Today (June 30th 2020) marks the 100th and final day of our #Cateran100 programme!
Starting on March 23rd, the first day of the COVID-19 Pandemic Lockdown, we’ve been broadcasting an online programme through our Twitter and Facebook channels that we hoped would cheer, inform and uplift on a daily basis.
Called #Cateran100, 66 local, national and international poets, musicians, storytellers and film makers from Scotland, USA, Canada, Finland and Australia have all contributed their time and their talent voluntarily, creating a huge and diverse collection of sound, song, film and spoken word, all of which will continue to be available through the Ecomuseums’ Soundcloud and Vimeo libraries.
Through the national and international network of the Ecomuseum’s Poet in Residence, Jim Mackintosh, 126 poems in Scots, Gaelic, English, Saami, Portuguese, Spanish and Hungarian have been shared over the 100 days, read by 44 poets and 13 readers drawn from wide range of Scotland’s cultural and creative community.
Music, songs, stories, videos and photographs about the people places and landscapes of the Ecomuseum have also been shared daily, using content and images from the Laing Photographic Collection, Cateran’s Common Wealth, Tobar and Dualchais the Ecomuseum’s own growing online library.
The artist roster is impressive:
Joining Jim Mackintosh on the poetry strand have been Jim Aitken, Jess Anderson, Morag Anderson, Anne Casey, Hazel Buchan Cameron, Sara Clark, Thomas Clark, Alison Cohen, Stuart Cosgrove, Linda Cracknell, Michael Dempster, Ashley Douglas, Jo Gilbert, John Glenday, George Gunn, Nat Hall, Bill Herbert, H-J Hoyles, Andy Jackson, Brian Johnstone, Russell Jones, Jackie Kay, Maria Joao Kay, Billy Kay, Aoife Lyall, Marcus Mac an Tuairneir, Hamish Macdonald, Iain Mackintosh, Ciara MacLaverty, Pauline Maclean, Paul Malgrati, Beth McDonough, Cameron McNeish, Hugh McMillan, Pino Mereu, Tom Murray, Hamish Napier, Susan Nicholson, Elsa Panciroli, Stuart Paterson, Jon Plunkett, John Quinn, Larissa Reid, Claire Rinterknecht, Fiona Robertson, Jacquie Roberts, James Robertson, Peter Ross, Ann Rutherford, Finola Scott, Jess Smith, Jim Spence, George Szirtes, Sheila Templeton, N.T. Valentin, Irene Watson, Richard Watt, Alison Whitelock, Alex Woodcock
Music and Songs have been shared by Jim Aitken, Dave Macfarlane, Aileen Ogilvie and Johan Sandberg McGuinne and stories have been told by Thomas Clark, Lindsey Gibb, Ally Heather, Johan Sandberg McGuinne, Aileen Ogilve and Jess Smith and films have been made by Stefan Morrocco
We are enormously grateful to them all!
Members of the Travelling Community, Laing Collection 1933
Engagement with the programme has been exceptional. Over 60,000 people have listened to our poems and watched our videos since we began broadcasting on March 23rd. Our followers have gone up 400%, our twitter impressions have jumped 600% and our Facebook posts are being enjoyed by thousands of people too.
Our hope is that through folks’ enjoyment of the ‘sense of place’ that we have been trying to impart through #Cateran100 – from far back in deep time, right up to our time – we will encourage local folk and visitors to enjoy the Ecomuseum and all it has to offer ‘live’ when we are allowed to move about again more freely.
It’s hard for us on the Ecomuseum team to remember, as this dreadful crisis continues, that we only launched less than 8 months ago!
Early in this New Year, we’d begun gearing up for a second phase of development, with innovative plans to become Scotland’s (possibly even the world’s) first ‘Museum of Rapid Transition’ – focusing all our work on the powerful role we believe heritage can play in helping people mitigate and adapt to the climate crisis. But as COVID-19 started to spread out of China and the full reality of the impact of the Pandemic started to bite, all our planning and fundraising for this had to be postponed.
Seeing that lockdown on the scale already happening in Europe was coming our way fast, and that there was no way we could continue to plan as we had hoped, we began to think how we could make a useful contribution in the crisis. Given the photographic archives we have access to about the people, places and landscapes of this area and the incredible community of talented local artists who live and work across the Ecomuseum geography, we began to prepare content that we could share online with our fledgling community of followers that would cheer, inform and uplift on a daily basis and we set ourselves the challenge of keeping it up for 100 days. Today marks the 100th and final day!
We’re still busy behind the scenes readying to return to our ‘Rapid Transition’ plans as soon as we are able and hope to have some exciting announcements to make soon.
COVID-19 is a frightening example of rapid transition brought on by global crisis, and we believe we can bring all that we are learning from these last few months into our plans because the climate crisis facing us is an even bigger challenge and the story of our past – even this very recent Pandemic, which will also pass eventually – is a huge resource that we can tap into to help guide the story of our future.
