Creative Arts projects with an extended family of refugees and local communities. We exchange and express stories of the Holocaust, genocides and contemporary persecution. We challenge discrimination of any kind and work towards a kinder future.
The Story of 6 million+
In 2005, Kirklees Council initiated a project to collect over 6 million buttons to illustrate the industrial scale of the Holocaust and other genocides. The public collection began in West Yorkshire, but word soon spread and many of the buttons were collected regionally, nationally and even internationally. Leeds based artist Antonia Stowe designed the installation for Huddersfield Art Gallery. 6 million+ had a huge impact on visitors and toured nationally for the next five years to places including Ripon Cathedral and Brent Cross Shopping Centre in London. The project involved thousands of young people, community groups and individuals in the process of collecting buttons and thinking about genocide and discrimination. The installation included a film featuring conversations between Holocaust survivors and asylum seekers and poetry written in response.
A group of individuals involved with this work, with new people on board too, are continuing the creative arts and educational work as an independent charitable trust (launched in June 2014) and developing international exchanges and local projects, especially in Dewsbury and Batley in collaboration with Creative Scene. We are currently responsible for Holocaust Memorial Day in North Kirklees and run arts projects with professional artists, local people and refugees online and face to face (when possible) throughout the year. We have achieved some fame for our 'Weeping Sisters' procession of giant figures who commemorate the Holocaust and other genocides; we make them with local people and refugees. Under lockdown, in summer 2020, we completed 'Small Contentments' with 70 participants from 14 countries; the film resulting from this project that commemorated the 25th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre has been seen by over 10,000 people. January 2021 sees two creative lockdown projects; a virtual Holocaust Memorial Day collaboration, supported by Bradford and Kirklees Councils, and 'Collect your belongings', an online shadow puppetry, writing and drama project with our family of participants that will continue until March. We rely on our own fundraising to carry out our work.
