Family Event: Untold Stories – Visualising History 3

Celebrate International Day for people from African Descent

Learn about 36 Craven Street’s lesser-known 18th C young resident and help us tell their story.

This creative and collective storytelling workshop is designed primarily for ages 10-16. However, all are welcome to take part.

Group size: Up to 15 participants

Themes: Transatlantic slave trade, migration, freedom, child narratives

Activities: Storytelling and tracing, comics-as-poetry – comics and ode and concreate poetry, collaborative imaginative drawing (large continuous paper, swap places while drawing, draw with eyes closed, observational drawing - take a line for a walk/run – Paul Klee – not lifting pen off paper), deep mapping.

Meet our illustrator in residence, Kremena Dimitrova, and learn about her research related to the museum. Kremena is a London based illustrator-as-historian who specialises in public history through visual storytelling - children's illustration, comics, murals, public art installations, maps/trails. Co-creating with children and young people, Kremena interweaves text and images, creative writing, characters, and humour to bring hidden and forgotten archives/narratives to life. www.kremenadimitrova.com

Explore how illustration can be used to visualise history by practicing your existing creative skills and by learning new artistic techniques.

Help us co-create a research comic and co-curate an exhibition at Benjamin Franklin House on 2-18 December 2024.

“Creative and collaborative work helps to uncover and communicate marginalised and diverse stories. But, it is essential to acknowledge how much we do not – and will never – know about children’s lives in the past. This offers valuable scope to engage visitors in the practice and ethics of research and story-telling.” (Lamb & Pooley, 2023, p. 2). Traversing histories and geographies across time and space, this workshop draws on R.G. Collingwood’s (1946/1994, p. 245) theory and approach to re-constructing knowledge about the past that relies on the historical imagination, or in Collingwood’s own words “… the historian’s picture of the past is… in every detail an imaginary picture…”.

Related Visualising History workshops you can join:

Friday 30 August 2024 at 10am-12pm

Saturday 31 August 2024 at 10am-12pm

Host or Publisher Benjamin Franklin House