UNESCO Chair on Refugee Integration through Education, Language and Arts

Rise & Shine Festival 2023

On the 19th and 20th August, the Scottish Crannog Centre hosted their annual Rise and Shine Festival on the shore of Loch Tay, Kenmore.

This second edition of the Rise and Shine festival was a collaboration between the Scottish Crannog Centre and the UNESCO Chair for Refugee Integration through Language and the Arts (UNESCO RILA), with support from the Maryhill Integration Network, Glasgow.

Together we brought together a wealth of craftspeople, storytellers, musicians, theatre makers, visual artist and academics from across Scotland and internationally. Originally grown out of the tragedy of the crannog burning down in June 2021, the festival was a celebration of the resilience of the Crannog team, as well as an opportunity to reflect together on what it means to be a community, on questions around sustainability both in the social and ecological sense, on climate justice and on pre-colonial modes of interacting with one another.

The beautiful shore of Loch Tay in Perthshire recently became part of the UNESCO UK Creative Cities network as City of Craft and Folk Art, a designation that has been extended to the whole county and includes the Scottish Crannog Centre. In this quiet space of craft and music, we reconnected, reflected, shared and learned, together.

There were opportunities to take part in crafts such as prehistoric pottery workshops, Celtic jewellery making, Scottish and Zimbabwean storytelling, forest foraging, and Gaelic poetry.

Other activities included nest making to explore ideas of home, interactive theatre sessions exploring memories, home, and leaving, and Eritrean coffee ceremonies to learn from the Eritrean ways of building sustainable communities. We experienced the sense of connection that comes with talking to each other, making with hands and minds, and sharing food and drink together.

The weekend was full of song, stories, craft and sharing the vibrant cultures within Scotland as we forged new ways to connect to each other and to the planet.

The Scottish Crannog Centre is an open-air museum on Loch Tay that celebrates life 2500 years ago, the beginnings of how we live today. The museum allows visitors to ‘experience the iron age’ through craft, food, spoken tours, and a unique personalised customer service. Open every day 10am-5pm.