Project Description
The fourth year for the Festival in Portsmouth engaged audiences from across the city with performances, workshops and film screenings.
A fun-filled launch hosted by Outside-In Food Court featured live music, delicious food and powerful storytelling in partnership with Pamodzi Creatives. A Community Conversations poetry workshop with Maggie Harris at Portsmouth Museum was also a great for young people to achieve their Discover Arts Award while exploring journeys and views of Portsmouth through poetry.
Isobel Tarr’s, The Channel, was hosted at the University of Portsmouth. Thought-provoking conversations were had both as part of the installation and between audiences, the artist and people with experience of indefinite detention.
Photographer Rich Wiles’ Ongoing Journeys exhibition took the ‘WhatsApp still-lives’ with family archive photographs to create a personal, yet collaborative, project. It movingly brought together an extended Syrian family in images despite the physical distance between them.
The rain didn’t put a dampener on Portsmouth’s Journeys Live event either. In the shelter of Outside-In Food Court, there was a day of free, live entertainment. Celebrating talented artists from around the world, the line-up included the traditional and enchanting music of Mahroo Diba and the powerful vocals of Hamsa Mounif alongside the joy of the World Harmony Orchestra and the funky Afro Cluster.
Laurence Payot’s Angels video portraits appeared at some particularly exciting outdoor locations including the crane at Gunwharf Quays in partnership with Aspex. Featuring refugee and asylum seeker participants from across the UK, the portraits reminded those passing by how we can cope with difficult situations by finding strength in the things that make us happy. In other words, finding some light in the darkness.
See below for film and gallery highlights from the festival.
