Healing Through Remembering has begun a workshop project that will bring together groups from different backgrounds to discuss and consider issues around commemorating, memorialising and explaining events from the past.  The project, entitled Cultural Inclusion: Challenging Community Commemoration, is funded by the Belfast City Council Good Relations Unit.  It began in May and will run until the end of September 2016.

This year is significant for commemoration, and the project was designed with the timeliness of 2016 in mind.  The project encourages groups to consider the ways they express their own culture and identity, challenges participants’ attitudes and stereotypes about the ‘other’, builds cross-community relationships between groups and individuals for future engagement and reduces gaps in collective knowledge and understanding about the past.

Five sets of groups will run through a programme of workshops:

• Initial workshop
• Visit to a venue representing a Protestant/Unionist/Loyalist perspective
• Visit to a venue representing a Catholic/Nationalist/Republican perspective
• Visit to the Everyday Objects Transformed by the Conflict exhibition
• Final workshop

Everyday Objects Transformed by the Conflict is an HTR exhibition that does not agree to one narrative of the past, but rather presents a number of different perspectives and experiences.  For more information about the exhibition, please click here to visit its website.