INSTALLATION:

After three inspiring weeks of workshops in Globe Garden, we presented the collected stories, hopes and concerns of our community in an interactive installation for the public during the Totnes Festival. We invited our local audience to come listen and contribute to conversations about what 'home' is, discover surprising details of how we all ended up here, see fellow Totnesians making maps from childhood memories, and add to the shelter we constructed out of found materials

For info on the Totnes Festival visit: www.totnesfestival.com

PLACING BELONGINGS -

This reflective activity grew into a colorful display of images appearing around the garden one by one - traces of individuals who passed through at different times recording glimpsed of belongings they carry with them.

RE-MAP YOUR ROOTS -

This mapping task showcased childhood memories of daily routes walked from home, placing value on each person's individual reflections.

We exhibited an instruction video demonstrating the re-mapping process as well as a scrap-book displaying the maps people made along with the pictures they'd taken while walking their remembered routes in Totnes.

Seeing others' experience of the task in this way encouraged newcomers to give it a try themselves.

CONVERSATION PIECES -

While listening to recorded conversations of others in the garden and watching videos of creative activities about identity and belonging, participants decorated tiles with their reflections on the material.

These conversation pieces accumulated in layers throughout the installation, forming a record of our dialogical space, where everyone was invited to express their perspective on where they come 'from' in relation to each another. Listen to this sample:

JOURNEY WALL -

Over the duration of the project, the journey wall developed from a blank canvass into a maze of overlapping life stories.

The process of reading one another’s' journeys became increasingly involved as different people’s trajectories wove into each other more and more intricately with each new addition.

Mapping one's own journey anew became a process of navigating around those who had come before, interlinking in certain places and seeking out space to make a unique mark on the map.

DIGGING ARCHIVE -

The collection of fragments unearthed from beneath our feet when we broke ground to build the shelter became a precious  digging archive, individually catalogued by visitors to the garden with imagined stories of where each found artifact may have come from.

MAP OF EVENTS -

This record of the reasons people come to Totnes, linked to the places they come from, accumulated many diverse and interesting snippets of the stories that have formed our community.

SHELTER -

Our home-made shelter not only served to house the artwork we created, but also provided a hiding place from the rain, where visitors could hunker down, cozy with a cup of tea and biscuit.

In fact, we came to greatly appreciate the importance of tea as catalyst for conversations about what makes a home.

The physical aspects of our installation may be impermanent, like everything in life, transformed by time passing, but the sense of feeling at home, of belonging somewhere, of owning an identity, is what we carry with us, away from where we come from on to wherever we are going next!