KIN

KIN Arnolfini, Bristol – 2018

In 2018 I was asked to join Kambe events new venture, KIN as a creative producer. The event was designed to make the change in the world that we wanted to see. After a year of development, and engaged student project, and a lot of design and admin we organized a four-day event at the Arnolfini – Bristol’s International Centre for Contemporary Arts. With a few days to go, we had only sold half of the intended tickets and had to make the very difficult decision to cancel the event. 

Camp KIN, Market Harbouror – 2021

To make use of our work for the event Kambe subsequently developed the Camp Kin, a three-week mini-festival for the Summer of 2021. I reformed my research project and artist residency for the festival as ‘KIN: More-Than-Human Mapping’. This nature-focused research workshop brought campers at the Camp Kin festival together to explore, research, and map the site from a ‘more-than-human perspective.’ The aim of the project was to observe and record the shapes and variety of more-than-human lives around the campsite over the three weekends. The project resulted in a physical map that participants built and rebuilt, over the three weeks of the festival w from our observations, samples and analysis of the site. 

Over three weekends in Sumer 2021, I worked with two participatory-design based researchers Dr Male Luján Escalanté [UAL] and Marie Williams [Dream Networks/UCL] to deliver the workshop to over 500 festival-goers young and old. Each research team was given a Cultural Probes style research kit to find a ‘new perspective of the site and its non-human actors’. We are currently developing a research paper based on our experiences of running the workshops in this context for publication in participatory-led journals and conferences.

What is More-Than-Human?

A more-than-human approach understands the world not only as a human environment but aims to offers perspectives of non-human actors. More-than-Human data goes beyond metric and aims for a rich set of data, including your and other experiences (human and more-than-human), narratives, stories, sensations, emotions, objects, or processes. 

What does this project do for Participants?

The ‘More-Than-Human’ mapping workshop enabled participants to collect data about their interactions with ‘non-human actors’ using ‘cultural probe’ research kits across the site. The mapping process enabled the participants to explore and reframe their experiences of the festival. The idea of the workshop was to explore the site from a ‘more-than-human perspective’ The emphasis in the project is on the mapping process. The project will also result in a shared map of the site representing and sharing some of the collective experiences of the weekend. The Map can then be the starting point for new conversations and projects for Kambe.