Creating our 18-month long artist mentoring programme

MoYah

Music artist and lead facilitator of Future Proof

My name is MoYah, I was Born in Mozambique, Southeast Africa, and raised in Lisbon, Portugal before moving to London. Music has always played a very significant role in my household, cultural landscape, and identity.

My father used to be a singer back in Mozambique he loved Afro-Latin Ballads and love songs. During my childhood, my mother would always have Afro-Portuguese music blasting through the speakers of our front room. Music was how we expressed love, celebrated life, and came together.

From a very young age I realised that music could be used as a powerful tool for self-exploration, empowerment and artistic expression, this led me to start writing poems initially which eventually turned into Rap.

Inspired by Hip Hop culture and artists like Tribe Called Quest, Queen Latifa and later artists like Wu-Tang Clan, Common, Dead Prez, and others I used Rap to address issues relating to my identity, social injustices around me & explore themes of belonging from the perspective of a child of the African Diaspora.

Fast-forward a couple of decades and I’ve been developing my artistic identity as a Rapper, Artistic Curator, Workshop Facilitator and award-winning Interfaith Arts Programmer.

I’ve had the honour of travelling the world with my music, I have performed in almost 20 countries and have curated projects for marginalised communities with the aim to amplify their voice, process trauma, disintegrate stereotypes & encourage more community cohesion.

I moved to Bristol just over a year ago and shortly after my move I was invited to have ‘The’ meeting at Bristol Beacon that I was telling you about earlier on.

A creative and supportive environment

We wanted to create a programme that was completely centred around each member of the cohort, taking into consideration their individual needs, acknowledging where they were in their personal creative journey, understanding what they wanted to achieve and the most effective way they could access the support they needed to reach their goals.

After thoroughly reading through around 50 applications for the programme, conducting individual interviews with potential candidates & multiple discussions between the team: Owen Parry (Creative producer), Alex Lupo (a talented musician and qualified music therapist), Sophia Allison (A powerful Spoken word artist, DJ, artistic curator and creative producer) and myself, we finally selected 8 artists for the programme.

This included UK Drill & Hip Hop artist KDogg KT, Spoken word poet & singer Yiska Multi-faceted performer Jazpa-One, Filipina RnB singer-songwriter Xyzelle, left-field Electronic producer & performer Melissa Fear, UK Garage Producer x-o1, Enigmatic producer BAST and Bi-lingual Rapper B3nji.

From the very beginning, it was crucial that we received as much input from the collective as we could; this really helped shape each monthly session as well as their personal development plans.