ReSpace works with young people in the Rwanda, Kosovo and the UK to engage with the past, experience the present and imagine the future of and through places of significance, using arts-based participatory methods.
‘It is to space – the space we occupy, traverse, have continual access to, or can at any time reconstruct in thought and imagination that we must turn our attention. Our thought must turn to it, if this or that category of remembrance is to reappear.’ (Halbwachs, 1996)
ReSpace is an AHRC funded research project that investigates how concepts of space, through arts-based participatory methods, can engage young people that have no memory of the histories of violence and conflict in Rwanda and Kosovo [as Hirsch (2008) described them a post-memory generation] to reimagine specific sites of memory. As part of this inquiry it developed a number of art and design methods in combination with anthropological and architectural approaches to encourage young people to explore the cultural heritage of space as well as re-‘invent” these spaces as a means to engage with historical narratives from the past and voices in the present.
ReSpace is part of the AHRC funded project Changing The Story, led by Leeds University. The project is run by University of Rwanda, Pristina University and Bournemouth University with partner institutions the African Digital Media Academy, Rwanda and AniBar, Kosovo.
