'Curry and flares' - show tells stories from mills

An immersive exhibition about the textile industry tells the stories of people who worked in Bradford's mills between 1970 and 2000.

Unspun Stories, at the Loading Bay gallery on Duke Street, features archive films and voice recordings, against a specially recorded soundtrack.

It is being staged by 509 Arts and The Colour Foundry, and aims to showcase the industry's more modern history, with much of the existing storytelling focused on the Victorian era.

509 Arts artistic director Alan Dix, who worked in a mill himself, said: "I wanted to tell a different story that involved Ford Cortinas and Bollywood and curry houses and flares and Abba."

"Children in Bradford were being told about Bradford's textile heritage in terms of Victorian mills and mill owners and women in long frocks and big bonnets and children getting trapped in looms," he said.

A 20-minute film was created using recordings from 509 Arts' Lost Mills and Ghost Mansions project, in which they interviewed 80 people who worked in the textile industry between 1970 and 2000.

The interviews were then taken by a composer, projectionist and a visual artist from The Colour Foundry who "mashed" them together with footage from the Yorkshire Film Archive.

Mr Dix said: "We were determined to make it feel more contemporary.

"We didn't want to do a 'it were 'ard and we lived on gravel' kind of show.

"We've collected images and films in the process in putting the project together over the last two years and mashed it into an installation DJ set."

Though Bradford's textile industry dates back more than 700 years, in the second half of the 20th Century the sector changed as workers joined from different ethnic communities.

Mr Dix said: "Bradford is a complicated place – like lots of cities.

"It's got an international demographic that increasingly cities across the world are acquiring as people move in, move out and change, and some people stay over generations and some people move on.

"We wanted to reflect a tiny bit of that process, so it's not static.

"Things aren't fixed over time, people's lives change and we wanted to show some of that."

The exhibition, launched to coincide with Bradford's year as City of Culture, will run until Sunday, with musicians from the City of Bradford Brass Band performing across the weekend.

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