Sensing Place

A public programme exploring critical and creative approaches to the public realm & placemaking across Northampton.

Autumn-Winter 2022 / Winter-Spring 2023

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Focusing on the relevance of placemaking for social and artistic communities, and the role of regeneration within cultural institutions, my contribution to this programme was to question what it means to inhabit, share and transform public space. Through a series of paracuratoiral activities–including a 3-days symposium, screenings, workshops, writing groups, food events, virtual gestures and other participatory events– the idea was to investigate placemaking or creative processes by which people and their institutions shape the public realm and build communities.

Artists, curators, academics, researchers and public members gathered to reflect upon various implications of placemaking. My proposal was to conceive bodies as places, territories, or grounds in which new forms of placemaking can be seeded and grow. Participants responded to this proposal by looking into the relationship between interior and exterior spaces, individual and collective experiences, the public and the private, and other critical and creative approaches to engage with the embodied experience of public space.

My intention with this public programme, was to deepen the awareness of the embodied self in relation to places (urban and natural) and to other bodies; understand the interconnected condition that bodies hold with spaces, other bodies, and the rest of the world; localise and awaken inherent potentialities within the body and the spaces it inhabits; recognise the many challenges that public spaces face within the urges of the contemporary context –social inequalities, environmental violence– but also their capacity to generate resistance and resilience, and provide shelter and protection; create ‘interstices’, as described by Karl Marx, or trading possibilities other than those in effect within the capitalist system (non-reproductive, alternative economies); generate spaces for learning and conviviality, critical thinking, affective encounters and knowledge exchange; finally, we wish to devise strategies of well-being and care towards the individual’s body, the care of other bodies and the spaces they occupy.

Chapter 1 (2022)

Click for images and more info:

Harold Offeh, 20 May 23

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This programme was presented at NN Contemporary Art, Northampton.

Thank you to Hospitalfield in Scotland who gave me the time/space to think and write about this programme during the summer of 2022.

Thank you to Hope Scott Trust for funding this residency.