Home and Hope

Interesting exhibition at the Geffrye Museum showing work as a result of a project the museum did with the New Horizon Youth Centre, a day centre for vulnerable young people.

Using items from the collection about homelessness in Victorian London they held sessions to get the young people to discuss and react to their experiences of homelessness today. Each case looked at a different aspect of the project. I loved a set of poems in reaction to a picture of a women’s Salvation Army hostel where the women slept in boxes like coffins in rows.

Another section looked at what the young people considered to be the essential items to have when living on the streets. Also a section where people defined what home means when you don’t have one and I loved the one who concluded in a poem “Ho|me, How obvious, it’s me” as “me” is included in the word “home”.

The whole thing was thought provoking without being preaching or condescending.

 

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