Feminine mystique

In February 2012 a group of 16 women, aged between 14 and over 80, met for the first time at The Women’s Library in Aldgate, East London. Over the coming months, with the help of three skilled artists from Magic Me, the women will draw on memory and research to explore the connection between love and place, as part of an art project called Where the Heart is. They will produce podcasts and short films that will create a virtual walk around the Aldgate area; to be presented as part of LIFT 2012.

Magic Me is the UK’s leading provider of intergenerational arts projects, with 22 years in the field. Our team of freelance artists, from the performing, visual, literary and media arts, reached over 500 people last year in diverse places and spaces. Where the Heart is is Magic Me’s ninth annual project at The Women’s Library, London Metropolitan University.

The demographic of Tower Hamlets brings us a group of huge diversity. The young women are from Mulberry School for Girls, a community school with a 98% Sylhetti Bangladeshi intake. The older women are Jewish, African, African Caribbean, South Asian, Scottish, English and Irish. Magic Me works with both groups separately before they meet, to give everyone a chance to air preconceptions and assumptions, fears and expectations. Everyone comes with willingness and curiosity, but no one is untouched by experiences of a society where both old and young can be marginalised, where racism ignites easily, and where there are few places a group such as this would or could meet.

What we look for each year is a theme that will not advantage one group over the other. We look for questions and lines of enquiry that are open to all the women, whatever their age. This is different to reminiscence work; neither age group’s narrative is dominant. Instead the focus is on building common themes and connections. Differences are not left outside. There are tensions and difficulties, but the work builds a space safe enough for these to be present, but not destructive.

The Women’s Library offers a space that defines no-one by their age. It says only that we are all women; giving everyone an equal start. The Library also houses a huge collection of resources relating to women’s history.

This year our focus is Suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst. She campaigned doggedly for equal rights for women, experienced acute family tensions and set up crèches so that working class mothers could work and learn. Looking at and handling documents relating to her story will spark the women’s stories; tales of friendship, family, romance, passion for a faith or cause, and stories of love lost. These will be shaped through the use of writing, audio recording, film and image layering, and theatre. And all the time the group will be building relationships.

Over the years project participants have often talked about being surprised by themselves and by one another. The question we always need to ask is: Why is it better to do this together, rather than separately? The women bring each other attention, curiosity and support, enabling them to exceed their own expectations, and to hear their own voices freshly. One participant remarked: “I did not expect to have anything in common with you, but you are not what I expected.”

With support from a National Lottery grant through Arts Council England, Magic Me will undertake two important research projects in 2012 and 2013: a review of ten years of Women’s Library projects and the particularity of women-only intergenerational work; and an exploration of how different artforms support relationship-building, focusing on three projects working towards performances at Wilton’s Music Hall this May, in partnership with theatre company Duckie.