Sensory and arts practice

Sensory suitcases

This research seeks to co-create low cost, sustainable sensory tools that can be shared through community structures, and can be replicated and improved upon in communities using affordable, locally-available materials.

We were inspired by ‘sensory suitcases’ – portable kits used at Attenborough Arts Centre that allow visitors to engage more directly and holistically with exhibitions through manipulable objects, without relying on verbal or written language.

In Holguín in January 2025, we worked with learning-disabled children and adults, their families and professionals to create and test similar portable kits, responding to the participants’ sensory interests and environments. Drawing on existing well-developed community arts and education networks in Cuba, these are now being built, distributed to and modified by special schools, cultural centres, libraries and home-schooled children throughout Holguín and Granma Provinces, introducing sensory practice through simple, adaptable tools.

We started from homemade bags of simple sensory tools, made from recycled, donated and waste materials from Nottingham Scrapstore. Professionals from education, culture and psychology, ACPDI members and children from local special schools gained direct experience of unstructured sensory exploration and how it facilitates learning and creation.

Recycling, repurposing and thinking inventively are skills honed in Cuba through years of goods shortages caused by the US embargo, and they could be seen in the rapidity with which workshop participants took up the ides that sensory objects. From the second day, mothers and other participants began to spontaneously arrive with stimulating sensory tools, made from household materials, often with their child’s sensory profile in mind. You can see how immediately children responded too!

Also at the workshops was carpenter and sculptor Alexander Verdecia, who then worked to a co-developed brief to produce five prototype sensory suitcases and contents that were tested and refined with the original audiences.

Since then, he has been building 50 further suitcases and sets of tools to be used by ACPDI in their work sharing and developing sensory methodologies and arts practices in municipalities across Holguín and Granma provinces.