Mayflower FOLK is a community arts project which seeks to retell and re-imagine the story of the Mayflower with communities and groups around Southampton using folk forms: folk stories, folk art and folk embroidery forms.

Mayflower is itself a folk story – not just in the fact that it is a story of folk on a journey, but also because it is a story which has produced its own variations and interpretations all around the world, just like the most well-loved folk stories. In versions of the Mayflower as folk story, elements are left out, favoured, or reworked, depending on who is telling the story. One element that’s often left out of these Mayflower tellings is Southampton.

Mayflower 400 will focus on three themes to organise commemorations in Southampton in 2020. These are: journeys, festivals of light, and the water. We will focus on the idea of the “journey” as a way to collect migrant stories, folk stories and responses to the Mayflower story, which will be blended through folk art forms and folk story forms to produce celebrations of the unique connection Southampton has to the Mayflower.

The project will be run by local writer-artists Nazneen Ahmed and Susmita Bhattacharya, both of whom have extensive community and arts organisation contacts in the city of Southampton and throughout Hampshire. The project will work with community groups in Southampton and will be supported by local art galleries, libraries, cafes, bookshops, schools and universities. The project is funded by the Arts Council England, Seedbed and the Mayflower 400 grant.

The project will culminate in an anthology of the writing and artwork, including photography of the workshops themselves, an exhibition and a launch event which will include readings and performances by participants from across the groups and schools.