Walking Again Lively: Towards an Ambulant and Conversive Methodology of Performance and Research

Abstract

Narrative walking practices, or modes of conversational activity set in motion by the conditions of wayfinding, potentially offer mobile and dialogic methods of engaging with experiences of mobility and of representing those experiences. They also offer alternative ways of intervening in politics and policy impacting on the distribution of mobility or immobility. The artwork way from home employed such practices as a performative, participatory and interventional methodology for eliciting and representing the transnational experiences, affects and significances of place for refugees and asylum seekers across the UK. The various strategies conceived here as homing devices, homing tales and conversive wayfinding, were employed to construct ‘meeting places’ where transnational views, perspectives, experiences and knowledge could be exchanged. This methodology proposes alternatives to hegemonies of communication, representation and authorship in both artistic and scholarly production, through processes that interrelate experiential, analytical and interventional ways of knowing.

Key Words:

• Conversive wayfinding
• homing tales
• homing place
• ambulant methods

Notes

1. The way from home digital artwork was conceived by Misha Myers and designed with a technical team, including Dan Harris with Adam Child of limbomedia. It was commissioned by Performance Research, Vol. 9 (2) as a contribution to the DVD ‘Bodiescapes’ (Eds, Peter Boenisch & Ric Allsopp) and exhibited at the Millais Gallery, Southampton, as part of the exhibition Art in the Age of Terrorism (11 November 2004–29 January 2005).

2. Trans‐national Communities: Towards a Sense of Belonging was led by Maggie O’Neill (Department of Sociology, University of Loughborough) and Phil Hubbard (Department of Geography, University of Loughborough).

3. Throughout way from home, many participants shared experiences of racial hostility directed at them in the UK, such as an incident of bricks being thrown in one of the partner refugee support organisations windows or of dog faeces put in the mail box of an asylum seeker’s home. Beyond these anecdotal accounts, numerous articles related to this subject may be found in the Press Archive section of the North of England Refugee Service available at http://www.refugee.org.uk/press_archive.htm. In addition, ample literature may be found on racial hostility and violence towards asylum seekers in the UK, such as the Dummet (2001), Yuval‐Davis (2002), Schuster, (2003), McGhee (2005) and Dumper (2002).