Arts and Culture for Social Cohesion – Cardiff Council

Arts and Culture in Cardiff

Arts and Culture – how Cardiff use it to promote community cohesion and inclusion.

The Council’s role as an enabler is to work with communities and organisations to add value together, to empower the people who live and work in our city and build strong resilient communities. Across the city, artwork represents all the faces of Cardiff and gives people the belief that they can be whoever and whatever they want to be.

As part of Refugee Week, Hamed Amiri talked about his book and subsequent play ‘The Boy with Two Hearts’ which chronicles his and his family’s journey as refugees from Afghanistan to the safety of the UK. Pupils at St Mary the Virgin Church in Wales Primary School also created a poem and a film ‘A Zig Zag Journey’, a story of hope, love, and compassion for anyone seeking sanctuary. The film starts at the statue of Betty Campbell in the city centre. Betty was from Cardiff and was the first black headteacher in Wales. The statue is the first statue of a real Welsh woman in Wales. A one-woman show, called ‘Betty Campbell – A Journey through Butetown’, has been performed across the city and takes school children on a historical journey through Butetown, Cardiff, from the building of the docklands through two world wars and onto modern-day Cardiff Bay – all told through Betty’s eyes.

Wales Millennium Centre enables people to tell their story in different ways, be that by through plays such as ‘The Boy with Two Hearts’, displaying artwork or photos or through ‘Platfform’, the youth radio station which provides training and skills to young people from the local area.