 All right, guys, I think we are going to get started. So I'm Kossim Shepard. I teach in the urban design program here at GSEP. Many of you know me. I'm seeing a lot of familiar faces, which is nice, as well as some new ones. And I've been teaching at GSEP for 10 years or so. But I actually come from my original training and background is in documentary filmmaking. And I've been making films for even longer than I've been teaching at GSEP. Films and videos as well as writing about cities and urban change and really telling stories about cities in a variety of media. So this topic is very near and dear to my heart, which is the fifth annual urban design storytelling symposium, where every year we take a moment to reflect on the ways in which we've tried to incorporate and are constantly evolving the notion of what storytelling in an applied sense means in the context of urban analysis and in the context of design and architecture pedagogy, in the context of planning and historic preservation. And take this moment not only to reflect on what it means for us in a design school, but also try and take some cues from how other people in different fields and different sectors are thinking about storytelling in its applied sense and what it means to their practice in a wide variety of ways. So just a little bit of an overview of what it means in the context of our program in the summer, the urban design students, many of whom are here, have me for a class called Reading New York Urbanisms, which tries to kind of mash up a really crash course in the history of New York City's urban development with some basic tools for how to tell stories about place. And the purpose here is not necessarily to turn the urban design students into the makers of polished films, but rather to arm them with the tools of storytelling more generally, which includes how to talk to strangers, how to conduct interviews, how to find ways and palates and methodologies and tools for representing qualitative experience in places, those things that you can't necessarily measure, those things that you can't necessarily calculate, what are some tools that we can use as designers as subjective interpreters of place to advance our understanding of those place, ideally in advance of any intervention that we might make as designers. So in the past, we've looked at a variety of neighborhoods. Students have had their choice in groups of two or three or four people to go out and make a portrait of a neighborhood. And we've tried to sort of match this with different kinds of categories of neighborhoods or places, whether it was corridors or open spaces or systems of infrastructure, edge conditions and border conditions, and then try and introduce questions of urban systems into that analysis. How can you really tell a story about something that's abstract and distributed, but embodied and manifested in the physical and material culture of space with a deep, deep belief on my part that I've kind of suffused into the pedagogy here that the social experience of place and the physical form of place are inextricable and analytically, and that in order to understand them and analyze them, we have to sort of take very seriously that interface and the fact that the physical and the social inform each other constantly, and in fact, that interpretations of place deeply, deeply inform our interventions. So the ways in which cities have been represented and the ways in which neighborhoods and people and urban conditions have been represented very much informs how we understand them and then how we design for them, not only understanding the challenges that we seek to redress, but also the conditions that we might seek to enhance or the opportunities that we might seek to distribute more equitably. This past year, we focused on three districts in particular, Jersey City, Long Island City and Sunset Park in greater integration with what the urban design students were doing in studio and came up with some really, really wonderful stories that really spanned a whole range of different topics. People interviewed designers, people interviewed activists and people on the street, people talk to farmers and community advocates, people talk to street vendors and workers, really investigating everything that ranged from an analysis of the various sounds of Sunset Park to understanding a specific design interventions in Long Island City to looking at the history of public housing in Hoboken and Jersey City. I mean, a really wide range of stories that really, I think, enhanced our understanding of the places that the students were then designing in a way to move from thinking about design as a process where you're incorporating layers of information into a page format and moving towards a concept of introducing methodologies of storyboarding and linearity and sequence and really trying to think about not only who we're talking to when we tell stories and whose stories we are telling, but how the process of sequencing and ordering those narratives gives meaning and instantiates hierarchies in certain ways that are important to unpack before we can move forward and crucially, the ever important relationship between context and details. So those are sort of some of the ways in which we think about what storytelling means to us as urban designers, but we always recognize that we have a lot to learn from how the telling of stories, particularly stories about place and about people manifest in service of other fields, whether that's in the service of environmental preservation or ecological conservation, whether that's in the service of really thinking holistically about healthcare or whether that's in the service of thinking holistically about community change. So I've invited a really wonderful group of speakers to speak to those three ways of thinking about storytelling as an applied practice and I've asked each of our wonderful presenters to reflect not only on the products of the stories that they've told in their work as practitioners of, as crafters of narrative, but also their process, what I think is very different whether you're talking about a community-based arts project, whether you're talking about a novel, whether you're talking about a film or a book. You know, we're kind of, while the process and tools of cinematography and filmmaking are very prevalent in the way that we think about this, the idea here is, again, not to advance one particular format of telling stories in moving images, but rather those tools that allow us to subjectively interpret place and spatial conditions and the people who reside in place and operate in place and then use that to move forward to understand how those conditions might be ameliorated, improved, enhanced, et cetera. So we have a filmmaker, a writer, an arts professional. I'm gonna introduce all of them together and then ask each of them to come up and share a little bit of their process and work with you and then they will join me at the table for a conversation about what narrative practice means to them and also how they see it changing whether it's through their work in education or whether they see their work in communities or their work in sort of advocacy. So we're gonna start with John Bowermaster who is a writer, filmmaker and adventurer and for six times has been granted the National Geographic Expeditions Council Grant. He's one of the society's ocean heroes and his first assignment was documenting 3,741 mile crossing event Arktika by Dog sled which sounds like that must have been quite an adventure. He's written 11 books and produced and directed more than 30 documentaries. The feature length ones include Dear President Obama and Arktika on the Edge after the Spill and Ghost Fleet. And Oceans 8, which I think you'll tell us a little bit more about, that project took him and his teams around the world by Sea Kayak over the course of 10 years. Stories ranging from the Aleutian Islands to French Polynesia, Gabon to Tasmania and more. Reporting on the one ocean as various coastlines are faring in today's busy world, a topic that's very, very, very near and dear to the hearts of all the design programs but the urban design students in particular are dealing with the Hudson Valley this semester and then in the spring when they go abroad and take kind of a global lens that are for design issues. The notion of water and water infrastructures and water as a system becomes of the utmost importance as it is of course one of the most critical issues of our time. Lives in Hudson Valley and works there and for the past few years have focused on a series of short films about the environmental risks and the hopes for the Hudson River Valley which of course is the birthplace of the American environmental movement. I also am gonna ask John in the conversation a little bit about his work as a visiting lecturer at Bard College and the Environment Urban Studies Department because I also obviously have a personal interest in the ways in which these kinds of tools are taught to the future not only designers but environmentalists and other practitioners whether they be doctors or artists or what have you and I would encourage everyone to tune in to his weekly podcast, The Green Radio Hour at RadioKingston.org. After John speaks we're gonna hear from Nellie Herman who's the Creative Director of the Program in Narrative Medicine right here at Columbia. She's published two novels, The Cure for Grief and the Season of Migration which was a New York Times editor's choice and her nonfiction has appeared in an anthology about siblings as well as in academic medicine. She's been an invited resident to numerous residencies such as Malay, Ucross, The Salt and Swell Foundation and has taught fiction and narrative medicine to undergrads, medical students, graduate students and clinicians of all sorts. She was a recipient of a 2016 NEA Literature Fellowship and was recently awarded a Cullman Fellowship of New York Public Library. And then finally we will hear from Aisha Williams an art practitioner who's the deputy director of a very cool organization called the Laundromat Project. She's over a decade of experience working with visual artists presenting programs and generating funding for both commercial galleries and nonprofits. She used to manage visual arts at Lincoln Center which was a comprehensive program providing visual arts offerings and experiences to all the audience and supporters of that vast and complex cultural complex. And before that was a director of the Kent Gallery. She's also on the board of the Marcus Garvey Park Alliance and the Possibility Project and served as a steering committee member of the UN Women's Conference 2016. So we're gonna hear from each of these narrative practitioners if I may categorize you as such each individually and then we'll all join together for a conversation starting with John. Thank you. This semester at Bard I'm teaching class called Multimedia Environmental Storytelling. And it's a semester, it's a project based class and the goal is that each student, their upper class students, they choose one from column A which is subject matter and it could be an environmental issue, specifically a local issue if possible, and then one from column B which is the medium that they wanna tell that story in and it can be the classic, it could be nonfiction or it could be a podcast or it could be a film, et cetera, but it also could be dance or literature or theater or painting, that's completely up to them. But it's only when we got into week five that one of the students asked me, again, the class is called Multimedia Environmental Storytelling and I got into week five, one of the students very shyly asked me in front of the rest of the students, how do you tell a story? So these are exceedingly bright young students, they've been taught to write really well but it's mostly essays and mostly comes from kind of their inner dialogue, it's not about going out and essentially reporting a story. And I just thought, well, okay, obviously I need to back up a second. And I was taken back a little bit because that's what I do. My whole life has been storytelling so I just assumed that everybody could tell a story. For me, it's instinctual but I assumed that that just came naturally to everyone. You saw in Kesson's introduction a lot of reference in National Geographic but that came kind of into my writing career a little bit. I was born in the middle of the United States in Illinois in a little town called Normal and I didn't travel, I was never on an airplane with my parents, that wasn't the life we had. I was a voracious reader. I do great talks in schools because teachers love me because I say I learned everything and got inspired by books. But a lot of it was kind of classic manly man stuff. Jack London and Urs Hemingway and there was a magazine back then called Boy's Life I think which is now essentially outside magazine and men's journal and National Geographic adventure on steroids. But and so I knew I was gonna write when I went to college when they asked you when you applied to fill out a line that says what do you want to be when you grow up? I literally said sports reporter because I thought what could be better? Go to the ball game, have a hot dog, a beer. And I tried it for a couple years while I was in college. It was so boring, so boring. It's repetitive. Every day you just fill in a new name and so and so scored X, so and so hit a home run in the bottom of the seventh, it just didn't change. So I abandoned that but I stuck with the writing but my journalism degrees are in that in journalism and I started as a print reporter and writer and for good 20 years I made a really good living actually writing for magazines and books. I dabbled a little bit in film just as it came about. My argument always, because I've never taken a film class but I've made more than 30 documentaries but my argument always was that if you can tell a story it didn't really matter what the medium was. And some of the projects we did, like we went to the Aleutian Islands and we went to Vietnam and each of those projects was a magazine story for National Geographic, a book, a film, lectures, internet dispatches but if you took them all and went through them it's the same stories, it's just different mediums but that National Geographic connection then morphed into a position where they kind of wanted, they were getting a really good bang for their buck with me because I could write stories. Oftentimes National Geographic will fund people who aren't necessarily good storytellers and then they have to bring in someone else to help them. In my case because I could already tell stories they were pretty confident they could just send me out and they wouldn't have to pay somebody else. So they got off pretty cheaply and I just started making films as part of the whole process and again it was basically same reporting skills, same storytelling skills just with some technology involved that was eye-opening. I like the fact that we got some little bio or my bio I guess referenced that we did this big project that took 10 years where we went around the world one continent at a time by Sea Kayak looking at the relationship between man and the ocean. How many people on the planet? Nobody? Don't be shy. How many people on the planet? We'll call it 7.3 billion, 7.4 billion something like that. How many live within stone's throw of the ocean or an ocean, the ocean or the one ocean? Almost more than half. Four billion people live within easy access to the world's ocean, the world's one ocean. If you go home and flip open your National Geographic Atlas you'll find five oceans listed, Atlantic Pacific, Indian Arctic and the Southern Ocean which goes around Antarctica but if you go home and spin your National Geographic globe you'll see pretty easily that it's all just one big body of water covered 70% of the planet. So anyway it was just incredible fodder for stories out there, it was never ending but as part of that we did this 10 year long project got me quite into water and water related issues and then for 10 years after that we made documentaries, we made a couple in Antarctica, we made a couple in Louisiana, few more, all with kind of ocean related subjects themes and but then I thought, you know, I live here in the Hudson Valley where I've lived for 30 years. I'm just 90 miles straight up the Hudson River from you guys. I wanna come back and take Kassim's class in the summer. But I kind of thought, you know, you don't have to travel halfway around the world to find good adventure, you don't have to travel halfway around the world to find good stories. So I have a small team of people who work with me and we kind of took a big deep breath and said okay let's make movies here at home, let's tell stories here at home. So we started a project called, initially it was called the Hudson River at Risk and we looked at kind of environmental concerns up and down the river. Maybe I'll show you a little clip from that, how's that? Over the past couple of decades I'm lucky to have been able to travel around the world literally continent by continent, often by sea kayak, looking at the health of the planet's coastlines, estuaries and rivers. This Hudson River Valley has such a rich history of both in terms of its wildlife and its people, you know, going back to the Native Americans who use the same Hudson River as a corridor for transporting pelts and fish to the modern day where there are 20 million people who live near the edges of its shoreline and use the river for commerce as well. Wars have been waged here, pirates once lived at its mouth and industries have boomed and busted up and down the river. Brick making, cement, iron mines, commercial fishing, which has led to incredible riches over the years but also grave consequences. That industrial revolution had a great impact on the river and its valley's wildlife. It was a pattern of pollution that ravaged the river into the 1960s and 1970s and in some instances continues today. Today of course, instead of pelts and fish, the cargo moving up and down the river is largely oil and gas in unprecedented volume by both train and barge and aging nuclear plants since just 35 miles from the heart of New York City, awaiting a decision to re-license it or not. And the biggest construction project in North America, the four billion dollar rebuilding of the Tappan Zee Bridge provides jobs but threatens the river's ecosystem. It's clear to anyone who spends time on the Hudson today that it is both an incredibly rich resource but also still a river at risk. So that was just a little tease we made I think a half dozen of the films that looked at these risks and the risks were pretty straightforward. I was quite involved in the effort to ban fracking in New York State and that was successful in 2014, the governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, disallowed fracking in the state but while we were patting ourselves on the back for this grassroots effort, all the ancillary businesses of the gas oil industry including pipelines and crude oil being moved by barges and by train came roaring through the Hudson Valley. So we took a look at that, you saw that image of Indian Point, the nuclear power plant that sits, it's 35 miles from Times Square so it's only 30 miles from here. And we looked at a bunch of other environmental concerns and I took them around, we identified that there were 300 groups up and down the Hudson River that work on environmental issues. And so I took these films up and down the river as a way to, because I'm a big believer that media and I guess in this context, storytelling can make a big difference and they worked. I mean, several of these films that we worked on were used as tools to help educate consumers to complain about certain environmental issues and they worked. The transport of crude oil by train and barges largely slowed. There was a pipeline that was gonna run from Albany to New Jersey that has been forgotten and Indian Point is gonna close in 2021, 2022. So these little films can help make a difference but to be quite honest, I showed them so much that I got bummed out. So we pivoted and we said, okay, we're gonna focus on good news stories because this is the problem with a lot of environmental storytelling today is it only focuses on the dark side and the bad. So we start the side, we do a whole new series just called Hope on the Hudson. So I think I've got a couple of clips here I can show you and these are just tiny little clips from existing films. Mahikana took is the name that the Hudson River had long before it was called the Hudson River. Right now in this time, there are indigenous people around this continent and the world that are standing up in ways that they haven't for a long time and they're standing up for water. Water is life. Water is what goes through us. Water is what we are composed of. The clear water is a tool of the heart as all human tools are. They're tools of the heart. That's what brings people along and makes them wanna be here for 35 years and care about the organization. It's greeting public, it's educating kids, it's making the boat work. It's playing music together. It's carrying the fire forward. What clear water has is a beautiful boat that is sitting on the Hudson River that goes through the water of life. That ancient highway that is Mahikana took, the Hudson River. I'll know about this loop clear water. It's kind of an educational environmental education boat. If you wanna see the boat itself, you have to watch the whole movie, which is online at HudsonRiversStories.com. But this is very, it's celebrating its 50th anniversary. We filmed it while it was in repair for a year and a half or so. But very sweet and very uplifting and very powerful little film. We also, I have a great interest in water and water related stories, but we're looking at all sorts of environmental issues so we've also made several films about local agricultural issues. This is based on a big teaching, a non-profit teaching farm in the Hudson Valley where they experiment a lot with new products and because they have a lot of space and a lot of money, they're able to do things that smaller farms can't do. This is a story of healing through many generations. A great, great granddaughter who is allowed to speak her language. This is the story of a mother who sings the songs of the sacred corn to her children. This is the story of children being proud of who they are and where they come from. This is the story of my great, great grandmother's dreams and wishes coming to life, in the beat of the water drum and the seeds of the rattle. This is the story of intergenerational resilience coming alive to dance into another day. It's open, it's about efforts to regrow Native American seeds which have come near to extinct, including one species of red corn that was down to literally two ears, two ears of red corn, and they brought it here to the farm hub in the Hudson Valley and have nurtured it and now they produce thousands of pounds a year of this red corn and the aquasizing come down and they take all the food back to where they now live. But it's an optimistic, hopeful story but it's also a very sad story because you're reminded that this land in the Hudson Valley used to be theirs and now they've been kicked out and moved up to the Canadian border where it's really a miserable place to grow and so as a result they've run out of the ability to produce their own food. So, not everything is as hopeful as it may seem. But anyway, very sweet story. I encourage you to look for them. There's a million ways to tell a story, maybe thousands, I don't know. And I'm looking forward to hearing what these guys have to say in terms of how they produce their stories but these are mine. Again, I'm a big believer that media makes a difference in a good way and we've come in recent few years to think of the media as being only arbiters of carriers of bad news but I think there's also a really easy way to find good in these stories as well. Thanks for coming in. That was amazing. Thank you, John. It was really great to see video. I have a blank screen for you. I understand that is not usual in your world but I don't use slides so I hope that's okay. My name's Nelly. I'm here as a writer and also as the creative director in the program in Narrative Medicine so I'm gonna tell you a little bit about myself and my own personal work and then also mainly about how I came to be in this program and what our program does sort of from my own angle of things because the program does many, many things. So just to start, I'll start with sort of a basic elevator speech of what is narrative medicine because that question gets asked constantly and probably everyone involved in the work would give you a slightly different answer but my answer is usually something about that we work with stories and storytelling in healthcare specifically trying to get healthcare practitioners to understand something about how stories work so that they can then be better at their jobs. That's really what I usually say. It was really interesting to hear Kossum start us off talking about you guys learning the tools of storytelling in order to be better designers because that's kind of basically what we're trying to do as well although maybe some of the tools that we're sharing might be a little different although we do also do qualitative research and teaching the students about those kinds of things but really we focus more on what happens when we tend to focus more on literature, what happens when you read a story as a way of getting people to quickly access what a story is and what, you know, if you pay attention to what happens to you when you read a story and what other things you notice, what are you listening for, all those things you then can translate that into what happens when you're listening to a story, when you're interacting with an actual human being and the theory is that really medicine in pretty much all ways is storytelling. I mean the whole work of medicine is listening to stories be it actually listening to the language that someone is telling you about what is wrong with them but also being able to analyze their body language, being able to notice details like in the presentation that you're being given, I mean in so many ways you're being asked to understand and interpret stories so we kind of take the view that if we can make people better readers in all senses of that word then they might be better at reading patients and being of help to their patients and it's not just for doctors, we work with all kinds of healthcare practitioners. So backing up from that, just my own personal, by the way I'm not paying attention to time, I hope you, okay, I thought there'd be a clock here but I don't see one. Just my own journey into the work, I was always a writer, creative writer and specifically a fiction writer and when I was in high school a series of unfortunate things happened to family members of mine so I spent a lot of time in hospitals, not as a patient myself but as watching my family members be patients and I lost two of my family members when I was in high school and through all of that grief and trauma I was writing and writing was just the way that I always, since I was a little kid, processed what I went through without, you know, I wasn't conscious, it was just how I didn't really talk to my family or to my friends about what was going on, I actually would just sit and write about it. So then I went, you know, graduated high school, I went to college and after college I came to Columbia to do my MFA in fiction writing and I knew then that I, I mean, I always knew I wanted to write a book about what had happened in my family and in my youth but I didn't know if I wanted, should I write a memoir, should I write a novel? I wanted to write a novel but I didn't know how. Anyway, all of that I can talk for longer about but while I was in grad school I started writing my novel which would be my first novel which was about my family's story and at the same time I also learned that there was this program called Narrative Medicine that existed up at the medical school and that they were looking for MFA students to go and teach a fiction writing workshop to the medical students so I very much volunteered and applied to go do that and I went up to the hospital to teach a very short, like six week workshop to medical students and the experience of doing that was completely transformative to me I think for lots of reasons partly because, well in large part just because I had been around doctors in this very personal way the idea that I was interacting with students that would be doctors and that they thought that I had something to teach them was just completely revelatory and seeing these students react to the tools that I had been working on for years just very basic skills of creative work and sort of I would ask them to write a silly creative exercise and they would look at me like I was crazy because they just never had been asked to do work like that and for me and all my classmates it was completely normal and that was really exciting for me that I think that like oh wait this creative work can translate into other environments and can be of help and of interest to these people who are then gonna go on and actually potentially save lives so that was my first experience with Narrative Medicine and I was completely hooked and then I pursued a job with the program for many years and it took many years to get one but then in the meantime I finished my first book and worked to publish that and wasn't really even aware of all the ways that that book that I was working on really actually was Narrative Medicine or was Narrative Medicine to me in the sense that it was creating a work of art that was actually transforming my own experience and my own story which is now what I try to do with students and with people I work with in the program so after I published that book I ended up getting a job in the program where I then found myself working in the hospital going to faculty meetings with faculty at the hospital and trying to talk to them about how to work with student writing at Columbia as well as in many other medical schools across the country more and more schools are working with student writing as a way to they call it reflective writing in medical school as opposed to creative writing but to my mind it's pretty much the same but as a way to get students to sort of process what they're going through they're asking them to write but of course faculty at medical schools often don't know what to do with the writing that they're being given and it's pretty problematic frankly the way that it's being taught is not they don't most places don't have novelists on the faculty they have people who are very well meaning and care about what they're doing but aren't necessarily trained in what storytelling is or what creativity is so it can be problematic obviously more to say about that too so anyway I worked at the medical school for a while I then was working on my second novel which I eventually the second novel I wrote is about the early life of Vincent Van Gogh it has absolutely nothing to do with me which was a lot of the point I wanted to challenge myself to write a book that wasn't about me because the first one very much was and only in retrospect do I see all the ways that it really was about me without my knowing but also another story but anyway I worked to do that and in the meantime I moved away from the sort of nine to five job that I had at the hospital and more into teaching which I do now still in the graduate school the graduate program for narrative medicine where we get many students coming I would say the primary students we get are students coming out of college before they go to medical school or to health professional school of various kinds so that's the teaching that I do now so I wanted to say a little bit just about the sort of basic pedagogy of what we do in the program which is not there really isn't one thing but I would say the usual thing that we do is that we sit in a small group of well actually you could do it in a big group too but depending on the environment you sit and we just share examples of writing, poem or an excerpt from a short story it is pretty much always a work of creative writing it's not we don't look at essays we don't look at academic texts we're really looking at literature and specifically also not medical related things I think a lot of people who do the work or think they know what the work is share here's a story about a doctor and a patient and that's what we should read but we actually try and not do that because it can be really freeing for people to be looking at something that's not about medicine and then we ask them to write in basically in the shadow of what we've just spent time talking about we give them a writing prompt and the prompt is usually very open-ended it's not like please reflect on the patient that you just saw yesterday and what you would do differently it's more like write about a gate or write about the time you a time that you I don't know I can't even think of one off the top of my head but they're very open-ended and hopefully eliciting creative responses and people get really freaked out and you know we necessarily don't really wanna do this but when really like every single time when people put themselves through the act of doing this thing that makes them feel vulnerable they come out the other side completely excited about it and what has become my sort of angle into the work and my thing that I now sort of proselytize about in the program is just basically the idea that each of us are practicing creativity in all kinds of ways throughout our days no matter what we do and to start to become aware of the way that we do that and to actively cultivate it and use it in our work it just makes us better at whatever we're doing and you know a couple of years into the work I realized that no one really used that word in which makes sense I mean there's a big stigma around that word in lots of contexts but certainly in medicine the word creativity is not embraced usually so that's kind of become my thing is like pushing that we actually start using that word and start not letting it be moved to the sidelines but actually something that people can be proud that they're doing and when people do do the work and you know undergo these little acts of creativity they share with each other I mean amazing things happen just not only in what happens in your own processing of your own experience but also in the teamwork that can happen in a room when a group of people have worked with a certain patient and didn't know that they shared feelings or experiences with that same patient and five of them write about that patient and you know many various things that can happen I can go into more I don't know where I am in time, is that okay? All right, that's why we'll talk more. Thank you. So when folks saw the description for today and saw the Laundromat Project who thought that I was gonna talk about owning a Laundromat? Said it's definitely not what we do. So, I believe this is, so the Laundromat Project is an arts organization we were officially incorporated in 2005. We simply advance artists and neighbors as change agents in their own communities. As an organization we work at the intersection of art, community building, and social justice so we believe in the power of creativity as a tool to drive change within local communities. So we are hyper local with a national view of things in the world and kind of understanding that real shifts and movements in society and culture happen on the ground directly in communities where we live, work, breathe, grow, share time with one another. And so we are called the Laundromat Project because we consider the idea of a Laundromat as a communal space where folks can come together, meet their neighbors. So I am not a native New Yorker. I've been here for about 16 years but the idea of New York City has been this really vast space where we all share, where we share space together with one another and we are deeply connected to one another and might not even necessarily pass by our neighbor on our regular everyday routes or just through our regular everyday motion. The idea of a Laundromat as a space where you're literally standing there doing your laundry and during the spin cycle you can be standing next to your neighbor and engage in conversation, get to know and learn about one another and really talk about issues that are of particular concern within your community. So the Laundromat is a metaphor for a community space. We actually did in the beginning of the organization when we first started doing art projects and I will go deeper into that and you'll see some examples of those. We literally propped up a folding table in front of a Laundromat and an artist by the name of Rudy Shepard sat down and started taking or drawing portraits of folks who were walking by the Laundromat. And so people would stop and they heard about this guy who was drawing people's portraits and wanted a portrait of themselves to put up in their home and while Rudy was taking portraits of folks he would begin to engage in conversation, get to learn about them, get to know about them and it became an exchange of knowledge and information and he became like the local portrait maker. So where some folks just saw him as a neighbor they started to actually view him as someone who had these particular skill sets that could be used to create community within their hyper-local space. And so simply the way that we do our work we make art and culture and community while fostering leadership among our neighbors through residency programs. So we actually provide financial resources and support and mentorship to up to five artists a year who actually want to understand and learn better how to use their creative practice to go into their communities to work around a particular issue of concern in that community. We are city-wide so these projects pop up all around New York City. We actually over the past 14 going on 15 years we've done projects in every single borough in New York City. We have done one project in Staten Island so we can claim all of the boroughs across the city. We also have a fellowship program where we train up to 10 artists every year. Folks who might have recently just came come out of grad school or people who want to have a deeper understanding about what it means to create a community engaged place-based work. And then in addition we actually have a brick and mortar space. We have a two bedroom apartment that is in the South Bronx in a section of the South Bronx called Longwood and it's literally an apartment. It has a bathroom with a shower. It has a kitchen and no one lives there. No one can live there. But we create, we, with the neighbors on the block itself, so we do workshops. We have, there's a community garden sitting right next behind the apartment where we do cross collaborative workshops. Anything from taking the local herbs in the garden and learning how to do dyes and then turning that into printmaking practices and things of that nature. So I will show you some examples of that as well as I advance through but simply that's the programmatic part of what we do. And I will show a quick video to give you an example. A Living Room on Roosevelt is a public art project that engages local community in conversations about issues of community safety as connected to immigration, displacement and policing. And we're having those conversations in a living room installation that was inspired by my living room growing up. The project is also a collaborative effort with Queens Neighborhoods United which is a local grassroots organization that works around issues of criminalization and displacement and jacket height. Working with Ro on the project has been an amazing experience and has actually taught me a lot about my own community and talking to individuals about the topics that we have at hand. I've actually gotten to hear from the community stories and experiences of the topic so that way we can use in a research project that we're doing about Roosevelt Avenue in Jackson Heights and Corona. I am a self-taught, multidisciplinary artist. I work in mixed media, collage, installation, photography and writing. And a lot of my practice has to do with investigating memory and intimacy especially in relation to place, history and trauma. We shouldn't be ashamed to talk about these subjects like immigration, displacement or policing. We're able to talk about it in public. I think that makes people feel like they're part of a community. A lot of the pieces that are part of the installation really just were inspired by me sitting in my mom's living room and me looking at a lot of the small details and really acknowledging the labor and the creativity and intention that my mom put into those things. The record collection is actually also, it's not my mom's but it's my stepdad and my uncle's. They passed away a while ago but they lived in the same apartment that I grew up in. It's like bringing more of my family history into the space. One of the most important lessons that I've learned with my work with the LP is that our communities are already rich with creativity and by bringing this living room installation into a public setting, we're asserting that a lot of our everyday spaces are already places for creativity and for connection. So for us at the London Project and I think me personally, I am a consumer of stories. I'm just curious about everything and really interested in digging deep and understanding people's motivation and passions around what they do. And so at the London Project, we truly believe that art and storytelling are inextricably linked to one another. And so for me, a good piece of art is a piece of art that tells a story that takes me to another place and helps me understand and exploring different things that I didn't know before when I encountered the piece of artwork. It opens up new worlds and creates a different way of seeing the world and understanding how to build a world that better reflects me, my people, all the things. At the LP we are, and I will go into this, but at the LP we are people of color centered organization, intersectional and inclusive. And so in thinking of that, we are particularly interested in what it means to tell our own stories and tell our own narratives as people of color who are living within New York City. How do you reclaim particular narratives around a place and actually own and change the narrative that's built around that? How do you hold on to your stories and share them out with others? And so one question that we constantly ask ourselves and the artists are always asking are coming to us as they're developing their projects is how do we use our stories, voices and language to build lasting community power? And so one project in particular that's very much centered around this is a project that's called We the News and it's by an artist named Lizanya Cruz. She's a Dominican immigrant. She recently moved to the country about three years ago and she was particularly interested in reclaiming the narrative around what it means to be an immigrant. And so for each of our projects, because we are a place-based hyper-local organization, we understand that we can share and hold space for the telling of stories, but the people who actually live in the neighborhoods who grew up in the neighborhoods who are descendants of the folks who built the neighborhoods can tell their story better than we ever could ourselves. And so for each of the projects that we do, all of the artists have to partner with a community-based organization in order to work and build community in order to develop and tell the stories, create projects around that. And so her community partner for her project was an organization called The Black Alliance for Just Immigration. It is an organizing, legal-based organizing organization. They do a lot of work around helping provide legal services to recent Caribbean and African immigrants to the country and helping folks navigate through particular issues related to documentation and things of that nature. And Lizania lives in Bed-Stuy. And so what she did was she gathered a number of different story circles with recent immigrants, I can mention Caribbean and African that were based in Bed-Stuy. And they just sat around in a circle and told stories about what it means to be an immigrant, what it feels like to be far away from home, what it feels like to create a new home in this particular space. And those story circles were then translated into zines. Lizania is a graphic designer by practice and you see the zines that are on the news cart there. Each one of the zines are free and available to the public and the news cart actually is mobile. So it folds up into a box, you can unfold it into a newsstand and she traveled around Bed-Stuy and unfolded the newsstand and did a pop-up and allowed folks to just encounter the project and take away a zine which gave them the ability to learn about the story of a recent immigrant. So again, reclaiming and owning our own narratives and actually having ownership over the way that our stories are told. And so one of the things that is embedded in the work that we do is our tagline. We make art, which is, we make art. We build community, which is the community building part of what we do. And then all of that is done in order to create change. So how do we create a world that is more just and equitable and how do each one of these projects drive particular change? That's not only local based, but then how does it ripple out into the broader society in the world? And so one of the beautiful things about this collaboration that Lizania did with Baji was each of the zines that were created during Baji's annual convening. They are based, their headquarters are based in Oakland, California and they have one of the largest organizing offices here in Bed-Stuy. And so they flew Lizania out to Oakland and she did a whole session during their convening. And what happened was as a takeaway, the organizers for Baji now use her zines as they go out and do a lot of the connecting with the immigrants and folks. So that is a ripple effect or a way that Lizania is working with a local based organization to then impact the work that they're doing to drive the narrative around immigration. Both locally and broadly. Another project that we supported was, oh my gosh, 2016. We're in 2019 now, right? 2016 and 2017, 2017. We supported a project. I don't know how many people have been following the movement around taking down monuments and replacing them, but there is a particular monument that is on 105th and Park Avenue, 5th Avenue. It is a monument of a doctor, his name is J. Marion Sims, who was a gynecologist and did a lot of experimentation on women of color, particularly Latina and black women of color, to influence his gynecological work. And so there was a local organization called East Harlem Preservation who had been a lot of organizing around removing the statue. It was just not right. For a doctor who was doing experimentation on the people that are reflected within the local population. So this organization did a lot of organizing work and in 2016 or 2017, one of the artist groups that we supported did an intervention or an activation around the monument to bring attention to the work of Dr. Sims and to try to move the conversation around the removal of the statue. And it has been taken down as of last year and now there's actually an open call. There are a couple of artists that are being considered to replace the monument at this point. So again, reclaiming, retelling, resharing our narratives. And another story or another thing we are particularly focused on issues of concern within communities. So this project in particular is a project by an artist. Her name is Ms. Walker. She grew up in the South Bronx and the South Bronx is heavily impacted and affected by environmental issues. I think they have the highest rate of asthma within New York City itself. And it is a food desert and all of the various different issues that come along with or environmental issues that are deeply impacted more so than any other neighborhood in New York City. And so for her project, what she did was she used this Kiko, the icy carts that go around on the blocks every summer. And so she used that as a tool in a way to actually encounter and engage with her neighbors as they could talk about issues of concern environment. So it was just issues of concern in their neighborhood in the South Bronx. And so in exchange for an icy, a free icy, you had to share a story. And as you shared that story, she actually created a mobile app that showed the air quality levels at that particular moment in time. So it was a way for her to track the air quality and paired that with a particular story of someone who was deeply impacted by environmental issues. And they got an icy in exchange. And so I'll show you a quick video of this project. Okay, so my project, Koko Climate Cart, is a food vending cart slash mobile installation that engages the Hunts Point along with community. The whole idea is that people come up to the car and tell me their story and experience about the weather, especially summertime in 2016. And then they get an icy treat in exchange. Being raised in Hunts Point and growing up around the community center to the point, I was able to be exposed about environmental justice and racism and systematic racism and how it impacted my community. So a lot of my artistic practice is taking those theories of how my community identity was shaped through a lot of policy making and a lot of burdens that we face environmentally. It was getting people to talk about climate change and connected to what they already know, but people don't talk about also because here in this community we are a waterfront and we experienced Hurricane Sandy. And some people who were really in the coastal area were impacted and we got people to talk about those things. So I see in long run, a project like this can continue to impact more engagement in those issues. Monetary currency is not involved with it, so the idea of exchanging your story and someone wanting to hear your story, I've been finding that really interesting where a lot of people is like, wow, you wanna hear what I have to say? I have something to tell you. And also just being able to create a safe space where we're able to hear each other so people feel comfortable to share things about not having heat, not having money or personal things that they don't, maybe it's embarrassing to say, but it really is important. And especially in talking about climate change and how this all relates to each other. It allowed me to grow and build myself as an artist outside of school to really see how I deal with real world challenges. And I learned what the LPs have just stepped back. I want the communities to feel like they can create art. I want them to have control and there's no wrong answers in how to do that. Not so much as an artist, but someone is like a listener of my community. And I didn't realize until this project it's hard to get one of those icy carts. It's very, very complicated. But that's another example of some of the work that we do. And the final example I'll share with you about one of the artist projects that we're supporting is a project we're currently supporting is called Here to Stay Housing, Here to Stay Housing for the People Mapping Project. It's by an artist collective called Chinatown Art Brigade. They do a lot of organizing down in Chinatown Lower East Side. Organizing around issues of gentrification and displacement, particularly with the rapidly gentrifying area of the city. And what their project is mainly based around is documenting the history of the neighborhood and archiving the history of the neighborhood because the neighborhood will soon not look like the neighborhood that it originally was. So they go around and they've created a map which you can see a little bit of the map down there. And they have local residents go in and actually tell stories of particular sites of significance to them. And so there's actually a QR code you hover over and what pops it is a video of someone telling the story of that particular section of the neighborhood. And it's a way to, like I said, reflect what the neighborhood looked like. But what it also is used for, large part of that population are not English speaking and have a lot of issues, particularly when related to displacement around being evicted from their homes. And so what the map is used for as well as a tool so that when they go into housing court they're actually able to tell, discuss, point to and connect how they are impacted by the change that's happening currently right now within the Lower East Side in Chinatown. And so one part of what we do is support artists as they go out into communities using their creative practice to have issues around or to speak about issues that are happening within their neighborhoods. But as an organization, we want us to understand how we actually have those conversations as well. So one way that we do this is through, like I mentioned, the brick and mortar space that we have in the South Bronx is called Kelly Street Collaborative. So it's a two bedroom apartment where we work with local neighbors on a particular block in the South Bronx is called Kelly Street. It's an historic block in the Bronx. And we listen to what they say they want to talk about or what they want to engage in and we create programming around that. So we do workshops with the youth on the block. We do workshops with the adults on the block. We teach folks or we bring in teaching artists to teach folks how to make teas and make facial scrubs and how to do doll making and how to do print making and creating zines that tell their stories. We have yoga sessions, it's Saturday yogas every day where folks can come in and learn about health and wellness and how that impacts their every day. And during that time, we collect and share and tell stories and learn about what's happening in the neighborhood and learn about the history of the neighborhood and we can take that and turn that into a tool that we use to then go out and tell those stories even beyond. And that is Kelly Street. And so I'm just scanning through really quickly. Make sure I get through and I can go more deeply into a lot of these projects. But at the LP, just through the examples that I shared, we're constantly engaging with the artist and with our neighbors to understand what it means to tell a story and who's story are we telling. And so one thing that we were particularly holding ourselves accountable to when we're thinking about ourselves as storytellers is how we share and collect stories with honesty and transparency, how we consider power dynamics as we're telling the story. So understanding who's a storyteller and who is sharing their story. We always constantly consider how we activate our archives. So understanding that archives are ever changing and ever evolving spaces and understanding when to go in and what to find and what to share within those archives itself. We think about how we use memoirs, a tool for advocacy, so understanding how we tell first person narratives as a way of truly as an empowerment tool, an ability to actually hold and be able to share your own story. We think about how we operationalize ethics, so how we do the work ethically and then how we lean into accessibility. So thinking about being able to tell stories in multilingual as well as offering services around ASL, so opening up access so everyone has the ability to consume and share their stories. The various ways that you guys approach what it is that you do in terms of the telling of stories have very, very important differences in terms of the sectors in which you work and the kinds of spaces and context in which you work, but also a tremendous amount of similarities and resonance. Something you said, Aisha, particularly at the end, but that really ran through overtly. Your presentation was the notion of storytelling as empowering, both empowering for the artists who you're sort of helping and supporting and sort of transforming into leaders not transforming, but helping them transform themselves into leaders and change agents, but also how it can be empowering for the people interacting with those projects and those platforms and how that can be sort of a tool of empowerment. Which I think is really interesting also in terms of Nellie what you were talking about in terms of helping healthcare practitioners be better at what they're doing. And also John, I wanted to hear from you a little bit more about what happens to the stories once they're out there in the world. You create these beautiful stories in a multiplicity in formats, but then you kind of alluded to this and I wanna hear you talk about it a little bit more, then they can be used as tools in a variety of different contexts. One might be a cinematic auditorium context like this, but then I'm sure there are other ways in which these things live and have their own afterlife upon afterlife in terms of the way they're used as tools for empowerment and engagement and advocacy. So I wonder if each of you guys could talk about power is maybe an intense word, but the afterlife of some of these stories and if you see that that's kind of coming to be more understood in the wider world, that stories and storytelling is power, both for good and ill, is that starting to be more understood and accepted or are we still kind of fighting for people to recognize the power that stories wield? We are always thinking about, I'm particularly interested in thinking about storytelling in multimodal ways. I think about now in the way that we live in the world and access and consume information, your ability to share your story and then have the whole world hear it, like the moment that you share the story is an extremely empowering thing that you can go on and in ways that we never could before share widely and tell who we are and what we do. Anecdotally, I just recently had a conversation with my grandmother that will be shared publicly in podcast form, but literally sitting next to her and she was just saying, I've never been able to tell my story before in this way, holding on to this knowledge and information for so long, but to be able to be provided with a tool that allows you to share that out can open up the world in so many different ways. So I think that just in the way that we're consuming information and consuming media now, I think it's becoming more recognized as a tool of power that we can wield freely without being told to or given permission to do so. Do you see that too, John, in your work in terms of telling stories then become advocacy tools in their own right? Absolutely, yeah, and I didn't mention it, but it's a big part of our story telling experience, especially the last decade, is that my university experience was in classic journalism, which was supposed to be objective and I was supposed to take sides. And I practiced that to a certain degree for a long time, but certainly in the last decade, I consciously made the decision that I don't have to be objective anymore and that there are lots of issues out there that I have enough experience and knowledge on. I can make my own call. I don't encourage that if you're 25, to be honest. I think you still need to kind of learn a lot and figure things out, but when you get to be a bit grayer, I think it's legitimate for you to take a side. And specifically, yeah, so I've morphed from journalism into activism. I mean, I really think that these films we're making are our social tools and a big part of what we do is sharing. And that's a huge part of it. It's no good to take them and put them in a drawer and try and privatize them. So they're all online. You can watch them kind of immediately. And we do lots and lots and lots of sharing with public audiences and we always have a Q and A. Afterwards, often the Q and A lasts longer than the films because all the films do, all the stories do, is kind of in sight, questions, in sight curiosity. And then people wanna know, and especially in this day and age, especially against in November of 2016, people really wanna know what can I do? How can I be involved? Especially also on a local level, on a neighborhood level. And then in the case of the Hudson River stuff, do people then take them and show them in their own self-organized context? They can, certainly. We kind of like to be involved so that we can help organize and share in the right way. But again, they're all online. Also, they are all online, but I usually don't tell people that because I want them to come to the events because I want them to see who their neighbors are. I want them to see who they agree with or don't agree with. And I want them to be able to ask questions of, I don't participate in the Q and A. It's the locals who are familiar with these, whatever the subject matter of the day is. And Nellie, obviously in terms of power dynamics, there's a tremendous power dynamic always in clinical contexts, whether it's a doctor or a nurse or a psychiatric professional or what have you, a social worker even. And one thing that jumped out when reading the description of narrative medicine was this concept of, I think it's termed like radical listening, or is there something like that in the course description? But I wonder, how do you guys think, or how do you think, I think you spoke so beautifully about how transformative it can be, both for you, but also for your students who in many cases are going on to be healthcare practitioners, to be able to process what they're going through and observing through the power of storytelling. But how do you think it influences the way in which they think about their patients as subjects with agency and... It's such a complicated question. I'm sitting here like trying to wrap my head around an answer. I mean, one thing I think is different sitting in between these two people. I mean, I don't, there's no product. There's no, it's more about like what do these, how do these tools, how can these tools help you and help your work? But, and then this question of power, certainly in the whole other conversation is the world of patient narratives which are coming more and more, coming out more and more. And patients feeling like they can raise their voice against things that they witness in the medical world. But it's interesting to work, because we work mainly with practitioners in the sense that they most often don't feel, I mean, for good reason, don't feel that they can tell some of that. They don't wanna tell these stories because they don't wanna expose their patients or, you know, HIPAA rules and all many other reasons why they're not able to, you can't easily write about what happens in medicine. So it's, and we've kind of gotten around those questions mainly by just focusing on, okay, we're not turning you into writers. We're really just kind of trying to get you to play with what these tools are and how the act of writing and thinking and being creative, not only in writing. I mean, we do work in other mediums too, but how the act of doing these things might then change other parts of your life, not necessarily make you wanna be a writer. Anyway, I've gotten way off your question. No, I think that's really, the notion of process and product, I think is a really important dynamic to keep in mind with this whole conversation. And actually, I think that comes up a little bit in your work too, in terms of, you talked at the beginning about, you know, you're giving this wonderful platform and support for these artists, but there's also a leadership skills component that you're not just providing funding and networking opportunities, you're also actively investing in their process that then I'm sure is transformational for them as the artists themselves. Of course, it's transformational for the participants and the communities who get to be a part of these things. But yeah, can you talk a little bit about that, about the leadership aspect and how some of the artists who have come through the program have, how it's informed, the stuff they've done thereafter? Yeah, so I can touch on one thing in particular, which might raise that. In the training program that we do for the artists, it's based on a particular pedagogy that we've developed over the past 15 years. It's a six-month training program where folks go in and they learn different skills, which we feel like is a good combination of things to go in and do this particular work. So they learn how to inter-build and exit communities ethically and responsibly. They learn how oral history practices, they learn how to navigate through the public policy system here in New York City, a number of different things and tools that they gain access while they're within the program with us. But in particular, the entering and exiting and building model where artists might go in and have a particular idea in mind. I have this way that I'm going to change the world and go in with a particular set. This is what it's going to look like. And there have been a number of stories. It never fails where an artist will go in with one idea and leave out with something completely different that looked nothing like what they entered with. And they will always see that it's a very particular transformative moment for them when they go in and actually present the idea the community's not having it at all. They're like, I don't know what you're talking about. I don't understand it. It's not relevant to me to anybody whatsoever. And the artists are needing to step back for a moment and practice deep listening. So going around and actually doing the work of listening and connecting with neighbors and just sitting quietly and passively and watching and understanding the rhythms of the community to then go out and then ask themselves, how can I be helpful within this space as opposed to how can I lead? How can I actually help and build together with you? And so I think that's a particularly pointed way of leadership development and understanding where you can help build support in order to really move and drive change and move and drive people together collectively. So it's always never fail. We'll always be at the end of the exit interview, the artists will always come back and say, yeah, I learned that in particular more than anything else. Cool. John, I think that's an interesting segue to start thinking about education more generally and the use of some of these skills and tools that we're all talking about in different ways in the pursuit of telling specific stories that might advance different kinds of practice, whether it's healthcare or environmental advocacy or urban design and architecture. Yeah, say a little bit more about what kinds of stories your students are telling in terms of environmental, multi-media environmental storytelling. Is that the right name? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Again, they get to choose the subject matter, but they need to be environmental stories and they get to choose the medium. You know, they're just starting to finalize what they're doing, but it ranges from when a student is making a giant mural based on an artist here in New York City that he quite admires, a guy named Alexis Rockman, who I happen to know, so I'm able to hook him up so he's doing the mural, he's doing storyboards and he's going to interview Alex for a little podcast. The interesting thing is when I designed the course, I was thinking multi-media just in terms of you could choose a media. I didn't really think about it, in fact you could use multiple medias to tell each story and that's kind of the way they're leaning. We have a great maritime museum there on the Hudson River in Kingston and they've collected oral histories over the years of the last fishermen because commercial fishing is not allowed on the Hudson River because of the PCB pollution and overfishing. So the last fishermen were kind of in the 1980s and so they did a pretty good job of doing these oral histories and a couple of the students are digging into those which is actually one of my pet projects. I'm going to kind of use them to kind of catapult us into telling interesting stories from the past. And so I have a pretty good Rolodex so I'm able to bring in people like this to talk about their perspective mostly on both, on the southern Spanish side and the media side, I've got a friend up there who does non-fiction theater and he relies a lot on interviews and oral histories to create theatrical pieces. So it's such a wide range. No, we're going to have a show at the end. It'll be quite fun. I do a radio show, which you mentioned. I'm going to have them come in, takeovers of the radio show in which they have to interview people which is a whole different skill. It's like asking someone who doesn't write to write interviews, somebody who doesn't interview it. So I think that's going to be fun. Yes, interviewing is an art form in and of itself. I wish I had time to teach a class just on that. But I mean, in terms of multi-media and multiple media, you said, John, that it's all storytelling and it could tell it in any medium, but I wonder if you could reflect a little bit on how the story changes when you have a... These are some incredibly beautiful images that you shared with us. What does the visual do to a story? How does it change when you're doing an interview-based radio format? Have you had any further reflection on how the medium affects or influences the message? Well, I couldn't stand up here and do a talk without visuals. I would fail. No, I... You started out with the written word. Yeah, I started out with what started to change when you made films. I'm going to veer away a little bit because something slightly different is that I really enjoy traveling with... because a lot of my work has been on the road... I really enjoy traveling with a photographer, traveling with a videographer, because they see the story in a different way than I do. And oftentimes, especially a good photographer, has his or her own way of kind of focusing on a subject matter, and I get to stand to the side and kind of observe and pick up things and what the photographer is getting out of them that I might not. I'm a big believer in small teams like that. Collaboration. And just being able to tell a bigger, deeper, richer story, and not just on the technical side, but on the reputorial side as well. Aisha, in terms of genre and format and medium, you started out your career in visual art with art on the wall, right? I think the majority of the artist projects at LP is supporting and putting out there in the world necessarily has a somewhat of performance or an interactive or some kind of public presence, installation-based practice. Could you speak a little bit about... is that necessary for it to be community-based, change-oriented work, for it to be a femoral, performative installation? Or... I'd just talk a little bit about format and medium in terms of your own evolution of your career in the arts as well as the LP. Yeah, and it's actually interesting, Nellie, what you said about the product. And for us, it's always interesting because we don't always have a product. I guess if the building of people and connecting of people, if that's a product, then that's what it would be, but it isn't physical, which is something that we always struggle with a lot. People are like, well, what do you do? And you have to actually physically explain what it is that we do, because if you don't encounter it in that moment, then you never will actually have that experience of building community as the output from what we do. But for me, yes, 2D, 3D interactive installation, all the different ways a story can be told. I think that given what the story is, I guess I'm always really curious to see how an artist executes on the telling of that story through the particular medium that they use. So I guess some things are better told and explained and experienced as a flat 2D thing. That's opposed to a more physical space, as opposed to an ephemeral space. I think that's kind of touching your question, but I know one thing that we're particularly interested in and we've started to explore was the idea of podcasts as long-form ways of telling the stories of what we do. It's always really hard to pop up like a three-minute video on the screen and have that encapsulate everything and all the work that was required to do a project. So even thinking about Rose's project with the living room on Roosevelt, you can see it in a very short, succinct way in this three-minute clip, not understanding that it took eight or nine months to actually pull that together. And so for us, we're really interested in digging in and helping to understand the real process and the real sweat equity and work that's put into creating this project. So I'm interested in the multi-ways that you can tell a story. So whether or not Rose's story is told in just this way and coupled with a podcast, coupled with some visuals that encapsulate the project overall, I think there are many different ways in how they're all collaged together. I think it tells the bigger, more broad story. I've got a question for you. Yeah, please. And please think of your own questions that I'm about to pass out the mic. You've given changes in technology in the last couple of decades. I mean, are there too many stories out there? Are there more than we can possibly consume? And how much... Is there a point of too much? I don't know. Never. Yeah, I don't think so. I think there's too many of a lot of things, but I don't think stories is one of them. There might be too many screens. There might be too many images. But I think story as a sort of overarching concept that connects people and is what the world is made up of. I just get overwhelmed sometimes. Yeah, yeah. Not just stories, but information. Well, yeah, I think there is definitely absolutely an oversaturation to the point where something that I engage with a lot in my students' notions and ever-changing notions of truth, because I'm dealing specifically with traditions of documentary and that's not the same as objective, of course, which doesn't really exist. But even within the various tropes and genres of nonfiction creative work, whether it's in writing or filmmaking or other kinds of visual art practice, the relationship between you know, scripted and unscripted, documentary and fiction is ever-blurring, but always brings up really important questions, especially now when it's very hard to know what is real and true and fake. So I think stories actually can be marshaled with integrity and ethics in support of having a common view of values and ethics and truth, but that's very different from an oversaturation point where you don't even know what's real or not. So it's a very tricky one. In 1999, I can reflect just on one 10-year period. In 1999, we went to the middle of the Aleutian Islands. Aleutian Islands are like a diamond necklace and hangs between Russia and Alaska. We went to the heart of the Aleutian Islands and this was kind of at the there was Internet, but it was not very sophisticated. I had a satellite telephone so I could call in a verbal dispatch and leave it on an answering machine on the corner of somebody's desk, which they then had to transcribe and type and put on the machine. We couldn't send pictures, we couldn't send video, nothing like that. And 10 years later, we were in Antarctica, which was quite far away, and we had a little big-end satellite about the size of a laptop so we were able to send video, stills, text, everything. That was just in 10 years. But my initial experience in Antarctica in 1989 traveled the Frenchman and he used to say all the time that he wished he'd lived in a world before there were maps. And so it made me think that sometimes I wish that this insta-sharing wasn't always so insta because now it's just too much out there. And how relevant? Some of it's less relevant. Well, one thing that people have talked about that I think is an important thing to support is the notion of the story as kind of a foil to the algorithms, which is really trying to activate the agency and authorship and individuality of the ways in which you select details and string them together with a context as distinct from something that is machine-learned and then imposed back upon you in terms of recommending songs or advertisements, but also it goes a lot deeper and darker once you probe a little bit. I'm just curious to that point. I say never enough stories because I think of people who haven't been given access to tell stories or stories that we don't know of. So I say never because there are so many stories that need to be told that have not been given the opportunity or the ability to be told. But the more crowded it is, the harder it is to hear them sometimes. I guess that's my only concern. Which brings up the role of institutions. You're not a free-for-all for the interactive community-based arts where it's all one big repository. There's a very specific institutional lens that you bring to the selection and the training and the leadership stuff. And I think the other way to think about it is also the point Nelly brings up of process versus product. There might be too many, I think it's conceivable that there are too many finished, polished, top-down stories out there already, but there has not been an equitable distribution of the tools. So I think thinking about that in different sectors where we don't normally think about where I mean a sector where I think there was a little bit of a gasp in the room when you said creativity is a dirty word in medicine it was like what? Creativity is a dirty word. Nelly, are you working only with doctors in training? No. And do they sometimes balk when you ask them to write and share? Almost always. And what tricks, how do you force them? It totally depends on the context, but if you're in context where we're working with in hospitals where the clinicians are in practice it's unfortunate because usually the people who need the work the least are the ones that come and the ones that need the work the most find that they are busy that hour. So in my spinal surgery there have only been a couple of times where that's been really an issue and has been disruptive but even in those moments the people who are so resistant to it if they allow themselves to go through the process of doing it at the end of the hour they're cheerleaders inevitably but it's just getting them to actually do the thing that they're so like what is this for? Why are we being made to do this? It's hard it's really hard especially when you're not in that world of power when you don't have an MD it's even more hard. So I was connected to a program at Harvard called Risk and Prevention School of Education and some of my background was in media and so I was able to do this cool kind of research project on children's hospital in Boston and this doctor used to be a filmmaker and so he brought this wedding, the two of medicine and film and again I apologize if you already talked about this but I hear that you're talking about from the doctor's perspective having the doctor's right etc this program was actually giving them video cameras and now of course you can use phones and everything but to document there for instance their day-to-dayness and with diabetes or day-to-dayness with whatever and it was coded etc and used I don't know if it was quantitative and qualitative for sure qualitative to guide the doctors in a different kind of way working with patients because they were really seeing that day-to-dayness of a client, a patient, a human being wrestling with something related to their health so I'm wondering about that or maybe you're already doing that I'm not sure so they were seeing footage of patients in their day-to-dayness am I hearing that right? so the patients were trained to use these cameras and they would take them home with them and really in their own narrative and experience in a very detailed manner talk about what they're experiencing day-to-day health challenge and then it was brought back to be coded etc and used as an educational and just in general tool for the doctors to help them come at it from a human perspective and seeing nuanced experiences that they might not have seen otherwise that sounds great and I know there is a lot of work being done similar to that like I can think of a couple photographers that I worked with who were doing similar projects and there is a lot of work being done on the patient side for sure as well in terms of getting patients to write about their experiences and what that is doing there's a lot of studies also done about what writing does for our health and usually when there are outcomes to be shared it's often patients actual health numbers change when they're writing so yes that work is being done I can't say that we have done work quite like that as I said we usually we tend to work with the practitioners and less with the patients the world of medicine is so complicated and it's a lot it's just to get anything done is like really incredibly hard so it tends to be easier to get a room of clinicians together than doing a project like that I imagine would really take a long time and a lot of effort to coordinate not that that's a reason not to do it but anyway but I think what that brings up is notions of participation which is definitely something documentary filmmaking has been contending with some good results and some strange results in terms of really trying to not only provide more information but also deal with that power dynamic that happens in all kinds of context between professionals and non-professionals whether it's doctors and patients or designers and community members so this is a question for Aisha you talked about the Laundromat project being hyper local with a national awareness or national view but a lot of your projects or I don't know if all of them are based just in the boroughs largely in this area but do you have any advice for like maybe how to take this community building to smaller towns and maybe different states different places that's a good question I can share with you how we think about that in the form of ripple effects so where our projects are hyper local because we are in New York City dealing with specific New York City issues people travel, people move, people share information information is accessible beyond just where the project took place so I think at the core our pedagogy is something that's translatable to other places with adding some specificity based on the location where there will be different gentrification here in New York City might look very different in New Orleans than it does in Los Angeles and other things of that nature but I think with us the core of particularly the training so understanding how you do deep listening within community, how you understand entering, exiting and entering building and exiting in community understanding how you conduct oral histories with focus it is a particular practice and way of working within a neighborhood that can be taken and brought to other locations and areas so how do I go into my community in Los Angeles and connect with local organizations or local individuals who are driving movements and listen to what they're saying and then help to move that through I think it's something that's translatable throughout beyond New York City also in all the projects that you shared not only were they hyper local in the city but there was always a community partner so that seems like a framework that is translatable obviously not every city or town or place has the same rich diversity of institutions that New York has but there are always advocates everywhere and then community partner is brought also because it can be a particular organization but it can be a circle of for lack of a better but for simplicity sake a women's book club group can actually be a community based organization a group of local residents who actually have a connectedness and embeddedness and a sense of knowledge about a neighborhood itself can be thought of as a community partner or community connectedness I guess organization makes a little bit squishy to say that but yeah I have two questions one is for Nellie the other one is for Yusha how it was related a little bit to that one but since we are in the studio that interacts with the regional scale and in rural areas how can we implement some of these interventions in the space in such a scale like a rural environment and then the other one is since many health issues stem from man-made environmental impacts how do you incorporate this into your narrative in order to generate a speech of hope between the patient and the healthcare giver I love that question so much but I don't know that I have an answer for it I just want to cry I just love the way you wrote that question no I don't know I mean God yes I was thinking about when Kasim gave his introduction about the I don't remember how you wrote it down but I don't remember how you said it about the way that oh yeah you said just that you're always thinking about the way that the social experience of place and the physical experience and I was thinking about that I mean hospitals are not unanimously but quite frequently terrible terrible places to be and just that idea of like how to you know just in a physical way how do we make the space be a more hopeful place for people to be you know you're in that space you can't wear your own clothes you can't have your own you know I mean on and on and on all the reasons why it's not pleasant but anyway that idea that our illnesses are man-made and then how do we create a hopeful dialogue but I don't know I don't have an answer I mean I can't say that we're pressing very hard on that particular issue in our particular program but your question makes me want to think more about how to do it and certainly the role of systems and infrastructures runs through all of your work in certain ways in terms of dealing with the power of the individual in the face of extraordinarily complex circumstances whether it's environmental risks or environmental damage or environmental justice I mean maybe one hopeful one hopeful way to look at it is like that's actually what we are trying to do with the work itself I mean we get the clinicians who come to us you know we do these periodic weekend workshops throughout the year where clinicians come from all over the world and the ones who come tend to be really burnt really burned out and really just like I can't take it anymore you know I need some help and they come to us for healing to be in a room of other people who also feel that way and who are willing to share and willing and they do feel I mean I can say that for sure by the end of the weekend by the end of three days of sitting and reading and writing together they do feel more hope than they did coming in whether that lasts I don't know but I think that sense of you know if there's hope to be found it is in community and in the work itself. The regional scale or rural contexts the question the replicability of it within regional areas I think I just lean into or we lean into just going back to our tagline making our build community and creating change so thinking about creativity as an infinite resource so for us we believe everybody has access to creativity everybody can be a creative individual and thinking about and putting in positioning it within a context that if you drive the use of creativity to create change to spark conversations to drive issues that's something that can happen it doesn't have to be New York City it can be rural but leaning into creativity as that tool that key tool to actually build these structures or these systems around that and ability to tap into an imaginative sense in nature of seeing things valuing creativity as a resource that we don't always think of automatically when we think about how we create change within our particular areas so just a question for everyone you guys have talked a lot about making stories and also making space for other people to tell their stories and you guys have spoken about some of the research you do before you get ready for preparing your narrative or opening yourself up to receiving narratives at what point do you feel or what sort of thresholds do you look for research to say okay now I'm ready to work on building my narrative or opening myself up to welcoming narratives well you mean that you can it's almost like you can never do too much research in advance you know it makes me think of the kind of non-multimedia response but that is just a response to writing specifically is that anyone that I ever meet who tells me that they like writing I don't believe I think they're lying is writing if you do it seriously well it's not fun my favorite quote is attributed to anonymous and I love having written also while on one hand I say you can never do too much research you know outlining is not writing thinking about writing is not writing talking about writing is not writing writing is writing and which I can then guess could be extrapolated to all mediums is that you know while the research in advance is super important you know the focus on the end product is even more important and the beauty of collaboration is perspective whether it's an editor working on a print piece or editors working on a video piece is I like that collaboration you know especially if you're working with people you trust so that was a really bad way of answering your question but you do have anything to add to that when you know you can share we're storytellers in a different way I think we hold space for the telling of stories and we provide resources and opportunities gatekeepers you might want to label it for folks to tell their stories so for us it's a very collaborative process and it's also leaning into that area of ethics and accountability and making sure we're telling the story in a way that feels just to the person whose story it is that we're sharing so we hold individuals stories as opposed to me Aisha creating a story that I'm then sharing out as I think a very different thing and when I watch your video clips it makes me want to tell stories about your storytellers I also was really taking something you said at the very end about you recognize that archives are always changing which I think is a really hard thing to do because you know the record you have is the record you have and of course it's riddled with exclusions and it hasn't been distributed or inclusive in all these ways but you're also creating all kinds of new archives because of the conversation piece where you're in the living room the first one like what do you do with that and I was also thinking Nellie about the experience of the hospital there was all this reflective writing sitting there without any place to operationalize that archive but I think that also relates to it is that there's the research you do in advance of producing a narrative but then also you need to continually reflect on the material and the resources and the assets that have gotten you to that place because that's not solid ground either thank you so much for this really interesting set of different forms of storytelling so my question is just I'm in the narrative medicine program and I'm curious how these different forms of artistic and creative practice informing I guess kind of high level methods in which you plan like an urban design or how are you pulling from different artistic mediums to inform design and in vice versa how do as a filmmaker as a novelist as a visual artist how are we or in general pulling from these urban spaces like I guess high level how is the artistic practice informing design and in vice versa how is the design practice informing artistic practice that's a very big question and a very interesting and important question I mean I think design has a very specific and complicated history with at various moments in time sort of holding up its creativity in a very narrow definition of formalism of creating objects and placing them in spaces irrespective of their context of time design practice being deeply deeply invested and interested in the societal and contextual fabric in which it's operating and that is actually not a linear change it goes up in town at various points in time where you have a generation of architects who wanted to be sculptors and now you have a generation of architects who want to be weavers and metaphorically so so I think it's kind of shifting there's always a very deep and important role for visual representation both in terms of working out one's own process of how one is sort of articulating an intervention in physical space but also something that where storytelling becomes really activated and instrumentalized in urban design practice is the role of visual narrative in getting people to come on board with whatever it is that you're proposing so the role of storytelling in community engagement is very different from the role of storytelling in business development for example and design practice uses both modes all the time one to sort of get stakeholders involved and engaged or to make it seem like they're involved and engaged or to sell its product because it is sort of as a profession also still a tool of capital in very important ways but I think an important other influence that to even add on more to your very large question is some of the ways in which knowledge has been produced in the academy that has other tool sets so I talk a lot about the role of sociology and anthropology in informing ways that I think about different ways to teach people how to do interviews or how to observe a neighborhood intersection different ways of sort of thinking about writing as a process that's an active process of interpretation not just something that's received as a description or an evocation but actually something that's making sense of what you're seeing so I think there's lots of constant interfaces between various art forms and design practice but I do think that the one thing that this sort of this symposium continues to exist and grow and evolve is I think it's safe to say that the idea of storytelling generally is something that has applied value in a variety of professional contexts is on the rise at least pedagogically I don't know if it's on the rise in terms of and so we can debate whether if there's a tipping point where that leads to too much soft and squishy qualitative I base this on having just done this Google search on how to tell a story and what do you think what are the first 10 things that come up why where when it's about performance pieces it's about spoken word pieces it's both influence that now is what people perceive as the first thing people think of when they think of storytelling which is not a bad thing and we're all always telling stories in our work but telling stories about our work and telling stories about our work which is what we've been doing here and certainly that sense of oral presentation and the legacy of expository rhetoric which I think runs through visual art practice as well as documentary work is still there even when my students are making poetic city symphonies with no text or information there's still an argument or a question which is something that we've learned from rhetoric that might not be obvious or overt but is still embedded in the way in which we articulate our own positions my question is maybe looking more for an advice is when you approach a community or people and you want to reflect on your story as much as you can the natural behavior of the people how you can do it because when you just bring a camera in front of the people their behavior, their natural behavior just totally, not totally different but it changed and probably the way how you want to show the message turns into a different way that you don't want to so no that's a really fair question we have a big issue I mentioned the fact that there are no limits to commercial fishing and yet as a result if you go up and down the Hudson you go to any town and go out on any dock you'll find people fishing and even though there are signs at virtually every dock that say do not catch the fish and now there are signs that say if you do catch the fish don't eat this part signs that think have been translated around New York City into 15 or 16 languages because you can still catch fish it's not that there aren't fish there some of them are badly polluted anyway the relevance there is that we've tried to tell that story but when you approach people who are fishing there it's kind of forbidden so they're the last people that they don't want to talk to you at all so that in our recent experience that's been really hard but in terms of working with people who do cooperate with you, you know you just you have to be kind of mellow and low key and you have to take your time and you have to meet them first without cameras and you know there is a school of thought and Kasim probably has seen this where the documentary film maybe we should go out and pre-report you know go out and do interviews first and then build the film and go back and get people to kind of repeat themselves or regurgitate themselves which is a way of kind of endearing them to you but yeah you have to be very very cautious and just showing up with a camera in your hand and saying tell me your story is awkward and doesn't work very often entering, building and exiting and I think also the transparency around how their story is going to be shared and told is something that we always try to be intentional around so as much as possible as we can letting folks know who it's being shared with on what platforms it's being shared so that they feel they have some control over what they're sharing and telling my question is for Nellie you were speaking about how the whole project that you do revolves around healing and hope and that the patients that you're dealing with are generally isolated we're looking at the federal courts around the Hudson Valley and I think people would be more reluctant to take these people out of isolation and incorporate them back into society and we were actually looking at film and media as a tool to fix that do you have any advice on how we could go about this and how we could talk to people and make the community more enthusiastic about welcoming these people and listening to their stories and empathizing with it, that actually would be really great I'm I don't but I'm thinking of people I might be able to ask and put you in touch with who know more I love I just love that I even get asked that question you know the work that I do has brought me into a world that I really am not a part of I mean I'm a part of it now only in my but it's kind of amazing to me always that that I have a mask of authority I think you kind of answered this question a little bit before and maybe we could just end on this because I think it's something that actually also cuts across all of your work I think actually you used the word storytelling circles but you talked about the sort of the context when people come to the group and I think really in terms of building the kinds of smaller subsets of communal relationships that will create a certain safe space in which people are able to share is an active practical tool it's not just determined by external factors like the size of the room you know it's something that you actually can really design as an experience so I wonder if you could just share a little bit about the like are you sitting in a circle okay now I can answer the question yes we always sit in a circle very much try and make the space and the feeling in the room as democratic as that's ever possible and I mean I can only speak to how I do the work but I come into the room with a lot of anxiety as I'm making clear to you like I'm not an MD and when you're sitting in a room of MDs and trying to make them listen to you it's very intimidating having been a patient you know I mean for many reasons so I bring a piece of writing but I kind of have to claim my own expertise in this one area that I am bringing something to the room that I know about and that that's worth something you just have to sort of embody that despite your own anxiety and then we read together and I really just try and ask open-ended questions as much as I can model that there's absolutely no judgment in the room whatever anyone says I mean the tricky part this is not necessarily relevant for you but one thing that happens that is a little tricky is people they veer off talking about the poem say and start debating or either sharing something very sensitive about their own life which is hard to hear for obvious reasons or debating something that they feel very strongly but anyway it can get contentious and that for me and I don't know what context you would be using but for me the way out of that is always to just sort of gently call us back to the material that we're looking at together so that it doesn't become too emotional where I'm being asked to be in a role that I'm not comfortable in and then same with the writing when I ask them to write I say ahead of time basic set of rules like I'm going to ask you to share what you write if you end up writing something you don't want to share you don't have to that's okay to write something you feel comfortable sharing so that they know ahead of time they're not getting any surprises and then I also say I want to encourage everyone to respond to what they hear so that I'm not the only person responding but I often am anyway but that sense of sort of slowly building environment in the room where people feel safe and comfortable as much as that's possible because they're doing something they're not used to doing which makes them uncomfortable so as much as you can sort of model an attitude of that they're being held in some way is really important I don't know I think it's super helpful and also in an interesting way kind of could be considered an analogy for one definition design practice which is what everyone here is dealing with which is to say really respect an open ended inquiry that might lead you in a direction that you weren't intending but within a context that has guidelines that respect both your own expertise and your willingness to have that expertise be challenged in a trusting and sharing environment and I think that's something that we should aspire for our stories to be as well as the way we teach it and empower others to tell our own stories and to really sort of foreground that in the way in which we just going to keep going back to Asia this entering building and exiting community because I think it's a really important framework to keep in mind whether you're excellent because I think it's a really important framework to think about not just ethics which is where it comes in from but also the contextual and experience design that goes into the context in which we both encourage people to share stories and then record those and push them out whether it's in an advocacy context in an environmental conservation context whether it's in health care or in community change through art so can we please join me in thanking our esteemed storytellers