PolyVocalCity
PolyVocalCity is an intergenerational and multidisciplinary cohort program aimed at expanding the crafts of city-making through the arts and diversifying who has a voice in these processes.
Building from the knowledge we have acquired and developed from last year’s conversations around Croydon, we will continue working in the borough and beyond with methodologies of world-building and gaming to find new strategies for achieving environmental and social justice in the urban realm. This year we are interested in employing the metaphor of parasitic life to interrogate symbiotic relationships based on co-dependency and resilience to break down hierarchical structures while exploring their fragility and their potential danger.
Launched in 2022 under TMCohort, PolyVocalCity is our ongoing cohort program exploring the urban realm through the lenses of narrative, sound, choreography, and infrastructure. Each year we take on participants for a 6-month peer-led educational program with the aim to generate new ideas for urban spaces by drawing on techniques learned from different disciplines. The program is delivered through a curated series of workshops, talks, walks, and activities led by our diverse network of collaborators including artists, activists, architects, filmmakers, poets, and choreographers.
We aim to focus particularly on creating opportunities for communities who have been typically excluded from the arts and city-making process, specifically working class, migrant, diasporic, ethnic minority, neurodivergent and low-income. We believe that the sustained support and development of a small group of people on a year-to-year basis will be the first step towards eroding the structural barriers that decide who can influence city-making processes.
Displacement (2022)
In 2022 the cohort focused on the theme of displacement and identity of the human and nonhuman, investigating how we can use storytelling to create new narratives and an intersectional perspective on city-making. Displacement can be experienced on a personal, community or worldwide scale, but each individual experience is unique. How can we tap into somebody else’s life, world and experience to truly understand displacement beyond ourselves? The cohort interrogated this theme through a series of experimental and creative workshops using tools such as walking, score writing and storytelling to encourage a glimpse through an alternative lens.
Our 2023 program will be based in Croydon and will engage participants through a ‘learning by making’ approach, valuing their lived experiences as a source of knowledge to generate new thinking about what culture means in Croydon. We will bring together local artists, poets, designers, planners, and activists to explore place-based and community–led strategies to achieve environmental and social justice in the borough. By engaging with specific sites and neighbourhoods in Croydon’s town centre, the group’s findings will connect and feed into the work of local partners, with the aim to empower participants to develop shared knowledge and contribute to ongoing conversations about cultural regeneration in the borough.