ran the first comics Ghost Lab of the project. We were hosted by the Rochdale Pioneers Museum (thanks to Clare and the rest of the the team!).

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Here are some examples of what was created by participants in the Ghost Lab. Once again, we were all incredibly excited to witness how poetry can expose social ghosts that would otherwise remain hidden.

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This week, we moved over to the Lancashire side of the project and held our ghost lab at the Co-op College in Manchester.Andrew McMillan ran another fantastic writing workshop. He got the group doing three activities:

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