Lightbear Lane: ‘Proud to Be’ - Routes and Roots West of the River
Lightbear Lane are a small, Exeter-based non-profit organisation who shine a light on the importance of the arts, culture, performance and music in community, nature and heritage spaces. Through facilitation, consultancy and artistic practice, joint directors Dr Judith Morgane and Sarah Spencer utilise and re-purpose different spaces to support wellbeing in communities and help them take creative ownership of their spaces.
Lightbear Lane’s ‘Proud to Be’ is a community-driven arts and heritage project, designed to explore and celebrate local pride of place, identity and belonging. The initiative brings together diverse community voices, capturing stories, experiences and creativity to create a shared story of place. Centred on co-creation, the project uses film, visual art and storytelling to give individuals the tools and confidence to tell their own stories, resulting in a collective work that reflects the richness and diversity of the community.
The project seeks to:
Encourage people from all backgrounds to reflect on and share what makes them proud of their community.
Foster social cohesion by creating space for conversations across cultures, generations and life experiences to address the challenges we are facing together.
Build participants’ agency and confidence to express themselves.
Contribute to local cultural heritage by documenting contemporary lived experiences.
Building on the work and development from the previous Creative Arc-funded project in Mincinglake and Whipton, this next iteration featured a series of creative sessions with people from different areas west of the river, giving them space to think about the neighbourhood and what really matters to them. People loved exploring the map and tracing their everyday routes. Some of the stories about why people have put down roots here are truly inspiring and LIghtbear have recorded some of them as podcasts. For children, the chance to make a ‘postcard’ showing their favourite place and win a prize is exciting and their teachers were delighted to have a project that connects them to the local community.
Lightbear mapped the area with 78 adults and 144 children and arrived at routes that show the river is a major artery for traffic (walking and cycling). Green spaces are highly valued, as are easy-to-reach amenities and places of cultural significance. Overlaying the street map, a new network of connections emerged – that of people going about their lives, stopping and making connections with people and nature: special place names, hidden nature spots and overlooked wildlife are all part of the rich findings.
There is now an interactive digital platform for people to not only look at other people’s reflections but also to add their own. The multimedia platform links to photos, podcasts and videos, and this archive of intangible heritage continues to grow. Having literally mapped these findings onto the Exeter Street Map, the result is the ‘People’s Network’, reminiscent of the London tube map.
This part of the project is just the start: there is much more to discover and many more stories to tell. In the community showcase event, people expressed enthusiasm to see the ‘People’s Network’ map on mugs and other merchandise. This will be a way to take home a piece of co-created work that reflects our participants’ contributions, allow traders to sell something to promoting local identity and provide opportunity to continue to share the project and its outputs.
This commission further enhanced Lightbear Lane’s position as a strong cultural player, one that is trusted to speak from a respected platform about communities and their understanding of the place they call home. They have already been approached to potentially deliver community consultations in other areas.