Hidden Stories

Here is a link to the flickr group and the instructions for that group:
http://www.flickr.com/groups/hiddenstories/

Discover the hidden stories of everyday places.

Hidden Stories is a public art project that investigates people’s connection to familiar places, by using them as inspiration for imagining stories. By re-seeing and re-imagining the landscape, we endow the space around us with new meanings and narrative possibilities.

Hidden Stories asks you to look at your landscape with an investigative eye. Find parts of the landscape spark imagination. Can you create a narrative space in the public sphere?

“The challenge is to fathom what it is that a particular landscape, filled to brimming with past and present significance, can be called upon to “say,” and what, through the saying, it can be called upon to “do”. Keith Basso, Wisdom Sit in Places

This can be done in 3 steps:

1. Investigate your environment. Find places that trigger curiosity and suggest or possess a hidden meaning.

2. Document the space to reveal its hidden narrative potential. Feel free to add details to the environment that will complete the story.

3. Post your Hidden Stories here, along with a written account of the story.

Park/green space is supposed to be where people can go to relax and imagine. However in the name of safety our public spaces have become more regulated and patrolled. What do these fences, borders, rules and survaliance do to our relationship to the landscape? I believe the effect is that the environment becomes a symbolic space, rather than place you feel compelled to interact with beyond a basic level. However our public engagement with our neighborhoods is what creates a shared cultural dialogue. When people interact with their environment, their voices, stories and memories become intertwined with the geography. Leaving marks on the landscape that can be shared with all that care to stop and see.

Record your story and make submit it here. We can build a collective of hidden stories together.