Misha Myers

Walking Again Lively: Towards an Ambulant and Conversive Methodology of Performance and Research

Abstract Narrative walking practices, or modes of conversational activity set in motion by the conditions of wayfinding, potentially offer mobile and dialogic methods of engaging with experiences of mobility and of representing those experiences. They also offer alternative ways of intervening in politics and policy impacting on the distribution of mobility or immobility. The artwork way from home employed such practices as a performative, participatory and interventional methodology for eliciting and representing the transnational experiences, affects and significances of place for refugees and asylum seekers across the UK. The various strategies conceived here as homing devices, homing tales and conversive wayfinding, were employed to construct ‘meeting places’ where transnational views, perspectives, experiences and knowledge could be exchanged. This methodology proposes alternatives to hegemonies of communication, representation and authorship in both artistic and scholarly production, through processes that interrelate experiential, analytical and interventional ways of knowing.

Situations for Living: Performing Emplacement.

This essay enquires how certain performative mechanisms deployed in the practice-as-research project Homing Place might be conceived as homing devices, mechanisms that create relational and dialogic interspaces of orientation, dwelling, and emplacement and methods of bodily attunement to places. How might they be a homing place or homing places – describing both a place of inhabitation that exists in and through movement and a method of action, a way of finding, making and inhabiting that place? In Homing Place, a set of contextually based and participant-led experiments involved inhabitants of Plymouth, UK, who are asylum seekers and refugees, in spatial, relational and dialogic art processes of wayfinding, mapping and walking. This essay considers the underlying conceptual concerns of this project – how do those performative mechanisms employed create place or are place-making, and how is emplacement performed? Key conceptual tools for this discussion are Tim Ingolds conceptions of wayfaring and inhabitant knowledge and Edward Caseys conceptions of dwelling and inhabitation.

Stories from the Walking Library

From August 17 to September 17, 2012, Deirdre Heddon and Misha Myers created and carried a Walking Library, made for the Sideways Arts Festival. Sideways, an art festival ‘in the open’ and ‘on the go’, aimed to connect ecology and culture through using the ‘slow ways’ or ‘slow paths’ of Flanders. The Walking Library was comprised of more than 90 books suggested as books ‘good to take for a walk’ and functioned as a mobile library for Sideways’ artists and public participants. In addition to carrying a curated stock, the Library offered a peripatetic reading and writing group. Drawing on the Library’s resources and the experience of reading, writing and walking one’s way across Belgium, Heddon and Myers consider how reading in situ affects the experience of the journey and the experience of walking; how journeying affects the experience of reading; how reading affects the experience of writing; and how a walk, as a space of knowledge production, is written and read.

Way from Home

In ‘way from home’ Myers developed a performative mechanism that created a space for creative and critical dialogue, exchange, reflection and expression of different perspectives and experiences of home, belonging and inhabitation at this contemporary moment. The performative mechanism involved a set of instructions for a process of walking, mapping and wayfinding, and invited inhabitants of Plymouth who are refugees and asylum seekers to map a route from a place they considered home to a nearby ‘special place’ that they visited often. Following these maps as a guide, the mapmakers then transposed the landmarks of the city to their maps of home through walking and dialoguing with a partner. A series of these walks was documented through various media and included in a multi-media interface conceived by Myers and technically designed by Dan Harris and limbomedia. This digital work was commissioned by and published in Performance Research. The set of instructions for the walk was included in ‘Performance Research’ as an insert, along with a two-page spread co-authored with Harris introducing the project and contextualising the work and the questions the project poses about home and belonging. Research and development of the interface were supported by an ACE grant, and involved a workshop at ‘A Sense of Place’ (British Council, 2003). The interface was the basis of a successful bid for an AOL ‘Innovation in the Community Award’ for the refugee support organisation ‘Refugees First’. Audio recordings of the walks were broadcast on BBC Radio Devon over a week during the morning, midday and evening news.

The Walking Library: Mobilizing books, places, readers and reading

The Walking Library, inaugurated in 2012, has functioned as a mobile laboratory and art project for the ongoing exploration of the relationships between environments, books, reading and writing. In this essay, our focus turns to The Walking Library’s function as a library, asking: ‘What sort of library is a walking library? What does a walking library do—for its books and its borrowers and the places through which it moves? And what can it reveal or teach us about libraries, books, reading and environment?’ In a context in which data has become ‘mobile’, we explore the mobility of physical books through the Walking Library’s social and architextural designs and structures. The book on the move is recognised as the material of social bonding. The Walking Library depends upon and promotes the mobility of books through social networks by gifting, lending, borrowing and sharing; it is the social capacity—the social capital—of The Walking Library, and of walking and reading together, which concerns us most here. The Walking Library has offered temporary spaces for sociality, for shared contemplation, poetic spatiality and kinaesthetic comprehension. In doing so, it has generated a heightened sense of books’ sociability, spatiality and mobility through a stronger understanding of the inter-dependencies of reading, walking, time and place.

Nowhere Without You

Artistic practices of walking may provide performative and interventional strategies for dialogic and interdependent ways of being in a world and age of unprecedented transborder migration. These strategies may offer new engagements with, orientations to and representations of transnational place amidst the contradictory claims, desires, memories that coexist in the aftermath of conflict and the negotiation of difference. This chapter considers a series of walking art works that explore the experiences and identity and place-making practices implicated in transnational mobility. These works offer strategies of interaction, negotiation and exchange to map and orientate to the experiences, provisional processes and places of transnational displacement, movement and mobility, particularly that of forced migration. Altogether, they suggest strategies of a civic engagement that may potentially generate longer-lasting transformations of space. The chapter draws upon Rosi Braidotti’s nomadic theory to articulate the ethics and aesthetics for walking art practices operating within public spaces marked by transnational mobility.

On Libraries : Introduction

On Libraries responds to the performative and performance potential of libraries as sites and services – and, to the shifting function, form and content of libraries within society. Ongoing vocifer...

Extending story-worlds through social media

ABSTRACT Technological innovations in digital communication technologies offer possibilities for new forms of participation and storytelling in theatre. WildWorks Theatre Company creates work that is discovered and devised with partners, artists and community participants in response to specific cultural and geographical locations. The work includes people in roles that can mirror their everyday real-life roles inside the performance world. This paper considers findings and interaction methods of research the company pursued with researchers Misha Myers and Dane Watkins, to explore how transmedial methods may extend the reach of story-worlds it creates and how these methods might enhance community relationships and experiences of the work for both participants and audience members.

Enduring Gravity: Footnotes of Walking and Duration

The footnote is an elusive fugitive. It slips under the foot of the body of the text, tripping up the trajectory of the writing and interrupting the linear progression of an argument, creating diversions, detours and paths of consciousness that open up new horizons and dimensions of thought.