Spacemaking as Sanctuary // Water Memory ????

As research and in response to the following prompts, I created a sound art piece, exploring how we are in relationship to and with space. You’re invited to explore your surroundings via this interactive and immersive sound art piece from wherever you are in the world. Entwining binaural recording techniques, field recordings, archives, text, mark making, embodiment and somatic practices, this piece is best experienced using headphones.

• How are we in relationship with the space around us? 
• How do we feel safe-enough in the spaces we’re in? 
• How do we belong? How do we be in relationship with our environment, especially if there’s tensions with power, safety and limitations? 
• How do we cultivate / practice / rehearse building and repairing community / relationships? 
• How do we repair our relationship with space?
• How do we relate to our environment? Is it rooted in extraction or is it generative in nature?
• How do we make our relationship to and with our environment irresistible? Safe enough? Accessible? Inclusive?
• How do we wrestle with tensions of becoming ‘experts’ in and of a space? 
• How do we ‘decolonise’ space beyond performative empty gestures?

You’re invited and encouraged to participate and share via the methods which resonate. 

You might respond with sound, text, photographs, mark making, dance, a movement, something else, all expressions are welcome. Mapping /remapping our ecologies via drawing, writing, feeling, experiencing, sensing connection to ourselves and our environment as a way of building trust and belonging.

Prompts for your practice

• Where are you? (Describe your environment)
• Where are you in space? (Are you laying/seated/standing/something else?)
• What is around you? Can you describe?
• What can you see, hear, touch, smell?
• Are you touching anything?
• How are you feeling in this space? (How are you in relationship to and with what’s around you?)
• How does this make you feel?
• Do you feel safe?
• What’s going on with your nervous system?
• What are you wearing?
• What do you remember?
• What helps you feel safe-enough?
• What do you wonder?
• What do you notice now?
• Notice your breathing, how are you breathing?
• What do you feel? (Please refer to the feelings wheel if it helps)

This participation exists within ‘crip time’ or ‘neuroemergent time’ or ‘anticolonial time’ where linear ideas about time are subverted as there are many ways of experiencing time. You are invited to ‘read’ or ‘see’ or ‘feel’ or ‘experience’ and apply in your own laboratory of experience* to create sanctuary via spacemaking and together beyond time or place via the most accessible tools and ways of Being, whether you are someone who is in bed, or outside.

*A ‘laboratory of experience’ is where we’re open to experiments. There is no ‘right’ or ‘correct’ way you are expected to share your expression, no rank, no snootiness or preconceived notions or expectations. 

We honour the individual experience without hierarchy or rank, instead, the practice itself 

There are many ‘new names’ for this offering, e.g: an experimental laboratory / a practice / a rehearsal / rehearsing embodied care (self + others), creating safe-enough places to land/ a ritual / a trust-building exercise…. But I call it ‘spacemaking’ and hope we can co-create sanctuary. 

Feel welcome to get in touch with your responses to the prompts at dionne.cargo.site as we collate a private reference space to share our practices with community.

Bio 

Dionne Elizabeth is a transdisciplinary artist, researcher, ethnographer, spacemaker, writer, teacher, facilitator, dj, creative producer, somatic + embodiment explorer and human Being based between the uk and Norway, via the Caribbean. Since 2008 i’ve been creating, producing and making sound art installations, art + embodiment workshops, psychogeographic sound walks and sonic plant meditations, entwining art, care, radio, ecology, somatics, embodiment, ritual, ethnography, archives, text and social practice.
Dionne.cargo.site