Just finished the most satisfying spatial annotation / online photo-documentary mapping project with a bunch of Afghan refugee teenagers in Sydney’s West. This is in the last few minutes, so I still have to badge the site with legal mandatories and funding body acknowledgements before it goes live, but I just have to quote you some choice bits:
George Street Shops: This is near Westfield. You put the car in the carpark, it’s very peaceful. (We are listening to Indian music while we write this, and George St is boring, so we get talking. Homayoun doesn’t like high-pitched music with Urdu in it, because he doesn’t understand Urdu. Indian movies are not just about love, they teach us about family, about how you live forever with your husband. The Bollywood star Shurkhan is hot, he gets good action in the movies, and he is the best.)
And how’s this for the (sub)urban annotation of desire:
Horwood Place: Two guys got out of the car, carrying fruit. X said to the young one, “oooooooh you are so handsome and cool, can you join with us?”. He was soooo excited that X chose him, but X said “sorry baby, I’ve already got a boyfriend. “Can we join in?” they said. Marian said yes, and explained that it was going on a website by ICE. “Of course we want to be in the picture.” They laughed.
(Alas, even when the site goes live, the mapping engine we’re using won’t give us permalinks.) This is a project that I’ve been itching to do for about ten years (ha ha, back then it was a CD-ROM), exploring how young migrant people relate to space in Australia. I was originally envisaging working with people who’d been in the country longer, so as to explore deeper familiarities with certain places, but when the opportunity to use this model knocks, you don’t turn it down. Also, the kids ran out of time during the photographic excursion, so they actually didn’t get to document their more intimiate/social spaces, and show off more of their digs. And it’s not spatial annotation in the locative sense, which I’d love to do in the future. But still, what we managed to achieve was a kind of familiarisation/defamiliarisation, the churning of the derive, which is just as cool.
The young people are just nuts. They listen with one ear while they chat up some anonymous, diasporic Afghan honey online.
[ tags: spatial-annotation, refugees, migration, urbanism, mapping, maps, derive, psychogeography ]
Great project with the kids. Sounds like you got some fun experiences out of it.
I came across this post because I was in a show in Providence, Ri called “Attack of the Psycho Geographers”. It was a fundraiser for this year’s Provflux 2005 in Providence. If you have not done so, check out the website (www.pipsworks.com).
Cheers, Gabe
Hi, just wanted to post a comment since this site was the first hit on the google search “OMG LOL”.