How do you move? Where do you move? Where can you move? How do your movements impact your perspectives, and vice versa? These were some of the few questions we engaged with during our Geography course entitled Global Movements: Migrations, Refugees, & Diasporas.
We became particularly interested in how past experiences, backgrounds, ideologies, and social influences all led to different perspectives on place, belonging, and home. These perspectives inform how we view other people, ourselves, and the world.
In order to explore the connections between place, perspective, and identity, we created an art installation in an dynamic student common space. We wanted to make something people would have to interact with, to emphasize the ways in which we consciously or subconsciously interact with everything we see and hear. We also wanted to center the frameworks we use to interact with a situation. By making those unavoidable, and naming them, we can begin a process of interrogating, understanding, and nuancing our own conceptions around these themes.
The goal of this installation is to encourage physical, mental, and emotional movement through the various spaces. Placing this art installation on the web is part of making this work more accessible and interactive on those fronts, while also facilitating an interdisciplinary discussion about the themes we are showcasing.
During the display period of the art installation, we encouraged viewers to experience all the objects in this space from various angles and heights. There is an evident physical component to experiencing movement. As viewers of this work through a digital framework, we also want to encourage you to think about the questions we posed to those who were able to attend the space in person: how are you interacting with the work? What are you seeing, or not seeing? What do the frames remind you of? How does your digital access (and frame) impact (how much of) the work you see?
As you browse through the photographs of the space, you will notice there are various frames in the space; some literal and some metaphorical. We urge you to reflect on your own frames, and how they help you reconcile with and understand the world.