Back in 2021, folk who care about Dudley were curious about co-creating an archive that brings together local stories of the past with observations and activities of the present with imaginings of the future. We wanted to spend time with this archive to reveal many understandings of Dudley and inspire imaginings of futures in which all life can flourish so we can find ways to bring us closer to those futures.
We were inspired by…
'In many Indigenous ways of knowing, time is not a river, but a lake in which the past, the present, and the future exist.'
Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants
'In an Andean understanding of time, the past, present and future are directly interconnected and happening in the same moment… objects, people and places… transcend time, bringing a living past into the present to influence and inform the future.'
British Museum, Peru: A Journey in Time
The CoLab Dudley team created an online archive to get us started. In 2024, community technologists Common Knowledge joined us to co-create a more Nature, people and time friendly and inspiring Dudley Time Portal.
people could develop deep connections with the places they live or work in: connections that invite care, relationships with life in that place, and learning through creative doing that deepens the climate resilience of that place?
The people who co-created this archive: Alan Reynolds, Alex Worrad-Andrews, Bill Laybourne, Caz Emery, Deb McDonald, Dionne Williams, Erica Williams, Gemma Copeland, Helen Garbett, Holly Doron, Jack Williams, Jan Norton, Jasmine Lawrence, Jo Orchard-Webb, Kirren Channa, Laura Onions, Lorna Prescott, Luke Hudson, Miriam Atikpo, Nat WB, Peter True, Rachael Othala, Rebekah Warmington, Rick Sanders, Sita Patel, Soheila Javaheri
In the Dudley Time Portal you will find…
ideas, photos, stories, doodles, knowledge, collages, models, poems, thoughts, sounds, experiments, drawings, research, videos that have been gifted to the archive by…
Many people who care about Dudley Borough have contributed to the evolution of Dudley Time Portal: learners, doers, history sharers, artists, film makers, architects, educators, photographers, researchers, Nature stewards, passersby… and maybe even you! You are welcome to become a co-creator of the Dudley Time Portal and add your own gifts through this invitation. You are also invited to join us at our collective archiving evenings: warm gatherings to share food while celebrating and connecting the gifts through archiving together. You are also welcome to become part of our community of…
Dudley Time Portal is a place of collective and distributed care - if one person looked after the archive, it wouldn't last long. Instead, several stewards tend to the archive in the hope it will become more resilient.
Throughout Dudley Time Portal you will meet beings from Nature. They invite us to experience the world in different ways so we can imagine futures where all life can flourish. You are welcome to choose a more-than-human companion to keep you company through your visit here.
* Ecologist and philosopher, David Abram, coined the term 'more-than-human' to describe all living and non-living entities and their relationships.
CoLab Dudley, who currently host Dudley Time Portal, will not always exist. This is why we are trying to create conditions now for people who care about Dudley to build the archive's resilience so it can flourish for generations to come.
How might we use oral story-telling to hold the archive and carry the ideas here to different lands, communities and neighbourhoods?
How might we create social rituals around archiving?
This is where we will share upcoming gatherings to spend time with and add to Dudley Time Portal.
You are also welcome to send us suggestions.
Everything in the Dudley Time Portal is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 which requires reusers/evolvers to give credit to the co-creators. It allows reusers/evolvers to share, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format, for noncommercial purposes only, under the same share-alike terms. If do you use ideas or creative works from the Dudley Time Portal we'd love to hear about what you create and who it's shared with. Drop us an email to colabdudley@gmail.com.
At various stages of its evolution, Dudley Time Portal has been funded by National Lottery Climate Action Fund, The Space Black Country Digital Firsts, Joseph Rowntree Foundation Emerging Futures Pathfinders, Arts Council England Cultural Compact and Projects grants, National Lottery Community Fund Reaching Communities.