Pipemakers Park
Footscray
Saturday 22 of April
10.30 AM
The second act was at the Pipemakers Park, located at the next to the Maribyrnong river.
The outdoor environment implies experimenting with other spatial settings regarding body arrangements, tools and materials. The group was composed mainly of Footscray residents. mostly males, but all with diverse cultural backgrounds, who were recruited through local facebook groups.
As this wasn’t an academic audience, I avoided using academic language and complex definitions. This allows participants to have more exploratory navigation, supporting their reflections on life experiences, unstructured assumptions, relations with objects, and using movies as references.
They were prompted to create an enactment or representation of their Cosmovision, only using the outdoor setting as material means.
In the beginning, this prompt paralysed some participants who were unfamiliar with creative crafts. After a moment of reflection in silence, the participants started to “cross” the place, walking into the bush or next to the river.
Regarding the enactments, they were made of leaves, branches and rocks or simply related to natural elements. They were distributed in different locations throughout the park, so visiting and listening to each became a sort of procession, a moving body.
Overall, the exercise was perceived by the participants as an opportunity to trigger a process of decolonising the way how they make sense of the world.
Most of the reflections and the consecutive representations were about opening a critical revision of their own relations with power, existing colonial structures and their dominance in different dimensions of their daily lives.
Footscray
Saturday 22 of April
10.30 AM
The second act was at the Pipemakers Park, located at the next to the Maribyrnong river.
The outdoor environment implies experimenting with other spatial settings regarding body arrangements, tools and materials. The group was composed mainly of Footscray residents. mostly males, but all with diverse cultural backgrounds, who were recruited through local facebook groups.
As this wasn’t an academic audience, I avoided using academic language and complex definitions. This allows participants to have more exploratory navigation, supporting their reflections on life experiences, unstructured assumptions, relations with objects, and using movies as references.
They were prompted to create an enactment or representation of their Cosmovision, only using the outdoor setting as material means.
In the beginning, this prompt paralysed some participants who were unfamiliar with creative crafts. After a moment of reflection in silence, the participants started to “cross” the place, walking into the bush or next to the river.
Regarding the enactments, they were made of leaves, branches and rocks or simply related to natural elements. They were distributed in different locations throughout the park, so visiting and listening to each became a sort of procession, a moving body.
Overall, the exercise was perceived by the participants as an opportunity to trigger a process of decolonising the way how they make sense of the world.
Most of the reflections and the consecutive representations were about opening a critical revision of their own relations with power, existing colonial structures and their dominance in different dimensions of their daily lives.