Sara Jones has been awarded an AHRC follow-on grant for impact work emerging from the network “Culture and its Uses as Testimony”.

The grant – “Testimony in Practice” – will provide funds for staging the collaborative documentary theatre production, Bucharest, at the BE Festival next year, along with a series of activities designed to extend the reach of the innovative method (workshops, “Making Of” film, creative writing events, schools outreach).

The play is produced by the Barcelona-based theatre company La Conquesta del pol sud and will stage the testimony of Romanian and German novelist, Carmen-Francesca Banciu.

The second strand of the project will be a collaboration with the Central and Eastern European Arts Space, Centrala, to gather testimonies of Central and Eastern Europeans in the UK. These testimonies will be displayed online and in a sound-art installation at Centrala (produced by an art group commissioned by them) and the Romanian Cultural Institute in London next year. Sara is Principal Investigator on the grant alongside Co-Investigator Emilie Pine (University College Dublin). The value of the award is approximately £100,000.

Related to the above, in collaboration with Nora Veszpremi, Sara has also been successful in securing an M3C Creative Economy Engagement Fellowship for the project “In-Between Spaces”.

The Fellowship provides funding for postdoctoral scholar, Jakub Ceglarz, to conduct research over 10 months into the (under)representation of CEE art in the UK creative economy and will result in a policy report that will assist Centrala in its advocacy for these artists and the communities that they represent.

It will also create a network of CEE artists, the organisations that represent them and heritage managers. Sara is Principal Investigator on the project and Jakub will also be co-mentored by Nora.