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Sarah Ashford Hart

Workshops Installation Performance Legacy Documentation Blog Contact

Where Are You From, Totnes? is a participatory arts project engaging Totnes residents in creative dialogues about where we are from, what being here means to us,  and where we hope to go.

During August and September 2011, in collaboration with Transition Town Totnes and as part of the Totnes Festival, Globe Garden became an interactive space for Totnesians to express identity in relation to location and each other. Recording conversations, mapping roots, and emplacing belongings, we devised a performance of interactions between people and place. We come to Totnes from many diverse backgrounds and our individual journeys cross paths here, whether for a brief encounter or a whole lifetime. In Globe Garden we meet to exchange our stories and create space for our perspectives on who we are to change and grow, thus composing a living artwork. This project has been about cultivating the resiliency of Totnes’ identity by trying out different answers to the question ‘where are you from?’ and in response, actively re-envisioning ‘where we are going’ as a community in transition.

For five weeks, we invited our community to visit Globe Garden and swap seeds of dialogue, planting ideas for what might grow here in years to come! We held a series of open workshops during August, where many unique Totnesians dropped in to have a cuppa and chat, share a story, emplace an object, and make their mark on our map. After three inspiring weeks of these workshops in Globe Garden,
 we presented the collected stories, hopes and concerns of our community in a performance and interactive installation for the public during the Totnes Festival. Over two weekends, our audience listened and contributed to conversations about what ‘home’ is, discovered surprising details of how we all ended up here, saw fellow Totnesians making maps from childhood memories, and added to the shelter we constructed out of found materials.

This living artwork about who we are continues! Below we have posted descriptions of our workshops, installation, and performance including images along with audio and video recordings of the work. The legacy of this project in Totnes has been imbedded in the Healthy Futures Garden, where our community is invited to continue cultivating dialogue about ‘where we are going’. This website serves as a portal for virtual participation. Here, we share multimedia documentation of the entire project, asking visitors to the website to consider the question ‘Where Are You From?’. Our Blog offers a virtual space for anyone to respond to this material in your own words. This is just the beginning of a long-term arts project, recording people's perspectives on identity and belonging, so please contact us with your thoughts!

This project has been realized in collaboration with artists Ria Hartey and Lisa Evans, and the communty of Totnes.

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This project is supported by Arts Council England.

www.artscouncil.org.uk

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Below is a video I compiled from conversations with others about the question 'Where Are You From?' as part of my MA in Devised Theater, which inspired this project.
 

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Workshops Installation Performance Legacy Documentation Blog Contact

Sarah Ashford Hart

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