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Flight: Encounters in South Liverpool
Four Corners

Encounters and gmproducts will be working in South Liverpool as part of Capital of Cultures Four Corners project 07.  We will be modifying a police pod transforming it into a mobile shop and touring it around the area from 16 April for five weeks. Each week we will follow the same route around south Liverpool as determined by the Neighbourhood Management team. We will place ourselves at various stops along the route (shopping areas, community centres, open spaces and streets) where we will engage passers by and groups in creative and interactive activities that have as their focus questions around the theme of neighbourhoods, neighbours and neighbourliness. The project will culminate on European Neighbours Day 29 May 07 where the results of our tour will be revealed and shared to a city wide audience.

We aim to explore people’s hopes and desires for the places in which they live, reveal and share imaginings, explore how they do or don’t relate to their neighbourhood, what their personal and emotional relationship is to the place they live in and the people they live near. By being mobile and using a range of creative interactive techniques and activities we will involve local people across the large geographical area of South Liverpool in the creation of a transforming and developing piece of work. Information, imagery and sound will be layered and reflected back to the viewer in order that more can be added. We will enable people to create different kinds of links between people, places, objects, dreams and realities. The project will be concerned with the big and the tiny, with memoirs and futures, with the real and the imagined.

Technology, creative activities and interventions in the Pod and on the street will enable people of different ages and abilities to engage with the project and to link up with other neighbourhoods and the city of Liverpool and beyond? People will be invited to leave a trace of themselves, make something, leave a question or an answer, a memory or a desire for the next viewer to see (both a real and virtual neighbourhood can be created through the course of the tour). The project will allow people to reach out (metaphorically and digitally), promoting and discovering skills and qualities and making connections.

The Pod will change and transform as information is collected and ‘things’ are made, it will provide a space for viewing and sharing, for creative involvement and become an ‘artwork’ in itself made by people along the route. The Pod will be reflective, engaging, transforming, intriguing, fun, and recognisable as a thing of wonder and beauty – and something made from the ‘stuff’ of South Liverpool…….

How will this be achieved?  

By setting up a temporary space and enabling transformation the team will provoke thought and action around the sense of ownership of space – How can people make places and spaces? What does it mean to make a space/place? How does it feel to meet a stranger? How does it feel to sit with your neighbour? How does it feel/what does it mean to be able to change a space?

By collecting memories and stories of an area the team will be able to reveal shared histories of places and spaces along the route. The collection of memories and stories and the revealing of the ‘human’ enables connections to be made and helps to create a shared knowledge and understanding of a place – a sharing and celebration of what it means to live together within a geographical area – a connection with the people and places that were there before and a collective hope for what might be ….. 

By collecting found objects and asking others to do so the team will create an intriguing and thought provoking display of local ‘archaeological’ finds for people to view and add to – a way of connecting with the human scale and the everyday life of an area

By asking people to take photographs of the places within their neighbourhood they like and want to keep, and those they dislike and want to change the team will help build a picture of places to change and keep for others to see and share thoughts about

A creative neighbours pack suggesting neighbourly things to do and say Could you post/give this to your neighbour? Smile at your neighbour every time you see them for a week. What could you do for your neighbour? Leave this plastic flower on the doorstep of your neighbour. What could you share with your neighbour? Do you know your neighbour?

Use of video.  By being asked questions people will be able to explore and share their feelings, thoughts and ideas about their own neighbourhood - when did you last borrow something from your neighbour? How often do you meet with your neighbours? Where is your neighbourhood?? What are your neighbours called? What does being a neighbour mean? How has your neighbourhood changed? Do you feel you belong to a neighbourhood?