Even a smile at a passer-by is a “revolution of the everyday”
– Reece Jones, ‘Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move”
Bringing a cross-section of artists and community members together to form a collective whose objective would be to interrogate, challenge and radically redefine a sense of belonging to a place.
Creative output will encourage and engage public and communities to actively question and act towards a more just and holistic sense of belonging within our local and global communities, and environment.
art is not neutral. It either upholds or disrupts the status quo, advancing or regressing justice.”
– adrienne maree brown
Belonging affects many social and emotional aspects of living in our world, and within a society. Within the notion of belonging, many of society’s injustices are encompassed, and when actively questioned and interrogated, it could help us find a healthier way to belong together, especially with migration and displacement going to be increasing due to conflicts and the climate crisis (Ecological Threat Register 2020). Belonging is a concept that really could do with some redefining.
The aim for this project is to search for, and to try to make sense of the concept of belonging in/to geographical spaces and places; considering the emotions, interpersonal relationships and political impact that shape our society and, hence, our places. We hope to start conversations about the importance of the innate need to belong, how fragile this can be, and its effects and affects to a space, and to what extent public spaces are political places.
The purpose for continuing this project as a Non-Hierarchical Co-Creation Collective of members of community, artists, activists, writers and musicians, would be to decentralise the ‘self’. This would enable co-creation to grow in scope and produce unexpected results, by finding a “balance and depths of variants, community voices.”(‘Mark Making’ – Belonging to Place podcast by Julie Nagam)
I hope that by creating meaningful encounters, we can consider the impact these concepts might have on our wider sense of how we function as a global society.