 This is an extra comment, Susan. The title of Jill's presentation is Situated Learning. Hi, Susan. How's it going? Hi, everyone. Good morning. Thank you for coming. My name's Jill Banting. And the title of my presentation is called Situated Learning Community Engagement. So I'm from Vancouver, Ireland. And I've been living near Camel River for about three years. Is anybody here know where Camel River is? Yes. All right. It's a really beautiful place. I highly recommend going there. I am, I finished my BFA at Emily Carr in Courtney at NIC in the Commonwealth Valley. So just in case anybody doesn't know, there is a branch of Emily Carr on my umbrella in Corbyn. And after I graduated from my BFA, I started working with the Camel River Arts Council, where I've been developing a community engagement methodology for the past three years. And that's the work that I presented to Chris to enter into the studies at Program here. So that's Kent Blackburn on the left. He's the Executive Director of the Arts Council. And on the right is Erica Benson, who is a resiliency trainer and youth worker in Camel River. And this is an example of a community engaged space that we've been occupying downtown. And it's one example of many of the different things that I've been doing. So I use interdisciplinary and visual dialogical methods. They're participatory and collaborative. And I make projects in community with and for community partners. So Arlene Goldbart is a wonderful writer. And just to quote her here, community cultural development is are the activities that we do with communities and in specific contexts that help to grow social, cultural, and economic ways. So an arts-based community development mandate is what the Arts Council uses. And so that's how I was introduced to community engagement. So I started doing a practice called Graphic Recording. And it is a way of listening and learning and communicating. And it happens at events. And it happens in public and in private. And it's during situations where there's information being shared. And there's communication happening, consensus building, things like that. So I've done a lot of these works. And they really informed my practice in terms of getting to know the community and the people and some of the different issues that are there. And so a lot of them were turned into public art pieces. And eventually, I became kind of exhausted by that practice. But in the process of doing that, I learned that there is an aspect of learning that is visual, and when combining language and imagery, there's some sort of strange energy that's created in the consciousness of the person who's making the work. So these are some examples of some of the other community projects that I get before I enter the program. Poetry on windows in the shopping district downtown. This is a work by Harold Vinnish. It's a poem that's very site-specific, right on the foreshore downtown river. This is a work that I did with a youth dropping center. And it was done in dialogue. And it was one of my first collaborations with a group of people who were considered to be marginalized and at risk. So that was a vinyl window decal that was installed into this sort of solarium site at the youth dropping center. This was a wall tattoo project at an alternate school. And it was an invitation for the students to design and make decals that expressed their identities and individuality. And they were allowed to decal the school. And sort of take ownership of the school space. Social examples of texts, symbols, images, poetry, different types of mark-making, in a sense, in the school environment. This is a mural that I painted. This is out in front of the sexual health clinic at the school. And it creates a system of place. And it creates an identifiable space that is in front of the clinic. And this is a text work that I did. It was a storytelling piece that I collaborated with one of the senior members of the community. It was put in the community center. And it was a story about how the original community hall was built. And he was there. And he was telling me how the floor was installed. So just in terms of getting a grasp of the historical context of community art after I entered the program, I started to really appreciate the history of community arts and where it comes from. And just how essential it's been in developing community engaged art as a form. So this is an example of the Great Wall of LA, which is a work done by Judy Bakker. And it involves hundreds of people. And this is a great example because it uses visual images. And it's about renegotiating history. And as you can see in the slide above, it's about community activity. It creates these hubs of activity. And it also resulted in this really significant artwork that stretched over 2,500 feet. And it was about retelling and reframing cultural histories of ethnic communities within and minorities in California. So Bakker's work is really significant in that she uses collaborative structures to educate both theors and participants about social justice issues and stimulating dialogue and community development. So we all created a social presence and a visual legacy that are significant to place. So in terms of my research early on, I started to ask how are the CG Dialog participation and storytelling to make public art that affects social change? And what kind of effects are they having in the community? Then I discovered Briana Kester and the dialogical aesthetics. And I realized through the graphic before the work that that was a form of mentoring and the dialog through art making and through visual imagery. So I became really interested in his ideas about that. The sense of intersubjectivity and vulnerability and openness to the participant and what comes into being through that kind of exchange. So in fall, I entered into the research stage in the first second semester. And I was in this pop-up studio that was in downtown County River. And so I started to explore some different things. I got pretty scattered and it was the hardest day really focused because there was just so much research to do. So I attempted to ground my practice in this studio space. And I held a series of art groups, classes, and community dialogues that this is an image of the art group. This is a really important place in terms of youth because in County River there's really nothing for youth to do after school. And in terms of supporting young artists, they're outside of art class. There really wasn't anything. So I really enjoyed meeting and gathering with these 13-aged kids and making art and then trying to dialogue with them through art about things they cared about and things that were going on in their lives. So this, again, is a slide from before, but it's a good example. I really enjoyed this slide because it's the image of people in dialogue with an image of dialogue in the background. And so this is, in this space, people started to be attracted to it. And city planners and cultural stakeholders started to draw up by. And we started to talk about city planning and cultural development and architecture, public spaces. And so that was really exciting. So I was learning through having these conversations with people. And I started to document the work, using video, posting them on the web, and trying to sort of grapple with, how do I document this independent? What is the artwork and how does it become more of a tangible form? So after the cube ended up closing down, and so I didn't have a studio anymore, and I was exhausted by image-making. So I was in Fiona Bowie's class at the time. I decided to have a studio day downtown. So what I did was I used the Deriv approach to explore the city as an image, and as a sculpture in a way, as a studio space. So this is an image of the downtown. And the foreground is benches in a public square. And then this beautiful monument to logging. That's Lothermite. That's one of the only pieces of public art that we can work with. And so I started to look at the city differently. I started to look at the signs. I started to look at the symbols. I started to look at the artwork and try and decipher it and try and figure out what is this place, and attempting to generate a new relationship with it. So I started to look at it a little bit differently. And then I, as so I was walking through the space, looking at the photographs, and I met the security guard. And this is a very place-specific kind of conversation. But this image is of some public washrooms that were installed beside the art gallery. And there was a big public debate around it. And it was really quite, there's not a lot of money on it. And nobody liked them, and ugly. And they just kept throwing money at it, trying to disguise them and make them into something nicer looking. And so there was no public art policy in the city. So I was sort of at a loss as to how to enter into that conversation with people. So I started talking to the security guard, who was walking past the art gallery. And we were talking about the public washrooms. And he started telling me some interesting stories about that. He said that at nighttime, up to eight people will pile into these washrooms and lock themselves in there to sleep. Because there's no working room to sleep. So in the morning, the AM security guard comes along and kicks them all out. So in terms of social sculpture, it was an interesting example to me of how things happened. And these structures were created and how people end up using them in ways that fulfill indeed. And I just thought that was really interesting. So I then had to encounter with a woman outside the library. And we started to have a conversation. I was really interested in this aspect of conversational engagement and connected knowing the way that we create identities through talking with other people. And this led me to think about Susan Lacy's work in the Crystal Quilt and how she does these formative orchestrated events that involve people who discuss and enter into conversation both in lives and things that matter to them. So after that, to read the encounters and the security guard, I started to think about voice, place, identity, and narrative as these key themes that I could potentially focus on to develop a more fluid methodology. And I'm interested in what the role of place, identity, and narrative are in the creation of dialogue and in building a sense of community. Cancer notes, I'll probably just go through this quickly, but Susan Lacy does situated practice. She spent seven days in the hospital taking notes, talking to people about cancer and death and all these different things. I found that really exciting. This was an orchestrated dialogue on a rooftop between teenagers and police. I address this because it's very confrontational and it's risky and it involves clashes and putting people together that might not necessarily want to talk. Stephen Wildhouse is a really interesting artist who I'm researching and I'm curious about the way that he deals with social systems and architecture and the way that people... He works with people who live in housing complexes and he engaged with people and he's interested in the way that people create identities and these self-organizing systems within control structures. And lastly, I got to go to Portland to the open engagement conference, which is great and I would highly recommend going. It's free, it's in Portland at the university there and I was introduced to social practitioners and other ways of working and Harold Fletcher, he's a teacher there. This is an example of some of his work that he did when he was a master's student. So what he did was I got a vacant storefront for free and they started putting art shows together using place-specific objects that they would gather from around that particular site. So I'm really curious about his methodology because it seems really random and it's also playful and it pokes fun at established art cones and it elevates everyday objects and everyday people and experiences by turning them into art. So in terms of pursuing this dialogical work, what does it state according to Kester its ability to catalyze advanced literary insights through the dialogue? So with my thesis work, the challenge is gonna be the structures of engagement and how to, what is the dialogue for? Like what am I trying to stimulate and with whom, why? And I'm gonna be doing an internship with public art work all fall and with Dr. Cartier and I'm hoping to find some situations there that could potentially reveal themselves. And like Fletcher, he discovers things, he allows things to present themselves to him so it's not so much about finding an issue and trying to tackle it, it's more allowing things to appear, so that's where I'm at right now. All right, thank you Jill and welcome to the floor. I've got a text from a faculty member from afar. We need to hold this mic right up to our mouths. Hi Jill, can you hear me? Hi Luigi. Well first off I just wanna say I really enjoyed your presentation, thanks very much. And just like on a stylistic note, one thing I noticed you did that I really enjoyed is you did provide a lot of reference in the form of quotation but you always paraphrased it and I really enjoyed that kind of counterpoint between being able to read the quote but getting your take and sort of elaboration on it at the same time. As far as your, so I just wanted to say I enjoyed that. As far as your practice, I thought you really presented it well for someone like myself who's fairly uninformed, the contextualization of it, in a sort of a historical context of social and situated work, you made it really, really clear, you spent a really good amount of time on it and then dove into your own specific work so that I really enjoyed as well. So I guess the question that this is leading to is I felt that you sort of outlined a narrative in the whole presentation about yourself even though a lot of your work maybe doesn't place yourself in the center of the work or the activity. And when you started to speak about the derive approach I felt a shift and I just wondered my interpretation of that shift would be correct. My impression was that up until that point, your work perhaps can be described as like an activator or a facilitator. It seems like you're maybe changing your own position within your work to be more in the center of the orbit. I don't really have a way to describe this. And I was wondering if you're gonna present something in the near future where we can kind of see this new direction that you're pursuing. But I'm wondering if that perception is correct in terms of putting yourself more in the center of the work or if there is no shift in the way that you're engaging with the community in terms of what you're working on. The center of the work meeting and I'm the subject of the work? Yeah, I guess what I'm asking is it seemed prior to the derive approach in your presentation you would let participants bring forth whatever was at the center of the work. And my perception was now you're looking for the subject matter and trying to draw that out of it. Is that correct? That's a good question. I think the derive approach was a shift towards towards social space. So moving away from community arts organization and social service groups and public art policy and then moving towards into my own practice that's coming from my own center. So I guess it was more of an attempt to find my own voice within that practice. And it still involves other people but it's not so much about organizational mandates, et cetera. It's more about my own sense of discovery. It's quite a bit of a resonance with Jay and these presentations earlier about giving up control to the derives as a situation is kind of a strategy to employ a kind of a program. We're at the center of it but you're also following that kind of control script and you put in place for things to invoke things that happen. But if I can follow on the we do question a bit, it seems to me, I'm curious about the role of politics here. The way you described Kester was really clear, right? I thought it's always really grasped that for yourself but when he's talking about emancipatory freedom to describe this as something, I think you said you enjoyed the elevating people into artworks and I thought that was really key. His question about, or his notion about emancipatory strategies when we talk about freedom, we're invoking a question about what is not freedom and the answer to that will be a certain kind of politics. Yeah. What are your politics? Are you willing to put them out there or do you want to work with them in a covalent way? I think I'm willing to be seen as a politician. I'm interested in exploring the way artists can engage in social and political realms. And I love Joseph Boyz and I'm curious about his idea of art as politics. I think what I'm curious about in terms of emancipatory, I'm more interested in emancipatory pedagogy I think and in terms of emancipatory politics, I don't really know yet. In terms of marples, are you gonna be a marple in the fall? What do you, you said you wanna discover something there. What do you mean, do you feel you'll be bringing tools to discover? Well, honestly, I don't know anything about marples yet. So I think the approach to marples can be probably a synthesis of the community, engage work and the degree of approach and also research and potentially more organized systems of information gathering. Part of the project of marples quantitative data I'm trying to show through gathering, not necessarily just making art but trying to show and evaluate how public art can or how it impacts communities. So that's sort of a rip, that's sort of branching into research, the different kind of research. That's your question. Yeah, no, that's continuing the discussions. Very interesting. Hello. Hi Rachel. Hi Bill. Along the lines of the last two questions, I think this fits in. One thing I've noticed that you seem to be getting more comfortable doing is directly talking to people outside of any institutional setting. And you're talking to specific people that are in service with those institutions. So the security guard, I know another project for everyone in the future. And to me, along with what Chris said, that's a direct political item. I wonder if you may feel that way and something you might also want to employ in marple. And is that also with the first comment and question, something like how you right now and searching yourself in the work because you aren't just recording anymore? Are you instigating comments out of your relationship with the institution? Is there a reason you're going directly to these people? Yes and no. I mean, part of doing any kind of relational work is that I have to question my own reasoning. And I think what I'm laying around with, because I'm in an institution right now, I cannot ask those questions about what that means to be a part of an institution. And being a part of the arts council, that was also an institution as well. I guess what I'm hearing you saying is that, are you asking is I am either one who started to instigate those conversations or is it close to listening? As opposed to just listening, as opposed to just being sort of the observer or recorder? Yeah, I think so. I think I'm moving into more of an active role as a creator of situations, as a creator of events, as a creator of dialogues that are more coming from my own sense of values. So I think my politics are more about getting more towards heart-based kind of realities. What is your lived experience right now? What matters to you? What's important? And how can we do things, small things, short-term things that will create a feeling of emancipation maybe from those situations without, without meaning they have to make some sort of grand political action happen. Very interesting. I think it's time for one last... I'm on raise. Thank you, Jill. That's a very exciting presentation. My question is about the dynamic nature of the artifact of the dialogue you're initiating. And I was very intrigued by that notion of graphic recording and the, well, what is obviously starts out as a protocol of discussion, but it's so much more by the colors and by the individual. But then, I'm assuming at some point the recording is finished and stands there as a result, the same with the Los Angeles wall. And I was wondering, and that's why I like the blackboard but actually so much because I'm assuming that it can constantly be changed and grow, which I find is crucial for talking about social change. So what are your ideas on initiating something that can be more of a dialogue in progress as opposed to an artifact? So how dynamic is what you want to create? Yeah, that's a really interesting question. I'm curious about this concept of the third object, which was presented by Clare Doherty in Open Negation where there's a dialogue, but then there's an object to attach that dialogue to that represents aspects of that dialogue. So yeah, the graphic recordings were objects and I think that's why I moved towards the blackboard chalkboard idea because I was looking at images of Joseph Boyce in the tree university and his blackboard was sort of like a homage to that in a sense, but it was also more about transience and transition between dialogues and trying to let go of the image and trying to let go of the artifact. I think there's a time and a place for it and it's functional in some situations. Like the graphic recordings sometimes were put on display as public artwork, they're also put online as a banner on a website or as little vignettes and slideshows. So I was curious to see how the object was then translated again by the user of the image in various iterations. But I think there is, that's something I'm grappling with and my methodology is the process and then the product, what is the product? I just want to have one last question for Melanie, she's in first year and I think there's a real resonance between your practices. Well, disclosure on the more political side of this whole thing, but my question is just around, if you found that there's any tension between the anonymity that comes with the community as a whole, the role of institution and then pulling up those personal narratives and personal stories of gender, race, identity, of any lived experience. Anonymity being just like a community as a whole. Like a faceless, generic, yeah generic. Like an ethnic community. Like a system, like in a community that's product of policy, that's history, so on and so forth. And then pulling up those individual stories to find any tension to that, or how has that influenced or seemed to your work? I'm more comfortable with personal narratives because I think that each person is unique and within their stories is just all the keys and themes to our work. So I'm curious what the narrative is. It's not only in method, but also methodology. It has to do with identity and labels. And I think it's complicated because once you start using words like ethnic minority and marginalized groups, then I'm implicating and I'm placing myself in a central location. So I would actually prefer to let that vocabulary go at some point and start to see individuals as being unique and special and I'm not really sure how to negotiate that yet because part of it is the language and labels and vocabulary. I'd be curious to talk to you now about that. I really think you should, and it's true words follow one another right after politics. Ethics is often quite on its heels, isn't it? Yeah, I just met the ethics board last week. Okay, okay. Was your job an OCR on the board? Well, actually no, it was those classes. Okay, right. Those classes. It's his week off. Yeah, she's great. She's very approachable so I'd encourage anybody who wants to work with the community to definitely get in touch with her and make sure that they know that there is a protocol to follow when you're at the school. Okay, thanks very much, Joe. So we'll take a few minutes to change over to our last minutes.