Manifesta is a not for profit limited company founded by Colin Prescod and Marion Vargaftig, who bring extensive expertise in developing and delivering arts and cultural projects and began their collaboration in addressing cultural diversity, social exclusion/inclusion and anti-racism in 1996. Manifesta uses in particular film and video production, and has a special focus on young people.
Manifesta main activities are:
- conception, development and management of programmes and projects:- using video as well as other art forms as media for exploring, expressing and interpreting key contemporary issues
- contribution to critical current debates - social, artistic, cultural - in the 21st century from different angles and via different media, devising ways of ensuring youth participation and engagement in these debates; and creating links and lines of communications/dialogue where there is none or too little.
Manifesta new initiative, Breaking into the Museum, is a transnational youth media initiative leading to new curatorial perspectives and interpretations.
Breaking into the Museum will promote youth participation, propose 'radical' intervention in heritage curating as an exciting form of 21st century cultural activism and engagement, bring new participating audiences to the museums, and contribute to the re-modelling of museums as contemporary public spaces.
Manifesta operates in the UK and overseas.
Recent projects include: -
- Belonging, a transnational initiative (London, Paris, Lisbon) designed to enable young people to explore intercultural dialogue - grounded in the specificity of personal and social opportunities, as well as the challenges which arise around new migrations and the making of new communities.
- Video ART Postcards
In the summer of 2007, two groups of teenagers from the London Borough of Newham participated in a unique experience: assisted by video artists and historians, the teenagers uncovered sites related to historical racism and anti-racism in the West India Docks area of London and expressed their view of this history and heritage by using digital media and their imaginations. Each participant produced a personal short video, or 'postcard', informed by their learning.
These two projects were devised and led by Manifesta, and produced in association with the Runnymede Trust.
For more information click here.
An example of the international strand of Colin's and Marion's work was the creation in 1997 of the European Multicultural Media Agency - EMMA- initiating and delivering a competition-based, 4X25 minutes documentary film series for young people (17-25) across the 18 countries then associated with the European Union.
The four films were co-produced with public service broadcasters BBC, France2, UR (Sweden),TeleacNOT (Netherlands), RTP (Portugal), and have been widely broadcast on European TVs and screened at a number of prestigious documentary film festivals in Europe and North America. ‘New Europeans', an educational video-pack incorporating the films, received a (UK) Commission for Racial Equality nomination for Race in the Media Awards in 2000, and was distributed in the UK, France and Belgium in English and French versions.