Unbound Fridays: space to make, connect and belong
Unbound Fridays: space to make, connect and belong
Unbound includes different kinds of sessions, but our weekly Friday creative sessions are deliberately a little different.
Fridays are laid-back and largely unstructured, offering a space for people to come and use in whatever way works for them. There isn’t a set workshop to complete or an expectation that everyone will take part in the same activity. What happens is shaped by the people who turn up and what they bring with them that week.
That might mean writing a new song, picking up an idea started a few weeks ago, recording something in our studio, drawing or exploring another creative art form. It might mean having a coffee, catching up with people, asking for advice or spending some time around others. Often, it is several of those things at once.
That lack of structure is intentional.
Why leave the space open?
A lot of spaces connected to criminal justice are necessarily structured. There are appointments, programmes, conditions, assessments, meetings and particular outcomes that have to be achieved. People can spend a significant amount of time being told where to be, when to be there and what is expected of them.
Unbound Fridays offer something different: a space where people have more agency over what they do and how they take part.
You can arrive with an idea you want to work on, or with no idea at all. You can spend hours working on a piece of music or spend most of the afternoon talking. You can contribute something to somebody else’s project, learn a new skill, share one of your own, or simply be around the community.
We think there is value in creating space where not everything has been decided in advance. It allows us to follow the energy – one of the principles that guides how we work at Vox Liminis – and respond to what people are interested in, curious about or need at that moment. It also allows people to shape the community rather than simply attend something that has already been designed for them.
Sometimes the creative things that emerge from Fridays become songs, recordings, visual art, or other pieces of work. Sometimes they don’t. Both are valuable.
A community, not a service
Unbound is made up of people with diverse experiences of criminal justice: people who have been in prison, people serving sentences, people on community sentences, family members, artists, academics and people who work within the justice system. It began because people who had taken part in Vox projects while in prison got back in touch after release and wanted to remain connected. At its heart, Unbound is about making positive connections following punishment and creating a community in which people can continue to make, contribute and belong.
The Friday sessions are for that community, while also providing a route into it.
They were designed to be accessible to people at different points in their journey through the justice system, including people on Home Detention Curfew (HDC) and people able to access day release or home leave from prison, as well as people who have returned home more permanently.
That matters because coming home from prison is not a single moment. It is a transition.
The practicalities of returning can be difficult enough, but there is also the question of where you belong. Relationships may have changed. Familiar places can feel different. Stigma and the conditions attached to release can affect how freely somebody moves through the world. One Unbound community member has described returning from prison as intensely challenging and lonely, and Unbound as helping them feel part of a community again – particularly a community where they did not feel judged.
Our work at HMP Castle Huntly has similarly tried to build connections with Unbound before people return home, so that community does not have to begin at the prison gate.
Friday sessions can become one small piece of continuity within a period when almost everything else may be changing.
The important conversations that happen around everything else
One of the benefits of an unstructured space is that important conversations don’t always have to announce themselves as important conversations.
Someone might ask a question while making a cup of tea. A conversation about a song might turn into a conversation about housing, relationships, licence conditions, work or what it feels like to be home. Someone who has been through a similar experience might share what helped them. Someone who works in criminal justice might be able to explain something in plain language or point somebody towards the right support.
That informality matters.
People involved in the justice system often have relationships with professionals who hold some degree of formal power in their lives. Social workers and prison officers can provide important support, but the power imbalance within those relationships can sometimes make it difficult to ask a question, admit you don’t understand something, or talk openly about a worry.
Putting people together in a shared creative and social space can change the conditions of the conversation.
A prison officer, social worker, artist, person recently released from prison and somebody who left prison years ago might find themselves sitting around the same table or working on the same song. Nobody has to pretend that differences in experience or power don’t exist. But there is an opportunity to relate to one another differently – as people making, talking, eating, laughing and figuring things out together.
Vox has previously described some of Unbound’s support as being difficult to capture precisely because it is so informal: conversations over food that might offer advice, reassurance or a route towards other support. Those apparently small interactions can be important in helping people navigate the transition home.
Making together changes relationships
Creativity gives all of this somewhere to happen.
You don’t have to walk through the door ready to talk about your experience of prison or justice. In fact, you don’t have to talk about it at all.
You can start with a guitar, a lyric, a drawing, an idea or a cup of tea.
Making something alongside another person creates a different starting point for a relationship. People bring different kinds of knowledge and skill. Someone who knows a lot about music might need help from somebody who has never written a song but has exactly the right line. Someone with professional knowledge of the justice system might learn something they had never understood from somebody who has lived through it.
As we say about Unbound: no one is an expert. We all have lots to learn from each other.
This is also why Fridays connect so closely to the principles that run through all of Vox Liminis’s work: prioritising relationships, welcoming, making together, sharing power, disagreeing well and following the energy.
Those principles aren’t only ideas we want to talk about. They are things we want to practise.
An open Friday afternoon gives us a place to do that.
Sharing power can mean allowing the people in the room to decide what happens next. Welcoming can mean being able to arrive without having to prove that you are creative enough, experienced enough or ready enough. Prioritising relationships can mean recognising that the conversation over coffee may be as significant as the song recorded in the studio. Making together means that creativity isn’t something delivered by an expert to a participant, but something people contribute to alongside one another.
Following the energy means being willing to see where all of that takes us.
If you have lived or professional experience of justice and are interested in getting involved in Unbound, or learning more about Vox, please get in touch at admin@voxliminis.co.uk