Calligraphy - and a Pop-Up

Farzana Patel followed up her calligraphy sessions with young people at the Islamic School with two sessions with the Different Moons Women's Group at Haslingden Community Link. The final session was last week, and now all of the Different Moons workshops are over, with the exception of 4 additional sessions being held with Year 6 at St Mary's C of E School in Rawtenstall. 

All of the Women's Sessions have been very popular, and we're now considering a new initiative as part of the Different Moons project - looking for a 'pop-up' base in Haslingden which can be used by groups like these to hold their own meetings and workshop and other training. One of the common complaints from South Asian women in Haslingden is the lack of available spaces where they can easily meet, talk, and learn. There's Community Link, of course, which is very popular, and the local library, but neither are quite right for small informal sessions, and so most of this type of meeting are currently held in the ladies' front rooms. For a variety of reasons this often inconvenient and restrictive, so we are looking at a pilot project for a new communal space, focusing on the needs of the South Asian women, but not excluding the wider community or, possibly, male participants. 

Mr Miahs book launch

We were invited to a Bengali gathering in Oldham. A special occasion organised by the English Bengali newspaper Probash Bangla to celebrate members of the their community who had made a special contribution to both British Bengali life and to Bangladesh. 

The gathering was to celebrate the publication of Mohammed Miah's book. Mr Miah is someone I've known for many years and he was one of the people we've interviewed as part of the Different Moons project, and he invited us to come along to the event - something we felt very honoured to be part of. 

The last animation session

Today was the last of the three Different Moons animation workshops at Haslingden Library. The workshops have been great fun, and the girls who stayed throughout are born animators...

Above with Shamshad Khan, as we recorded an audio track for the film, and below Rehmat Gangreker, who led the sessions.

Asian Girls in Haslingden

It was a really good day today; we held a day long session at Haslingden Library with a group of girls and young women, creating animations based on a poem written last year by another group from the same library.

Led by Rehmat Gangreker and supported by Shamshad Khan, Arry Nessa and Elisa Sarchi, we watched some of the animations already made for Different Moons and then the girls decided which parts of the poem - A Bengali Girl in Haslingden - they would choose to animate. Lunch was provided for everyone in the early afternoon...

Anne Bullock and Leesa Amin from the Youth Service joined us for the session, and Habiba Shenza dropped by to join us for the lunch. It was great to see so many people enjoying the work being done by the girls. These workshops continue after a holiday break next weekend - with two further sessions before the film will be completed.

Elisa

The Different Moons workshop programme is moving forward - the first series of classes with the Rossendale Valley Islamic Supplementary School have been completed, but classes at St. Mary's Church of England Primary School in Rawtenstall, and with Asian Women at Haslingden Community Link have started this week. On Saturday a new girl's group will also start at Haslingden Library, learning to make animated films. 

Helping Shamshad and Arry with these classes is Elisa Sarchi (in the photo above), who is working with Horse + Bamboo for three months. Elisa is from Pavia, near Milan in northern Italy, and is part of a traineeship programme funded by Paviasviluppo, enabling trainees to work abroad in cultural and creative areas. She is particularly interested in seeing how the arts are used in developing initiatives in a community setting, as with our Different Moons project.

The Women's Forum

Three screenshots from Jessica Royle's animation 'The Women's Forum'. The subject is taken from an interview with Samina Raffat Hussain, in which Samina reminisces on her early days in Haslingden. 

This is the fifth animation in the Different Moons series that are based and inspired by interviews with some of the early South Asian immigrants to Rossendale. The two minute film took Jessica two months to make.

By the end of 2015 we hope to have between 15 and 20 animated films which will be available through a special YouTube channel. 

The second week - a Calligraphy Moon.

Today we held the second session of 2015 at Rossendale Valley Islamic School - developing the introduction to calligraphy that Farzana was leading last week. Today the group learned to write their own names in Arabic calligraphy, and then write the words DIFFERENT MOONS, again in Arabic, but in the form of a crescent moon:

Farzana and Shamshad with their one of their two groups of RVISS students. Photo by Elisa Sarchi.

There's now a two week break at the Haslingden Community Link centre. It closes for Easter and then Shamshad and Farzana will continue these classes, as well as begin a series of workshops with South Asian women.