From July 2007 to August 2007, Christian Nold was engaged as an arts researcher for the property developer Lend Lease and Stockport Council (UK).
His approach suggests possibilities for Antarctic community development:
Drawing Provocations
People were asked to sketch their responses to a variety of serious and humorous provocations about their daily lives such as what really annoys them about Stockport, where they meet their friends, as well as who are the most important and dangerous people in town. Other provocations were focused on the town and its history, river and landmarks. As a result, people enthusiastically created a huge pile of drawings which were scanned and used to create this map. As far as possible, all the drawings were placed in their geographically correct position or where people mentioned them.
Emotion Mapping
The second activity involved people walking freely through Stockport equipped with a special device invented by the artist, that measured their emotional arousal in relation to their geographical location in the town. On the map, the walks are represented by thin angular lines tracing the paths that people walked. The emotional arousal is represented as a series of pillars at four different heights corresponding to the intensity of emotional arousal. Arousal is not necessarily positive and is best thought about in terms of heightened attention to ones body or surroundings. The textual annotations on the map were written by the participants themselves to describe the huge variety of events and sensory stimuli that caused their emotional reactions during their walks…
We hope that this map and text will stimulate personal reflections for people and then lead to a larger communal discussion that refines the issues of concern. Some of the topics we identfied could be tackled by single individuals such as running youth workshops, while others require a group of people and collaborations with institutions.
It is heartening that ‘friendly’ was the most frequently
used adjective for describing Stockport and we feel that
this sense of community can nuture a new vision for
the town.
Nold addressed the language of climate change in another project, In popular terms, which…
… tries to critically map the evolution of ‘green’ or environmentalist language both over time and in terms of geography. How did the discussions around ‘Global Warming’ turn into ‘Climate Change’? What are the agendas driving these changes of language and metaphors?