This March we launched our first ever funding scheme with a pot of £15,000 that was shared between nine projects from Levenshulme residents who were chomping at the bit to do something new that coincided with our social aims – exploring new ideas for our high street or creating or growing their own retail enterprises. All our winners have now received their funding and have been beavering away getting their projects off the ground over the last six months and have agreed to share their progress with us…and you! So over the next five weeks we will share updates from each of our winning projects on what they have been up to since March and how they have spent their funding so far.
Our next update comes from LCAC – Levenshulme Contemporary Art Centre who received £2210.00 to set up a temporary, non-profit making hub of radical thinking for the Levenshulme community. Read below to see how they got on:
Between July 10th-26th 2015, Levenshulme Contemporary Art Centre, as LCAC Projects, hosted the LCAC Shop on Levenshulme Village Green, with additional activities taking place at Fred’s Ale House and Bankley Studios. For these seventeen days, we ran a series of discussions, exhibitions, workshops and other participatory events, each of which was free and open to the public, and themed around urban space, regeneration and the relationship between art and politics. These included: a twice-daily reading group of David Harvey’s Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism; a zine-making workshop; philosophy workshops for children; film screenings; an ‘Imaginary Bike Ride’, rethinking the A6 as a cycle-friendly route; ‘Failed Journeys’, highlighting the inaccessibility of Levenshulme train station; ‘Orçamento Participativo’, exploring alternative social models; a discussion about homelessness led by Colyn Alcock; ‘What is Home?’, an exhibition by Manchester-based Swedish artists; ‘Border Paintings’, an exhibition by Levenshulme artist, Chris Hamer; ‘Case Studies in Joint Action’, a specially-commissioned dance performance choreographed by Jia-Yu Corti with Thomas Smith and Mark Marrington; and a sponsored live reading of Karl Marx’s Capital to raise money for Manchester children’s charity, Wood Street Mission.
The programme culminated with a roundtable discussion on the ideas raised by the previous events, featuring Dr. Danielle Child (MMU), Dr. Thomas Smith (University of Manchester), Mark Marrington and Dave Beech (Chelsea College of Art, Freee Art Collective).
We’re enormously grateful to Levenshulme Market for funding us; the project was a huge success, and LCAC Projects will be back in the near future with further events and new commissions.
