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Apr 23, 2016

5 Meters a Walk

We lingered near each other as we listened to our guide and wandered through the park, the site of investigation. Debra’s situated knowledge, gleaned through decades of practice in urban gardening, helped us to identify numerous plants along the way. Lindsay’s eye focused on minute details through a photographic gaze which later became our primary archive. Our first task was to grapple with the key materialities that each of us was interested in—rust, poop, and edible greenery. We enjoyed significant laughter as we collaboratively condensed observations. Our group was most comfortable in our process of discussion and in our memory work—we enjoyed comparing notes and trying to discern narratives from the park’s landscape architecture—a process transformed into a PowerPoint presentation that superimposed adjectives upon our photographic registers. However, after having viewed fellow group presentations we began to feel anxious about the cohesion of our own delivery. Eventually we reached a point of impasse; though after considering a dearth of aesthetic possibilities, until finally we agreed that to be able to participate in the objective of our working group, to create a game, we needed to have fun. Leah provided us with visual templates that we found useful for merging our love of words, description, and our visual archive. Our task was to choose a photograph that could help us compose a story that would engage diverse materialities, temporalities, and subject perspectives. Leah played with rapid time and the repetitive gestures of graffiti, Debra played with a poetic rhythm and toxic Anthropocene traces in botany, Lissette conjured up an imaginary invasive-species scenario from traces left on our trail. A zine brought all three stories together into a visual document, which we hope translates our critical discussion and play.