In June 2023, we teamed up with educational charity Never Such Innocence to deliver several workshops for local schools, based around our Picturing Peace exhibition. After some warm-up exercises which prompted students to think about how they visualise peace, researcher Camille Maubert explained the background to current conflict in the DRC; she also discussed the impacts of conflict on civilians, and introduced participants to some of the women peace activists featured in Hugh Kinsella Cunningham’s photographs.
After some time engaging with the photographs, students took part in a poetry workshop with author Nik Perring, who helped them to produce creative responses to the images they had seen. They results were powerful – perceptive, insightful, passionate, inspiring – and some of the poetry produced is now on display alongside the photographs. Never Such Innocence’s mission is to give children and young people a voice on conflict; these workshops underlined how keen and caring young people can be in their thinking about war and peace, and how much adults can learn by listening to their voices.
