From 8 July to 2 September 2020 we piloted a weekly programme of activities online and on the streets of Cliftonville under the name Doorstep Despacito. These activities were also open to other young people and families who live further afield via weekly sheets to complete from home, downloadable from our website. Through these sessions we creatively explored our lives during the ever strange and shifting year of 2020.

Doorstep Despacito was led by OSE alumni Coral Brookes and Sarah Karen with OSE team member Ayaan Bulale (aka Miss Ayaan).

If you enjoyed Doorstep Despacito or want to take part in future Despacito programmes, please fill out our short survey below:

Wednesday 8 July 2020: Manifesto

For the first week, we started by building a map/manifesto of what life looked like for us during the first lockdown. How do you cope and work with others in the current situation?

Wednesday 15 July 2020: Otherworldly outfits

This week we focused on thinking about how clothes and costumes can make us behave, protect us and perform in different ways. We explored this through making playful Personal Protective Equipment.

Wednesday 22 July 2020: Sound and vision

This week we thought about storyboards, creating frames to share our stories. We worked with sound to score these snapshots of our lives.

Wednesday 29 July 2020: Chopping and changing

Continuing from the previous session, we interpreted our sound scores to create bold visual motifs which came together in the form of a collaborative textile.

Wednesday 5 August 2020: Break time

There was no session this week as we took some time out to evaluate the sessions so far.

Wednesday 12 August 2020: Cliftonville cooks

All things food! We thought about what we like to eat, what we eat frequently with our families, our what our favourite foods are and how we might like to share this with others. We then made a zine recipe book!

Wednesday 19 August 2020: Animated spaces part 1

Reusing scrap material, objects and plasticine we created small sets of our lives from the last couple of months and animated them with simple stop motion techniques.

Wednesday 26 August 2020: Animated spaces part 2

This week we continued our stop motion, developing our animations and further developing our characters, scripts and narrative.

Wednesday 2 September 2020: Time machine

This session was moved to Wednesday 9 September.

We ended Doorstep Despacito by making sculptural time machines to talk to future civilisations about recent events/experiences and what we have done over the past two months.