Launched: Thursday 22nd April 2021
soundslikescran.com
Sounds Like Scran is an audio cookbook that gathers audio postcards of stories, memories and daily life, experienced through food.
Originally commissioned for International Mother Language Day (IMLD) 2021, to bring Manchester’s language diversity into focus. (original comm: Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art (now ESEA Contemporary)).
Greater Manchester has around 200 languages and dialects knitted throughout its streets, these become the focus for each page in this cookbook. Contributors made recordings of their own voices describing a story, a moment in their life, using their mother tongue. Each story connected with a particular dish. Sounds Like Scran: An Audio Cookbook is a little window into the lives of those living in Manchester, and the multiplicity of languages spoken in the city.
Acknowledgements
Semay Wu acknowledges CFCCA (now ESEA Contemporary) and IMLD for their commissioning of Sounds Like Scran. The project also received phenomenal support from the wider community outreach organisations of Manchester, for which this project could not have done without: Cracking Good Food, a social enterprise dedicated to eradicating food poverty, and to increasing food sustainability; Raj Johal from Manchester Settlement, a charity utterly committed to sustainable cycles of community change; Anita Kanji, a WAITE Wellbeing Leader at the Manchester Deaf Centre, who helped organise and facilitate online sessions for their participants to take part in this project. And to everyone who helped advise along the way, including Suhail Khan, and Gavin Brown, and not least of all, to all the contributors – for their enthusiasm and warm connections made.
My own example (in English/Cantonese):
Dish: Bone Soup Glue
Mother Language: Cantonese, English
*Cantonese parts by my mother; English and drawing by myself.
