valentina nisi
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Re:Precursors for Place-based stories - 2006/06/12 05:11
Thanks so much for your intervention joline. It may take some time for me to touch on all your observations and questions, but they are very interesting and important points that you raise in your text and I would like to reflect on it, hoping that this will answer some of your questions.
While individuals "told" your team stories, who put them all together? Who was the grand architect, if there was one? And who do you think the audience was for the vignettes and for the 'master narrative"?
Who is the author and who is the target audience for the MPL are very important questions for this project.
While in my previous work “Weirdvew” (for more information see: http://crossings.tcd.ie/issues/4.1/Nisi) the stories were collected by word of mouth from the community members, with the MPL the strategy was different. Despite an initial attempt to collect stories directly from the people living in the area, It was soon evident that the community was too big to use the same approach as for the Weirdview project. After trying to talk to people in the street asking for their availability to share stories, I organized to meet some community members for one to one conversations. This way I met Maireen Johnston, a writer that was born and grew up in the Liberties. Her family moved from the west of Ireland to the Liberties in the early 1800. Maireen wrote a book called “Around the banks of Pimlico” recounting her family history as well as anecdotes referring to local characters and social conditions of the area through the centuries. Together we toured the liberties while she was telling me stories of the place and the people that lived there at any one time, pointing me at locations that were relevant to her family and to the liberties community history. I ended up using her book as a starting point for the narratives. I selected a number of anecdotes from it concerning the history, the costumes and her family stories. From that material i produced the multimedia audio visual stories and built the web of content for the MPL. The intention was multi-folded. Firstly to stimulate local community members to recognize characters and situations that they had lived or stories that they had been told. Secondly to interest and attract people that did not belong to the community to to look at the area from a different point of view, rather than a guided tour through the historical buildings and facts of the area, I wished to provide a grass root history of the community with some historical framing. Media Experts (people that are familiar with new media from computers in general, music technology, multimedia, interactive storytelling etc.) , people living in the liberties area, and people external to the liberties, from Dubliners to foreigners living and visiting Ireland were asked to try the MPL. The results from the first study of the audience reaction to the MPL are described in the text I posted earlier.
i am going to write more about who the stories belong in the next few day! ciao for now, valentina
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