 We had a small and lovely group of seniors join us for part two of Creative Neighbourhood Mapping!  This workshop was a little more loosely structured, with time for chatting and story telling over tea as well as a short walk to document landmarks.  Themes of changes happening in Mt Pleasant surfaced during our conversation, including valued businesses that have closed and the transforming landscape of the neighbourhood with many new condos and high rises appearing. One participant told us about a historic beaver pond that once lay where a local coffee shop is now, which sparked conversation and speculation about the paths of Mt Pleasant's creekways and inspired us to look up some historical photos of the neighbourhood (such as the gem below from the Vancouver Archives).  Westminster Avenue (Main Street) between 8th and 9th Avenues including Mount Pleasant Methodist Church, H.O. Lee Grocery and Mount Pleasant Pharmacy, 1908 We also added landmarks for bargain thrift stores, big dreams for a future skytrain station, memories of delicious lunches, among many others. Our collaborative map is beginning to fill up with landmarks!
 We had a great turn out for our first Creative Neighbourhood Mapping Workshop yesterday! We started at the community centre and discussed how each one of has our own unique perspective and experience of the local landscape: depending on our own personal histories, skill-sets, interests, and backgrounds, we notice different things in the world around us. For this workshop, we worked together to begin assembling a collaborative portrait of each of our experiences of the Mt Pleasant Neighbourhood.  We split up into small groups and went for exploration walks with the goal of choosing one or two landmarks each to bring back to the map. The choice of each landmark could be approached from a variety of angles: it could be a place we already knew or something just discovered, it could be a recommendation of somewhere to visit, a history of how a site has changed, or an idea for a future transformation. Once back at the centre, we added our landmarks to the collective map and planned the route for a walking tour of the locations we had all chosen.   We set out walking all together, stopping by many of the landmarks we had chosen. Each participant took turns being our tour guide, introducing their landmark and explaining why they had chosen it.  The landmarks were diverse and fascinating, including yarn bombing interventions, waterway shrines, secret back room cocktail bars, meaningful trees with medicinal properties, abandoned houses, hidden gardens, traces of a candy factory, and haphazard bird feeders, among many others.   We used a Polaroid camera to document our landmarks. These photos, along with participant's written descriptions of the landmarks, will be compiled and exhibited on our growing map. Next up we have two mapping workshops, one for Seniors, and one for Youth, to continue to add to our collaborative map before it is displayed in the centre's lobby for the public to check out.  Thank you to everyone who came! It was an inspiring and exciting day. We can't wait to see how the map continues to evolve!   Today we installed our beautiful guerilla pop-up installation on a telephone pole near Mount Pleasant Community Centre. Each petal of the paper flowers was created a community member at our Paint a Petal workshop. The colours, patterns and images on every petal reflect the unique artist who created it.  The unmistakably handmade, DIY nature of the installation activates the corner it inhabits with quirky and playful energy.  We hope this project will bring a little delight and colour to you if you pass the centre this week!   Our pop-up hands on art activity Paint a Petal was a huge success! We had a great turn out of kids and parents who were full of creativity and made a ton of beautiful petals.  I was a little uncertain how participants would react to being invited to leave their artwork behind for our upcoming art installation piece, rather than taking it home with them. To my pleasant surprise most parents and kids loved the idea of contributing their work to a collaborative project and enthusiastically donated their petals.  Stay tuned for updates on the beautiful guerilla art installation these petals are going to become!   Thank you for having us Bounce With Bunny!   Last week we had a wonderful meeting with the board of Mount Pleasant Community Centre to fill them in on some of our ideas and to hear their suggestions and learn about potential resources. The board also joined us in creating this delightful intervention which is currently installed in the community centre lobby.  We worked together to write compliments for strangers who use the centre. The compliments ranged from sweet and heartfelt to silly. We then tucked them inside this little mailbox and posted it on the bulletin board in the lobby, to add a little warmth and mystery to stranger's experience at the centre.  Live Walks is an interactive, live-streamed, scavenger hunt delivered to you through the convenience of your computer or mobile device. Using Facebook Live as our stage we broadcast a walking tour following clues to discover unique landmarks, overlooked corners, and unexpected beauty in the Mount Pleasant neighbourhood. Inspired by our ambivalent contemporary relationship to social media, Live Walks plays with live-streaming as a platform for performance and explores the idea of vicarious living, distance, intimacy, and audience participation in a digital world.
How audiences participated: On February 9th at 10am Facebook audiences were invited to join Keely and June on their live-streamed scavenger hunt using the Facebook Live feature. Audience members were able to comment, share, like, and interact with us during the tour.  |
