Beating the Bounds: a conversation between neighborhoods was a collaborative project led by me and Mary Stuart Hall. It focused on two Atlanta neighborhoods—Cabbagetown and Kirkwood—and invited the public into an experiential investigation of place through experimental mapping practices. The project centered on listening (to the land, to participants, to each other) and was based on the ancient community practice of “swatting local landmarks with branches to maintain a shared mental map of parish boundaries.” Beating the Bounds sought an embodied experience of neighborhood borders.

To visit the project’s website, click here.

I focused on Cabbagetown and my experience of the neighborhood. I mined my personal past using writing, walking and movement practices, photography, and video. Departing from my usual archaeological, historical, anthropological, and community-based methods that I have employed in other place-based projects, this process was meant to prompt my own recollections (or forgettings) of my life in this neighborhood. Through these memory practices, I sought to produce for myself a more coherent narrative of mt own experience that has been fragmented throughout the years. One of the goals was to reclaim parts of myself that have been relegated to the unconscious. In traversing this particular landscape, what has been hidden is allowed to surface.

To view my map entries, click here.