Augmenting the stories
A charity has brought to life some of the voices of the 1981 Brixton uprisings.
To mark the forty year anniversary of the Brixton riots, the Independent Film Trust (IFT) commissioned writer and director Michelle Scarlett to create an augmented reality booklet.
It contains the voices of those that were at the riots and members of South London that remember it, as well as paintings by a local artist and soundscapes created by the director.
Ms Scarlett said: “After downloading the Brixton81 app, you hold your phone over the booklet and the pages then come to life and you hear actual snippets of these oral histories, and you get to see them in kind of real life.”
“I’m hoping it will be an all-round, engaging book that serves as an inter-generational activity that acts as a starting point to discuss some very important societal issues such as race relations, policing and how we live as a community.
“Young people should be attracted to the technology while older generations, whose stories are being told, can provide further context to the book with their own experiences. So I’m hoping it brings these two groups together. One accessing the stories and the other telling them.”
“It’s a way of being able to understand what society was like, to be able to prevent those challenges from happening again.”
Interviewees were found across South London through word of mouth, the Legs Eleven Sound System, which Scarlett co-founded, and the IFT’s already extensive oral history archive.
Ms Scarlett said: “I wanted to get a variety of age groups involved and a variety of perspectives. Those who learnt about the uprisings just through the media – what was their perspective of it and how did they relate to the society afterwards. Not just people who were there in the street. We wanted to know what the consensus of the wider population was.”
CEO Charlotte Knowles said: “We’re giving it away for free so that anyone who wants it can access it. Young people can get it to learn about the history and stories.”
400 copies of the booklet are available for free at the IFT website.
To get a copy fo the booklet, go to https://www.independentfilmtrust.org/eightyone
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