Posts Tagged ‘Welcome to My Place’

The Welcome to My Place project was talked about in the following publications and events.

January 2011: Conversation with Kati Blom on the appropriation of space, from the International Society for the Philosophy of Architecture.

September 2010: Study on Verticality presented at the European Conference on Complex Systems (Lisbon, Portugal).

In this paper, I will analyse some of the videos that were made at the occasion of the Welcome to My Place project, a collective video resource that started in February 2010 and where people can share the places that matter to them. In view of the videos and after some researches, I would like to propose a slightly different approach to the concept of non-place introduced by Marc Augé, and to the way places are appropriated. This paper is also intended to provide a short introduction to the philosophical notion of place and its main themes.

Here is a series of three artistic videos around the theme of verticality. I made them while I was in Hong Kong in May 2010 to complement the Welcome to My Place video collection and my researches on the philosophical concept of place. While I visited many cities in my life, Hong Kong is a particularly striking vertical experience, because of its density and uncompromising modernisation.

The Welcome to Finsbury Park project was co-organised with the Transition Finsbury Park association to engage the London N4 local communities with their neighbourhood. It consisted in a 2-month field investigation using videos and was concluded in March 2010 by a workshop and the co-creation of subjective maps (these two activities are documented in the following manuals). Here below is a review of the project and some conclusions, co-written by myself and James Thomson from the Transition Finsbury park association.

Here are step-by-step manuals documenting the workshops that have been organized as part of the Welcome to My Place activities. They are all free and under a Creative Commons License. Please check more details about the licenses inside each document.

These manuals can be used as:

1. Tools to better understand the identity of a place or an area (in the context of an ethnographic study for example).

This page is basically another way to introduce the activities organised as part of the Welcome to My Place project. They all involved at some point subjective maps. Subjective maps don’t have to be spatially accurate; they should communicate how a territory is perceived. They are a tool of critical cartography, “a set of mapping practices and theoretical critique grounded in critical theory. It differs from classical cartography in that it links geographic knowledge with power, and thus is political. Critical cartographers do not aim to invalidate maps; instead the critique is a careful analysis identifying maps attributes that are taken for granted” (Wikipedia).

Friends of the Westminster Reference Library welcome you to their place. Watch their videos and discover what is the life of a library today.

See more videos from the Welcome to My Place project.

Citations from the short and very interesting book written by Marc Augé in1995 (contemporary philosophy and anthropology):

• “If a place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place. Supermodernity produces non-places, meaning spaces which do not integrate the earlier places: instead these are listed, classified, promoted to the status of ‘places of memory’, and assigned to a circumscribed and specific position.”

The Welcome to My Place project is launched! Check out the first contributions here and please feel free to add your own videos.

The aim of the project is to encourage people to film the places that matter to them. Workshops will be organised to better understand the meaning of ‘places’ through the usage of videos. Please contact me if you would like to collaborate. I’m looking for artist cartographers, communities, professionals and academics interested in the study of places and their subjective relations.