Dundee will be submitting a bid for UK City of Culture status in 2017. As it happens, Dundee is now actually only a few weeks away from submitting a bid which is huge news!

I was fortunate to be part of the initial discussions held in early March involving key stakeholder in the bid. This very project was presented as an example to encourage discussion.

Dundee has been described as “the largest village in Scotland”, a indication to how friendly it is. As a team of 5 our research led us to celebrate Dundee’s assets while ensuring that the indigenous population feel connected and engaged with the cultural activities.

“…culture, it isn’t for us”

While there are certainly some great ideas floating around involving modern art, theatre and interactive installations, we have focussed our bid on the people dwelling out-with the city centre.

We wanted to celebrate some of the great every-day heros that can be found in Dundee’s satellite villages. At any given time, in each sub-region of of Dundee, people have a story to tell and we wanted to capture it.

Armed with DSLR, a bag of old Canon FD lenses and a Sennheiser shotgun mic we traveled to Lochee, an area 8 minutes North West of the city centre by car. Lochee is well known for it’s social issues a point that was echoed through numerous conversations with Dundonians, both indigenous and transitory e.g students. This sentiment was something that we felt could be addressed by getting closer to the members of the Lochee community.

And this is the whole presentation also featuring two further concepts: