Re:connections: A Festival of Conversations

Abstract

Re:connections is a series of artist-led events that took place on a regenerated housing estate in Birmingham, UK, in 2017, exploring how dialogical arts practice – the use of artist-led intervention to draw out conversation – might be used to understand more about people’s emotional connections to the places in which they live. The project provides an insight into the potential of such practices to contribute to assessments of place in a way that reflects the complexity and nuances of people’s deep relationship with their everyday environment.

Keywords:

• dialogical arts practice
• Lee Bank
• place assessment
• housing estates

Notes

1 Grant Kester, Conversation Pieces (Oakland: University of California Press, 2004), 8.

2 Edward Relph, Place and Placelessness (London: Sage, 2008 [1976]).

3 Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001 [1977]); Sarah Pink, Doing Sensory Ethnography (London: Sage, 2015).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jenny Peevers

Jenny Peevers is an artist whose practice explores the interaction between art, people and place, with a specific interest in exploring how arts practice can reflect and respond to the depth and complexity of people’s associations with the places in which they live. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, an executive director of Creative Health (Arts and Health) Community Interest Company, and a part-time Ph.D. researcher in the School of Architecture and Design, Birmingham City University.