The Place We Imagine: Sharing Food & Drink at Platt Hall
How can sharing food and drink at Platt Hall bring people, collections and heritage together through health and wellbeing, food sustainability and belonging?
The Place We Imagine is a programme of creative research residencies at Platt Hall. Funded by Paul Hamlyn Foundation, it uses socially engaged art thinking and practice to inform the development of the Hall. The first of these, Sharing Food and Drink, considers how food and drink can build relationships of trust and belonging across the communities in this neighbourhood. It includes research into options for improved kitchen and dining facilities in the Hall, and the commissioning of two artists, who will work with our participant groups to explore beliefs, practices, rituals and meanings around food and drink.
All our programmes explore different ways of collective decision-making with communities and partners. For this one, shortlisted artists Anjum Malik and Thomas Wells presented ideas to a wider group of stakeholders, whose feedback fed into the final selection by a panel made up of Platt Hall volunteers and staff.
I’m absolutely delighted to have been given this fantastic opportunity at Platt Hall. I love to explore food through poetry and drama, thinking about memory and place, and how food connects us to each other. Food is what we as humans have to eat daily to survive; what we eat, with whom, where, how, when and why makes us unique, and what brings us together around a plate, a table, a place. Platt Hall offers the perfect setting, I’m especially excited to work with the garden volunteers and local communities, creating poems and stories to honour this rich exciting place.
Anjum Malik
I am an artist and curator based between Manchester and Belfast. My practice is guided by socially engaged principles of collaboration and community building that often develop as installations, events, and performances. My proposal entitled, 'Pack'd Lunch' is a food and migration project to look at the relationship between food, memory and storytelling. Thinking about how recipes and traditions can be carried with us, remade and offer us a slice of home. My practice has been embedded within domestic rituals, often looking at the habits most familiar to us.
Thomas Wells
MEET THE ARTISTS
This is really exciting! I'd be really happy to work with both artists on ideas for projects at the Hall with Heald Place Primary School. It was great to be involved - it was a lovely morning and very nice to meet other members of the community.
Lucette Henderson, Heald Place Primary School
MORE PROJECTS
IN THE WINDOW
A project transforming Platt Hall's windows into a public art display showcases local artwork, keeping the community connected even when the Hall is closed.