‘I feel that I’ve been heard now. This morning I was invisible. Now someone knows I’m here.’ (Anon, Booth Centre)
A Map of You (2011)
Homeless people in Manchester wrote themselves into the public eye, creating ‘customised’ tourist postcards and Lowry postcards of Manchester and Salford.
a map of you postcards carry tiny stories, little snatches of homeless people’s lives. In the white space between the buildings, the stories appear, some stencilled, some handwritten, some self-explanatory, funny, dour, elusive. The cards are designed to bring attention to a group in society who are often overlooked, but have much to offer.
L, a homeless person in Bury, said: ‘People who suffer have knowledge.’ The skin of these writers is thin; through it they feel the world intensely and report with great vividness.
Exhibitions:
2014 Text Festival and on BBC Online website.
2012 I Live Temporary, was a digital animated version of the cards, shown at MediaCityUK
2011 The postcards were exhibited in Bury Transport Museum
2011 Artwork/poems from the project were shown on the BBC Big Screen in Manchester city centre over the course of the year, and tweeted by advertising company LOVE. Audience approx 91,000
To view more of the postcards http://www.flickr.com/
129 Participants From Manchester and Bury aged 16 to 65+ Gender Male 105, Female 24
Supported by Arts Council England, Bury MBC and The Lowry – and is working in partnership with The Big Issue in the North, The Red Door Housing Concern Centre, Brighter Futures at Bury Adult Learning Service, The Booth Centre and LOVE Creative.
Press and media
2011 BBC Online
2011 BBC Radio interview
2011 http://mailout.co
2011 Feature in The Big Issue in the North
TWEET FROM ENGELS
“walk past a restaurant // smile @ them thats th mask // I wont let them see me hungry #rainer” (Tweet from Engels)
Tweet From Engels is an ‘anti-epic’ poem made from encounters with homeless people, as part of our a map of you project. The raw material of all of this is the lives of homeless people, which in some cases are as harsh as the working class lives Engels described in 19th century Manchester.
Tweet from Engels, was disseminated through our Twitter feed. (2014) @tweetfromengels. Having something as big as this arrive in instalments was a good bite-size way to read, little verse fragments incoming as mobile phone updates or emails. The verses become surprises; some of them jolt because the stories they tell are so sad and sore. They are tales of the so-called ‘underclass’, a term that’s started appearing in the papers again, in post-riots jargon.
TWEET FROM ENGELS (part of A MAP OF YOU PROJECT) was projected onto Stockport Market Place, as part of the Big Digital Project (2014)
Projected onto Manchester Town Hall, (date?)
Retweeted by Manchester Central Library (2017) @archivesplus #tweetfromengels to 11.8K followers
