Abstract

One of the challenges that makers of site specific performance face is how to qualify and articulate site specificity, in an era where prevalent discourses and practices argue less for substantive and fixed understandings of location, and more for fluid and mulitiplicitous senses of place. As a maker of site specific performance I find myself embracing the idea that our senses of place, and in turn our identities that are affected by the spaces we encounter, are in constant states of becoming. This acknowledgment liberates our imaginings of place from the hegemonic clutches of received tacit agreements, and opens them up to creative spatial possibilities.
Rather than accept the negativity of Marc Augé’s observation that we spend more of our time in non-places and states of transit, I am interested in exploring the positive potential of a closer inspection of the specifics of these fluid states, positioning site itself as the transitory process, which is in turn productive of culture and identity. I would argue that by composing situations that combine performative approaches to dialoguing experience, with everyday modes and technologies of communication, a re-imagining of social space can occur.
In For Space Doreen Massey argues ‘not just for a notion of becoming’ but instead ‘for the openness of that process of becoming’ (Massey 2005: p21). This paper discusses the methodologies and findings of a research practice that seeks to explore how form might made from an openness to processes of becoming, asking how, by perceiving place nomadically, the performative potentials of place might be revealed.