SPIRASI SUMMER 2006
Art Project - Story Telling

In summer 2006 22 participants gathered at SPIRASI to share and collect stories that they knew from their childhoods. Each story that was told triggered memories in others and over the weeks 22 different stories emerged. As they were narrated they were recorded and later on they were written down. The stories are all different and yet they are all strangely familiar. In this simple way they reflect both our diversity as peoples and our shared humanity.

Our plan in 2007 is to produce a package of both this CD and its accompanying booklet and to make it available to schools throughout Ireland . We will also encourage schools to invite our newly trained story tellers to share their stories in person – as we have already done recently with 3 schools in Dublin 15.

When we communicate with one another we often do so by telling stories – we narrate what we did during the day, what we did last night, what we did last week, what we did on holidays, and what we used to do as children. Some stories are so good they get repeated often. Some are so good, that they get shared more widely, they take on a shared meaning, they become part of our identity, part of cultural selves, and they enter into our heart spaces. So by asking people to remember their stories, by recording them, and by writing them down, we put new value on the stories and in doing so we value the cultures that developed them and most importantly we value the people who tell them. And in their retelling and in their inclusion amidst the rich repertoire of stories we have in Ireland , we celebrate not only the inclusion of the stories but also the inclusion of peoples who come with them.