An augmented reality experience that links Brighton & Hove’s history with the transatlantic slave trade is being launched at Jubilee Library 20-25 November, 2023.

Street Story by Artist and Developer Judith is a free, site-specific augmented reality touring experience for the city of Brighton & Hove that uses smartphone technology to overlay information around the city with digital artefacts, which help to reveal the hidden history about the city’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade.

Judith says: “By walking, and experiencing this difficult history amongst the physical buildings of the city’s enslavers, my hope is that audiences will contemplate our legacy by walking with the past directly overlaid onto parts of our local neighbourhoods.

This work is designed not just to highlight locations in the city, but most importantly to start to make connections with the plantations and people which had a significant financial influence on this city. My goal for this highly experimental work is to encourage reflection, discussion, dialogue and further research within Brighton & Hove’s diverse communities relating to how we remember and commemorate the people of this legacy who, generationally, helped to shape this city”.

Street Story is one of three projects drawing on the city’s connection with the transatlantic slave trade supported by Brighton & Hove Culture Alliance, a network of people from the city’s creative and cultural industries, collaborating to boost the sector’s health and to benefit its workforce.

Each project has been conceived and realised by an artist from the Black community in Brighton & Hove, with these awards forming a key part of the culture alliance’s work to create more equitable opportunities across the creative and cultural sector in the city.

Kim Jack-Riley, Chair of its Anti-Racism Collective says:

“One of the alliance’s aims is to support the city’s valuable creative and cultural sector to be diverse and anti-racist. The Exhale Creative Grant provides an outlet for Black creatives living and working in Brighton & Hove to tell our own story. Each artist has used innovation and creativity to uncover and acknowledge truths about our city’s history whilst paying homage to the African and Caribbean people at the heart of that history.”

About the Brighton & Hove Culture Alliance

The Brighton & Hove Culture Alliance is a network of people from the city’s creative and cultural industries, collaborating to boost the sector’s health and to benefit its workforce. We believe passionately in the vital role that art and culture plays in making our city a fantastic place to live, work, visit and invest in.

Our vision is a thriving, diverse, inclusive creative and cultural sector for Brighton & Hove, built on collaboration and partnerships.

Brighton & Hove Culture Alliance evolved out of the action of a group of the city’s creative and cultural workers, who came together in response to the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the city’s creative and cultural sector. Together they formed the ABCD Cultural Recovery Programme, which ran from April 2021 to December 2022 and raised more than £500,000 for creative projects in Brighton & Hove.