Remembering Together Highland: Final reflections
Three years after the pandemic began, how would you answer the question “what just happened”? How would the people around you answer the same question? How would your community answer it? With such a wide range of individual experiences, positive and negative, peaceful and chaotic, often developing in isolation from those nearby, how could a story or a history of these years ever be recorded?
The first phase of Toll gathered answers to this question from communities and individuals the length and breadth of the Highland region. We conversed, listened, and shared our collective and individual experiences. From this engagement, the artists developed a creative response to these answers, ideas and suggestions from those who participated.
Sinéad, Cat and Hector worked with a range of communities and individuals in different settings and locations to supplement the research conducted in phase one, finding the individual, the idiosyncratic, the unrepresentative and the turbulent. They worked together to create written contributions or statements which will be inscribed on handbells. The contributions will hold and retell the stories, emotions, and responses of the people of the Highlands.
The handbells were fabricated by bell makers Daniel Freyne and David Snoo Wilson from a forge at Ratho, near Edinburgh. The letters from each inscription were individually hand punched into the metal.
Groups and individuals participated in travelling with the bells collectively and individually through various routes on a procession through the Highlands in June 2024. These groups were ones that had engaged before and submitted statements for the bells, and also included open public sessions and individual meets with others. The community groups informed the routes, where the bells were taken to and what the sessions looked like. Sessions began with an introduction to the project and each participant had the opportunity to engage with the bells, to find the statement that most resonated with them, that they wished to carry and ring.
The participants then travelled with the bells - often on a walking route that was significant to the community, or passed by places such as a residential care home, to visit and share the experience further. There were also other ways to travel such as using bikes with the Cycling Without Age group in Wick. Sessions often included a celebratory hospitality event - for example tea and cake in Mallaig and a community barbeque in Tongue. The route also took in situations without participants present, where bells were rung in different locations, situations with different people present or not. Sometimes the bells were left silent.
The entire route as a whole was documented by filmmaker Mike Webster. The film will exist as a legacy of the project alongside the physical bells. Finally, the bells will be held by trusted custodians. Those who may wish to ring them now or in the future, and to keep them for future generations to come and ring. These custodians will be in the form of community groups, individuals and organisations and will become part of a distributed archive.
The creative response film and documentary work will be shown in three distinct events. These are planned to take place in early 2025 in Skye, Caithness and Inverness, inviting participating groups to see these works and engage with the bells again and inviting new publics to experience this iteration of the project.
Furthermore the bells will then live on as part of a distributed archive. Each community we have worked with will be invited to become caretakers of the bell they contributed to. They will be responsible thereafter for the care and maintenance of the bell.
As well as the community groups distributed archive, regional centres will also take a part in archiving. They will be invited to acquisition some of the bells to be held in their archive to ensure a lasting community legacy.
For more information about Remembering Together Highland visit Lyth Arts Centre