National Festival of Making

As part of our project with The People's Jury on the Climate Crisis, we were invited to take part in the National Festival of Making, and bring our conversations on climate change to the public.

Over the weekend of the 8th and 9th July 2023, we were out in Blackburn town centre with a series of chalk plinths, built by the Jury group in a community workshop taking place a few days before.

In June, we gathered with the Jury for a creative workshop to decide how best we can get the public to share messages of hope, opinions and advice to contribute towards our final installation. We discussed how to build a campaign for change, articulating through creative collage and drawing the project motivations, actions and visions.

On the smaller chalk plinths, we had a number of statements, prompting the public to fill in the blank. Our prompts were split into the same motivations, actions and visions, like 'I love my local area because...', 'We need green spaces to...' and 'We as a family will...' amongst others.

On the large plinth, we had four questions prompting the public to share their tips and tricks, actions for change, recommendations of local initiatives and knowledge on how climate change will affect our lives.

Following our work at the festival, we are in the process of collectively reviewing the content and building the online forum, with a view to launch the final piece in September at a celebration event in partnership with Blackburn BID.