New Funding Award from The National Lottery Heritage

DWYS has been granted £112,100 by the National Lottery Heritage fund to develop a new comprehensive programme of activity. This will include: 14x new artist commissions, an archival training programme for women of colour, educational resources, various one-off events and a summer exhibition in 2024.

Artist Commissions

We are commissioning 7x emerging / mid-career artists to expand this work. Selected artists will be invited to explore local archives and produce creative responses over a 6 month period. A public exhibition will be held in July 2024. Drawing from the socialist legacy of Dig Where You Stand, we are particularly interested in regional stories about working class people of colour. We also place an emphasis on stories from before 1945. This disrupts mainstream narratives about migration in Britain, which suggests that people of colour only came to these shores after World War II. However, we remain open to other areas of interest expressed by artists.

RESOURCE PACK

We will develop and share a new DWYS resource pack. This will be free to download for community groups, schools and colleges to use when “digging” into the local history of their own communities. The resources here share stories found in Sheffield Archives but we want you, with the help of this pack, to go to your own archives . Digging starts with you.

TRAINING PROGRAMME

We will collaborate with WOC Azadi Collective to develop an archival training programme for women of colour. This is to address the historic erasure of women of colour from archival spaces. It is also to create a safer space for unpacking the violence in the archive, learning about the lost and fragmented lives contained within it, and supporting one another on this archive journey. Workshops take place once a month over six months. And each workshop is followed by a group meal.