Together an Active Pendle

Together an Active Pendle is one of seven nationwide health projects, funded by Sport England. In 2020, In-Situ began working as a lead arts organisation to support conversations with communities in Pendle about being active in everyday life. Bringing together a diverse group of artists and practitioners, we created an approach to intercultural conversations which stretched our understanding of what was possible during the pandemic, in terms of remote artist collaboration and communicating key messages across cultures and languages. When approached by Pendle Leisure Trust to join the national Together an Active Future project, we pulled together a team of artists to create a communications campaign encouraging participation in research addressing heart disease and diabetes in Nelson. Working alongside Pendle Leisure Trust and project partners, we set about the task without a roadmap, developing bottom-up approaches that prioritised deeper conversations in public spaces rather than online surveys. Following the onset of COVID-19, our collaboration was forced online, and the work took on new urgency, highlighting inequalities within the community. Through socially distanced street conversations, digital events and creative interventions rooted in familiar places, the project created space for dialogue, insight and collective responses to physical activity and wellbeing.