Seventeenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

Making With Place (MWP) artfully explores relationships between community, culture, place and public space, from perspectives of youth with lived experiences of systemic inequities. Grounded in community arts practice, MWP engages QTBIPOC (Queer, Trans, Black, Indigenous, People of Colour) young people as artist researchers. Resulting MWP public art experiments theorize place in significant ways, illuminating contexts from historic to present. Central to this learning are reflections into how Place Holds History, with artworks creatively (re)mapping and disrupting “boxed geographies” related to colonial and capitalist structures and paradigms. Pieces include a video installation (re)mapping of urban landscape with Indigenous imagery and teachings; a queer medicine garden (re)mapping land and relationships across genders, racializations, and species; and digital storyscapes of houselessness (re)mapping accepted ideas of place by surfacing untold stories and hidden communities. This (re)storying of histories challenges essentialized notions of community through pluralistic imagery and discourse, to chart new ways of being together. In this time of global uprisings against colonialism and white supremacy, and amidst the inequitable impacts of Covid-19, MWP confronts negotiations of difference, interdependence and justice. How can this embodied and embedded theorizing, this Making With Place, help us all navigate collective geographies, so that new, brighter horizons can unfold?