The Nightjar Project
The Nightjar Project uses the nocturnal bird and its migration to investigate ideas of movement and homeland, between Ghana and the UK. The project takes the rich narrative of migration, folklore, and the environmental peculiarity of the Nightjar to consider life living under two skies, examine cultural and historically views, and share stories of land management. It brings together a group of creative, educational and environmental organizations to explore these questions.
African Activities, SPUD, and the New Forest National Park Authority set out to define the possibilities of creative conversations between these communities. Their aim is to invite us all to think of belonging to places and communities. How work and live alongside each other and to share our stories of belonging. This is a two-year project and to set the agenda for further discussions we are starting with an exhibition by Kwame Bakoji-Hume, multiple workshops in storytelling and environmental creativity, a series of ‘Sound Scrapes’ from Ghana and a commissioning of a film by the artist James Elliot looking at land management.
Tell Us a Story About Belonging
Ghanaian artist, musician and community leader, Kwame Bakoji-Hume, is creating an exhibition of works that shares his story, from his early childhood in Ghana, though building his ‘family’ in a children’s home, migration and how he fits into the bigger picture of dual homelands and being part of an African diaspora in the New Forest, living under two skies. The exhibition will be full of symbolic language, embedded storytelling and interpretation within his painting and sculptural works. It’s the excitement of a living craft of oral cultures that can tell the story historic and contemporary ideas of belonging. Within the exhibition we want to invite people to tell their story of belonging as we build a body of individual stories. From the questions that arise from Kwame’s work and audience responses further work and discussions will be sparked.
Sound Scrapes
Sound Scrapes is part of The Nightjar project that takes reminiscent recordings of Ghanaian life that evokes Kwame to think of place and transposes them into related environments here in the New Forest. It draws parallels and, naturally, comparisons between the two places. Some common to all and others clearly dissimilar. It gently asks questions of difference, of lived experience within both cultures and colonial histories that sit underneath. The Nightjar Project uses the bird’s migration to represent the fluid movement of people, histories, cultures and ideas between the UK and Ghana.
Fires Across the Earth
The third strand of questions the Nightjar Project set out to ask is related to the marginal environment that the nightjar choses to live in. How similar or different the threat might be in Ghana and the New Forest National Park Authority, and what benefits might come from sharing information on community and land management, in particular the historic regenerative tool of controlled burning. The artist James Elliott was commissioned to make a film around the community decisions and the physical work of managing a specific environment on The New Forest that encourages and supports nightjars and other biodiversity. The film will be sent to African Activities Foundation in Ghana along with questions from the NFNPA to discuss land management and stories of nightjar numbers and habitat.