Yam From Here
Migration and the Making of the Black Country (YFH) tells the story of the diversity of the Black Country through the perspectives of the people who call it home. Through a multi-media methodology YFH explores people’s associations with the Black Country through three themes: Home, Journeys, and Community. The project takes place over several stages: gathering oral history interviews, holding artistic community workshops, and showcasing both literary and artistic material through a series of exhibitions. The materials produced from this project; testimony, artistic production, and photography, seek to tell a layered story of the Black Country as a dynamic place which is constantly (re)made through migratory stories.
Such aims have the potential to assist in both developing stronger social bonds, while educating different communities about the people they live alongside, by bringing them together to share in stories and artistic production.
Migration is at the root of the Black Country story, with many people migrating to the area during the Industrial Revolution in pursuit of newfound work in coal mines, iron foundries, factories, and textile mills. As the soot of industry began to smother the region, thus engendering its name, equally influential to social development was the movement of peoples’, and particularly in the nineteenth century the immigration of people from Ireland and Wales. The history of the area is also intimately connected to the story of Empire. The growing prosperity through trade for the Black Country saw the area supplying (amongst other industries) metalwork goods for the slave and plantation economies.
The chain that sits proudly on the Black Country flag has been symbolically interpreted as representing aspects of this grim material reality. Since the breakdown of Empire, the Black Country has maintained its position as a place of journeys. We seek to explore such stories, with all their potential difficulties and contradictions, to give voice to the complexities of the human condition.
The title of the project is inspired by the Black Country dialect term ‘Yam’, from “Yow am”, meaning you are. Yam Yams, is a term used by people from the Black Country to designate their community and sense of self. Looking at who composes ‘being from here’ in the twenty-first century; our project looks to explore the making of the Black Country through the lens of migration, in seeing how people of various backgrounds have come to make the Black Country their home.
