SYMBIOTIC PLACEMAKING
At its core this project is about recasting depression as a navigational tool for ethical city developement.
If you live in a city you have 40% more likelihood of suffering with depression, 20% more anxiety and double the likelihood of developing schizophrenia.
We use R.D Laing’s well known adage “insanity - a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world” as a jump off point. Together with a group of people identifying as neurofluid we developed a program of therapeutic workshops providing those who are often most sensitive to their environment with the tools to change it.
The research phase was miasmic and mucky, through it we merged learnings from ethnobotany, collaborative urban planning, bushcraft and many more disciplines. Eventually designing a series of therapeutic workshops that are beneficial not only for the participants, but for the built environment itself.
These workshops come under the 5 headings of Material Mindfulness, Creative Agency, Local Practical Criticism, Meaning Sharing & Symbiotic Placemaking. They are designed to interface with local planning authorities so that as the awareness of the participant broadens their collaborative insights and material experiments are logged and inform the policy for the development of their local area.
PROTOTYPE 1: The Embodied Lens and Material Mindfulness at The Severed Hand
During a week long workshop with the architecture collective Assemble I ran an engagement in tandem with my fellow participants.
The Severed Hand workshop was an experiment in material-social communication. Through-out it we were attempting to understand how the limitations and potentialities of a given material lays the foundations for the language used to describe and work with it.
My engagement was designed to help participants reflect on the embodied agency we were developing as our understanding of material processes and relations grew. By reorienting vision to the tip of the subjects finger, the point of material contact becomes our sensory resting zone, an ideal location from which to interogate the material lineage of an object.
PROTOTYPE 2: Social Joinery and Source Energy
The Creation of open ended mechanisms powered by natural means and situated in a place with frequent footfall. It was built with the help of my research assistant JS a member of the Moray Wellbeing Hub.
This laser cut ply and dowel water wheel is lightweight and easy to assemble. Meaning it can translate the force of streams and rivers into a rotary machinic moment at the drop of a hat. The output plate is circular 12mm ply with 6 12mm holes. Workshops can be facilitated in which participants create their own water powered mechanisms.
