RSVP

PolyVocalCity is an intergenerational and multidisciplinary cohort programme aimed at expanding the crafts of city-making through the arts and diversifying who has a voice in these processes. Join us for a 2-day festival in Croydon staging a series of workshops that use world-building and gaming practices to think about new narratives for the borough.

Festival Line up

September 8th – 18:00 – 21:00 – Little Turf, 39-40 Keeley Rd, Croydon CR0 1TF

Off-worlders (Not Public) – 16:00-17:00 

An interactive and sensory urban exploration of Croydon through an alien-themed world-building lens. Participants will navigate through the town centre mission zone via a route of their choosing, and using one of seven sense-altering devices. As they do so, participants will complete the mission log provided, which contains a number of questions about their observed surroundings. Following this, participants are free to discuss their findings with each other, comparing their experiences with each device, and how these relate to the experiences of people with limiting physical and/or mental impairments – How could Croydon’s public urban realm be designed more equitably for everyone, and can we identify any specific areas where improvement is needed? At the end of the workshop, mission logs will then be collected and submitted to the Urban Room for analysis.

Launch Party! – 18:00- 21:00

Join us for drinks, food and music as we launch both a podcast and zine produced by the cohort members and celebrate the end of the programme.

PolyVocalCity Saturday School

September 9th – 11:00 – 17:00 – Adult School Hall, 60 Park Ln, Croydon CR0 1ER

Sensory Walk & (De-)scribe workshop– 11:00 – 13:00

An experiential sensory walk in Croydon, mapping our (internal) collective sensory experience. Our five known senses include sight, sound, touch, taste and smell. We will engage with our local environment through the experience of pausing our sight stimuli and enhancing access to our sound, touch, taste and smell sensory fields as a method to deepen our understanding of the dominant role that sight plays in our world building process. What role does sound, touch, taste and smell play in accentuating trust, empathy, intuition, problem solving, social & environmental justice?

Lunch – 13:00 – 14:00

Listening is an act of reaching out – 14:00 – 16:00

Assembled in the format and spirit of a Saturday School, this activity will support participants to map out spaces of care & resistance across the Borough of Croydon drawing on their own experience of Croydon – a place which has become defined by its treatment of residents as consumers, embodied within its landscape of shopping centres is an assumption that people are there as resources to be financially mined. Spaces of care and resistance are therefore crucial to the wellbeing of residents and arise in unlikely places, within the shopping centres themselves, as well as food markets, allotments and community cinemas.

Once mapped, we will journey together to a future Croydon and use listening, reading and world building exercises to explore what future spaces of care and solidarity look like for Croydon’s communities. The highlighted spaces and rituals can help us collectively shape an abstractive, imaginative, nurturing and multipurpose community space in Croydon.

INFRA sonic cartographies – 16:00 – 17:00

Listening to INFRA-sonic cartographies is a case study workshop by Henrique J. Paris and Sophie Mepham. Re-interpreting local cultural markers, the workshop will engage with extending our perception of place and positioning through reading/listening and reframing urban landscapes and their corresponding data.