Situations for living: performing emplacement

Abstract

This essay enquires how certain performative mechanisms deployed in the practice-as-research project Homing Place might be conceived as homing devices, mechanisms that create relational and dialogic interspaces of orientation, dwelling, and emplacement and methods of bodily attunement to places. How might they be a homing place or homing places – describing both a place of inhabitation that exists in and through movement and a method of action, a way of finding, making and inhabiting that place? In Homing Place, a set of contextually based and participant-led experiments involved inhabitants of Plymouth, UK, who are asylum seekers and refugees, in spatial, relational and dialogic art processes of wayfinding, mapping and walking. This essay considers the underlying conceptual concerns of this project – how do those performative mechanisms employed create place or are place-making, and how is emplacement performed? Key conceptual tools for this discussion are Tim Ingold's conceptions of wayfaring and inhabitant knowledge and Edward Casey's conceptions of dwelling and inhabitation.

Keywords:

• refugees
• emplacement
• place-making
• wayfinding
• mapping
• percipients

Notes

1. Available online at http://www.homingplace.org; http://www.wayfromhome.org.

2. Ingold distinguishes two different spheres of knowledge, occupant knowledge and inhabitant knowledge (Ingold 2005), as does Certeau in the statement quoted earlier: ‘what the map cuts up, the story cuts across’. Dwight Conquergood recognised the ‘radical promise of performance studies research’ in the movement between these domains of knowledge, between the objective and abstract and the embodied and practical (2002, 145). For a discussion of Ingold's notion of inhabitant knowledge and Conquergood's approach to performance research in relation to alternative approaches to participation see ‘Along the Way’ (Myers 2006c, 3).