Play Southend at Village Green 2013

We are preparing for a series of gaming events at a new location (to be announced) for Play Your Place in which people draw, make and play their future town and to explore their aspirations for the future of their locality together.

Merrifield (aptly named) is a great recent discovery. Thanks to Dr Harriet Hawkins’s recent report about our work so far, Cultural Geographies of Play your Place I am rethinking the public events. Keeping in mind how to resist the inevitable bureaucratizing tendency in technical participatory processes, and to keep plenty of room for poetics and the punk “spirit of anarchistic dissatisfaction”.

Hawkins writes “The recognition that “making is connecting” (Gauntlett, 2011) has become increasingly commonplace across contemporary arts practices and beyond, while the rise of participatory art recognizes the potential of aesthetic practices to take on a socially-instrumentalised form, connecting diverse communities and fostering ethical relationships between people and their places and the environment (Kester, 2004, 2011). Yet this widely recognized social value of the arts, and its possibilities for connecting people and places, presents a need to reflect critically on the dynamics and value of these relationships, to query in short, the forms of relationship that arts practices can produce between individuals, and with respect to the individuals, and the communities and environments in which they live.”

Download PDF version of Cultural Geographies of Play your Place as part of a piece of research commissioned by Creativeworks London through their Creative Voucher scheme.