HOMING PLACE: TOWARDS A PARTICIPATORY, AMBULANT AND CONVERSIVE METHODOLOGY

The practice-as-research project Homing Place proposes a transferable percipient-led methodology of performance and research activated by ambulant and conversive mechanisms as the culmination of this research. The thesis is comprised of a range of activity that represents a moment and way of writing practice. Three artworks that comprise part of the practical component of this thesis--- way from home, Take me to a place and Yodel Rodeo-- each involved participation and contribution from particular audiences and social groups in spatial and conversational modes of performance executed through processes of wayfinding, mapping and walking. One of the primary contributions of knowledge of this research is the notion of homing tales and the knowledge derived from its deployment as a re-working of nostalgia and as a radical spatial narrative practice of home-making and orientation in specific contexts of migration. Another central contribution is the identification of a particular form of conversational ambulant practice within contemporary performance as conversive wayfinding, an artistic spatial practice where the performance event occurs in the conversational activity set in motion by the conditions of wayfinding. Among the questions raised are: How do contextually-based and participant-led performance mechanisms enable opportunities for participants to express strategies of home-making and enable participants to articulate their own critical perspectives and experiences of place, particularly in the experience of migration? How do people construct narratives and practices of home and identity in the experience of cultural and historical displacement? How do people meet, sense and make meaningful sense of places in and through spatial narrative practices? How do these practices become radical strategies to critique, resist and enable power and to create emergent forms of identity and belonging