#4 Sounding Stories
Sounding Stories was developed as a follow up to In Touch at ArtSpace supported by Arts in Maroondah. This time the council had a community in mind that they wanted to engage with through workshops leading to an interactive exhibition in the ArtSpace. A large number of refugees from Burma live in Maroondah and the council wanted to engage with young people from this community during the school holiday period.
The council set up initial meetings with elders of these communities from Burma living in Maroondah to discuss working with their young people. We were informed of some of the experiences they have had getting out of Burma and time in refugee camps before arriving in Australia. Some participants would have lived in Australia for years and some had recently arrived from camps in Malaysia.
Maroondah has the second highest number of refugees from Burma settling in Victoria. Most of Maroondah’s settlers from Burma are ethnic Karen from the Thai border area, and Chin, from the area bordering Bangladesh and India. Many would have lived in refugee camps for 10 or more years before coming to Australia. - Refugee Council of Australia
I worked with visual artist and educator Edwina Atkins to develop a workshop that would explore character and narrative. Edie is a great communicator of ideas and an amazing facilitator that really connects with children and brings out their creativity. The workshops were open ended and exploratory in nature as we wanted the themes of the final installation to come directly from the participants rather than coming from us. This would be a process that we would continue to develop further in future works.
This kind of creative development requires a lot of brainstorming and open ended discussions. I think about it like Alice following the white rabbit, you don't know what is around the corner, you’re just following the creative ‘rabbit’. Over several workshops we explored imaginary characters and worlds dreamed up by the young participants. On the final day we recorded each participant recounting their version of the story that had emerged from our explorations.
The Sounding Stories Workshop
Now that we had some amazing drawings and voice recordings Edwina and I went away to put it all together into an interactive installation. The concept of a ‘walk in story book’ emerged from the review of the artwork and audio. Distinct thematic worlds emerged too, The land of the giant character ‘spikador’, the land of strange animals and creatures, the ocean with pirates and mermaids, and outer space.
I wanted to continue exploring the implementation of conductive paint with all the lessons learned from the In Touch installation. We used the paint on panels that would then be connected by wires to the touch sensors. This created a much more reliable connection and allowed us to do all of the application of the conductive paint off site.
Using a projector and a constantly moving ladder Edwina painstakingly recreated the kids’ drawings on the walls of the gallery. Cayn and I installed the speakers and touch sensors, testing as we went. Cyan had produced hundreds of individual sound clips from the children’s voices as well as thematic scores that accompanied each gallery wall. Finally we worked with venue staff to light the installation using colour and texture to accentuate the immersive nature of the work.
The completed Sounding Stories exhibition
The end result was an installation that was both grand in scale and intimately detailed with a myriad of interaction possibilities. The installation opened during a mini festival showcasing communities from Burma with traditional dress, dance and music. The feedback from the community was overwhelmingly positive and continued to have a strong engagement from the general public over the next month.
Whilst being a creative success this work took a long time and it was more expensive than we had anticipated. We were consciously spending more money than we were getting for a project with the assumption that we would keep doing more work like this. We were using these early works to experiment and build up physical infrastructure (speakers, tech equipment etc.) to re-use in future work.
A participant interacting with the installation
Sounding Stories was a springboard that we used to pitch new collaborative community works. It created a framework for future works and helped inform our mission to encourage creative agency. We also established our very tactile form of interactive art and showed it was an effective way to connect people (literally and figuratively) to cultural spaces.
Sounding Stories will change and develop over time, shifting with the input of new communities that guide it to its next exhibition.
Creative team: Paintings by Edwina Atkins, Composer Cayn Borthwick, Tech Wizardry by Matt Blair, Pikkle Henning & Andrew Noble.
Sounding Stories is part of our ‘Collaborate and Activate’ repertoire and you can see / read more about it here
If you are interested in presenting Sounding Stories, collaborating with us or just want to say hi drop us a line: hello@playablestreets.com
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Thanks for reading 🤙
-Glen