Sense of Place
2015 | Community project followed by an exhibition | Shaineberg Gallery, Memphis
Exploring a community as an outsider brings with it the unique permission to ask questions that would be otherwise considered inappropriate, and an opportunity to dive into what is often overlooked.
Invited by the Memphis Jewish Community Center, I set out to explore the relationship between the people and the city, present and past. This was my first project bringing together my love of cities, maps and urban choreography. I wanted to create an exhibition that would be a reflection of my findings but that would be routed in the knowledge of the community members themselves.
Over 80 people participated in ten workshops with ages ranging between 13 and 85. In each workshop I guided the participants to mark the places and routes of their daily life on a Memphis map. Using colored tapes and papers they found ways to convey their feelings and thoughts towards their own places and circumference in the city as well as to the places and areas that are not part of their lives.
During my month long residency in Memphis, alongside the accumulating maps I gathered information from museums, city tours, archives and interviews with community members.
The two central walls opposite one another consisted of opposing sides of the maps.
On the one side were all the routes and areas that people marked as their own which I cut out of each of the maps and ordered by age. On the wall across were all the parts that were marked as other, that were discarded from people’s daily routs. I refolded the maps now presented in their new, missing form. From all the discarded parts I created one large wall piece leaning on colorful attractive aesthetics.
These two walls reflected much of the relationship both historical and present between the Jewish community, the African American community and the city. Another wall included a manipulated Memphis map and a printed version of the Racial Dot Map.
Above: Intricate cities - details. The routes extracted from the maps
Bellow: Exhibition view
