Experiential Mapping: Creation & Dialogue in Movement

For Prescient Pool 2019, Chilean artist Amalia Pascal invited local residents to take part in the process of art-making during her research residency in Folkestone. Using a diverse range of  socially engaged art practices, Pascal reflects on how cultural exchanges have the potential to shape local identities and contexts. By developing learning platforms such as psycho-geographic walks, mapping workshops, mobile museums & interactive installations, Pascal aims to create a space for experience and a place for listening and learning, where art practice and the community can co-develop through the concept of psychogeography.

Pascal deliberately chose to work a diverse range of local communities – residents at the elderly care-homes in Cheriton, two local secondary schools, visiting artists from ‘Magic Carpet’, and regular shoppers in the town centre and visitors to the Harbour Arm – listening and gathering memories and knowledge about Folkestone through workshops and walks. Pascal also created a mobile museum – a mediation device that allowed pedestrians and everyone on the streets to become involved with the archives and artworks she had on display, making art a living, playful and reflective experience, the participatory artefact inviting local residents to share their memories and stories to activate it.

The final exhibition brought together participants’ creations as an archive of objects, audio-recordings, images & words taken on the psycho-geographic walks, to explore the importance of subjectivity and personal memories in the way we experience the city. In this way, it foregrounds what is normally invisible – a group dynamic, a change of energy – questioning the possibility of integrating art in the lives of people.

Gallery Image Credits:

[1-2, 4-7]: Nina Shen-Poblete
[3]: Mick Williamson

Below is the full programme of Pascal’s residency:

Saturday 6 April 2019, 5-7pm / Urban Room, Harbour St

Prescient Pool Launch – With Amalia Pascal, Joff Insole, Jacob Bray, Pavement Pounders & guests. An evening of readings, screenings and artists in conversation with the public.

Sunday 7 April 2019, 10am-1pm / Departing from St. Eanswythe’s Churchyard, Church St

#1 Folkestone Trail – A psycho-geographic walking and mapping workshop.

Wednesday 10 April 2019, 5-7pm / Urban Room, Harbour St ‘Ask Folkestone’ workshop

Friday 12 April 2019, 6.30-9pm /  CT20 Project Space

Interactive installation: Experiential Mapping: Creation & Dialogue in Movement

Saturday 15 June 2019, 10am-12.30pm / Departing from CT20 Project Space

#2 Psychogeographic walk

Friday 21 – Sunday 30 June 2019, 11am-5pm /  CT20 Project Space, Folkestone

Final Exhibition: Experiential Mapping: Creation & Dialogue in Movement

Amalia Pascal is an artist who specialises in cultural projects that connect different communities and cultural organisations through artistic mediation, art, and heritage. Her practice aims to reactivate social dynamics using dialogue as a creative tool to generate collaborative propositions that encourage participants to experience, listen and share. This allows her work to reflect and signify the inhabited place with project processes based on local traditions and collaboration.

Prescient Pool (PP) was a series of collaborative public engagement events and art commissions inspired by people’s experiences and stories in Folkestone. Between April and September 2019, CT20 Projects made three new commissions: Amalia Pascal, Joff Insole, Jacob Bray and Jemma Wead. Initially inspired by the research and archive published under “Transitions” by Pavement Pounders, PP became its own depository of vernacular and symbolic stories contributed by people in Folkestone, presented and reinterpreted to make this heritage available to a whole new generation.⁠