Over by Christmas
CLIENT - East Side Partnership
This project explored the commonalities between the experience of East Belfast Residents during the current pandemic and the pandemic of 1918 through the lens of History and Creativity. The project involved Research, Conversations, Storytelling, Poetry and Art.
The research built on the enthusiastic work of a local amateur history group. Who’s conversations helped us to shape the project.
We told the story of an imagined visit of a Doctor from a silent movie about the Influenza Pandemic of 1918, who somehow ends up in East Belfast in 2021.
We met via Zoom with focus groups representing the intersection of Creativity and History; one group or Artists and one group of Historians. We asked the participants to imagine what the time-travelling Doctor would make of Belfast today, and in particular, what would he think about our response to the current pandemic. We discussed public health messaging, resilience, and trust. We shared our experiences, insights and imagination.
These conversations also included our Poet. The conversations inspired the commissioned poem below, which was then made into postcards and distributed to 6000 people’s houses in Inner East Belfast.
On the back was a QR code and a link to the website with all the information about the project, the funders and more.
Three Waves
During the first surge, they built borders and beds.
Scrap wood: boards, wardrobes, and pallets;
all measured, trimmed and sanded.
Boxy raised beds planted out
with seeds of subsistence.
In summers second swell
they swam every day at high tide,
keeping heads above water. Sometimes
they swallowed sea, spluttered and spat.
Watched kids hunt beached treasure,
as rainbows refracted on ripples.
By the time the tidal wave came
there were sea borders and more controls,
but they'd learnt to surf; balance waxed boards
on surface tension. Feeling winds, currents, changing course
and the wave subsiding they edged towards shallow water's safety.