Essay by Melody Chang
This fall, I will be organizing a speaker series/colloquium for Future Histories Lab on how people make sense of place. I’m bringing together creative researchers and community storytellers to discuss their techniques and notable technologies of place-based storytelling. Below I reflect on the extraordinary coincidence of the course’s themes with questions we will all be experiencing as we return with physical presence to campus and begin to narrate our own stories to one another.
On Wednesday, we carefully return to campus after 2.5 semesters of liminal campus times. The university body will be together. What happened to us?
We will bring forward our jagged edges, grown wild and unfiled by regular social contact. On campus anew, what awaits? Variously we may feel an expansive excitement from so much stimulation (what is that aftertaste of being unmoored)? We may feel boxed in an invisible corner around other people – filled with trepidation but irreconcilably eager. Gathering may be like watching from the outside an activity we used to know – bewildered in the forest, blasé in the crowd.
With these wrinkles, dressed in not-COVID-comfort-suits, we will each bring to campus our stories of the past year-and-a-half. They will be separate strands: the pandemic impacted us all but was nonetheless an individuated experience. We each had circumstances that uniquely unfolded: a latent relationship dynamic erupted into fissure, new beginnings timidly formed, family members on the margin weigh increasingly heavy on our minds. It’s not over and still, this attempt to return to campus marks a point in time. How do we bring one another up to date on where we are?
So where were you? How was that? And how are you doing now? These basic questions turn to ash in my mouth like I’m trying to extrude something too callous for tender states of being. I care to know these answers but maybe the questions ask too much. Or too directly.
It’s possible we are out of practice narrating to others at a scale so casual. We used to pass each other in a fleeting campus moment, sharing what articles or projects are on our mind before rushing off. These nodes functioned as a kind of peppered and cumulative meaning-making. We emergently made our collective narrative, criss-crossing like ants blazing a path. Now, except in small pockets, how many know our stories? On the other hand, the buoyancy of a casual-fast check-in belies an un-displaceable heaviness of experience in the response. Anyone who has been called upon by existential-birthday-reflections knows that it is ugly, frightening, and frantic business to make conclusive sense of something that is still very much in progress. Somewhere, someone lowers their gaze. I’ll pass; next question, please.
This fall, we draw ourselves back together. How will we collectively make sense of what happened to us as we re-constitute an “us” on campus grounds?
My friend reminds me stories are good for showing, not telling – when telling is too tedious a task. And what a moment to contemplate place as we all return together to the experience of place after isolation and confinement indoors. How physical place features in people making sense of their stories matters to me. This fall, I will be organizing a colloquium for Future Histories Lab focused on this and other questions. Every Monday, a creative researcher, producer, archivist, or community storyteller will join us on campus at Bauer-Wurster Hall to share their techniques and notable technologies of place-based storytelling. Their projects encompass performance, guided walking tours, physical installations, outdoor exhibitions, landscape interpretation, memorial design, and more.
Techniques and technologies of place-based storytelling. There is so much to that mouthful already. Storytelling. Based in place (or about place?) Techniques of and changing technologies. Is this a basic topic or complex? Familiar or innovative? I can’t tell. I’m obsessed with all parts of this, partially because of that flickering, kaleidoscopic effect. The topic trains my gaze because I can’t place it.
The act of storytelling has a timelessness to it. People have been doing it for as long as people have been people. Great masters before us passed down their polished traditions. Maybe I take for granted that we are generally familiar with its mechanics and formal qualities. At least I remember studying basic elements in grade school: setting, plot, characters and even stages in a narrative arc. Today leading storytellers dazzle us with new media projects – during lockdown how many of us reached for “content” (or was it connection?) on Netflix, podcasts, and social media. The prevalence of stories around us may betray that it’s the higher levels of fine-tuning the craft which gives the experience of a story that easeful quality of being enveloped. Time feels effortless when we are cascading through a good story. Time feels endless when we are politely trapped by confusing or poor delivery.
With so much that has happened, it seems an uncanny paradox that base questions may pose a challenge for multitudes to speak their narrative into existence. I’m interested in that moment of speechlessness. It suggests two things to me. First, there is so much to express, and if that expression feels clumsy right now, it is hard and important to do precisely because expression is an act of underlying existence. We articulate will, we flex our desires. When are we more alive than when we permit ourselves to display grief or be captured by excitability? We perform, we express, we become. I think our lives depend on the practice of expression. Second, we need a societal role to speak what the collective cannot while in crisis. I heard a few years ago that a doula’s task, among others, is to steward the birth story while the mother is laboring in birth. After, the doula gifts the story back to the mother. I wonder about this applying to loss and renewal in the built environment. To our invited creative storytellers this semester, we will look to understand their role and how they do what they do.
Beyond the foundations of storytelling, this colloquium will also focus on place. Place features in the projects we will study in the sense that many of the stories focus on place and the transmission of the story also happens at a specific location – the place is the subject as well as the physical context. In a theater, powerful track lighting fades the rest of the world into darkness beyond the stage. In on-site work, the production unfolds in conversation with what is around it. The environment is a tool. What value is there to telling stories on-site? What do we gain by bringing people’s bodies to a physical place and having their senses directly take in information? What additional challenges are borne by directing audience attention or planning in uncontrollable contexts?
Place is a hot topic. Gertrude Stein famously wrote after visiting the location where her childhood Oakland home had been razed and former farmland developed near 13th Avenue and East 25th Street, that “there is no there there.” Scholars writing about changes in scale borne by globalization, modernity, and technology speculate about the relevance of local place. How many places these days are containers for capital goods to circulate or for that matter, our bodies as workers or consumers? I don’t have the answers. With more than a year of remote education under our belts calling into question the future and value of in-person instruction, I look forward to all of us blinking together in the light at what is the there there of place.
And finally, storytelling is innovating new technologies, bringing experiments in digital experiences into a tried-and-true well. These can include apps that track geo-location or augmented reality superimposed on existing landscapes. What applications of technology can deepen our connection to place and when does technology take us out of place? I don’t think inventive storytelling is solely about new technologies, but applying the full slate of communicative and experiential tools with purpose and effect. That is, I’m excited about an experimental edge that focuses on new combinations of techniques that continue to serve the story (instead of losing the story to any one technology).
It seems that storytelling, place, and techniques can occur in endless choreography. I feel compelled to this aura of shape-shifting and mystery, like we are approaching on an ancient alchemical discipline. What new collaborations will create what chemistries? When does a project begin to speak for itself? In the midst of a production, a feeling of inevitability arises in the audience – as if things could have only ever unfolded that way. Good place-based storytelling camouflages the aches and pains of production. Like a magic trick, the technician has curated the container so our attention can rest, at their direction, on the wonder of experience. Place-based storytellers are the technicians who use landscape, history, oral testimony, photos, and technology as ingredients to their magic show.
When it comes down to it, this process is about making meaning out of what surrounds us and then making decisions on how to transmit that information to others. It’s less that any “it” already “matters.” It’s more that this process of storytelling, through sequencing and arranging information about underrepresented landscapes, is what generates and spreads meaning. These acts help to spread the feeling that anything matters at all.
As a city planning student, this exercise about public communications nests into what I consider to be a bigger challenge in public communications for the discipline’s efforts toward equitable planning. As planners and designers sink into pockets of expertise (or researchers into academia), can we continue to relate what we see and learn to others around us and vice versa? What would be a positive feedback loop of information that leads us back to one another quickly, like a fiery superhighway – that is also fun? And since planning regards place, what a special charge and opportunity we have.
Last spring, Future Histories Lab director Susan Moffat and I led a group of intrepid students through a spring course, Ghosts & Visions, based at the Albany Bulb. Using lines of sight visible from standing at the Albany Bulb and looking toward 360 degree landscapes, students told stories about local extractive histories in the Bay. Walking along a path out into the Bay, visitors listened to audio narrative written, edited, and recorded by students and viewed “stations” dotting the path. Each station had a small monument to the local extractive history, for example, the Chevron refinery in Richmond, and some had an augmented reality component. We did it outdoors as COVID conditions unfolded. We did it in very windy shoreline conditions. We did it among wildflowers in the spring, and jubilant running dogs, and beautiful views of the watery horizon line. It was an ambitious survey of the storytelling production process and what the students created continues to give: today, the audio tour has been downloaded from Spotify 507 times. This fall, as speakers join us on campus to share about lessons learned from their production processes, we will sink deeper into our craft in place.
The Fall 2021 Colloquium, “Techniques and Technologies of Place-Based Storytelling,” will be offered Mondays, 11:00 – 12:29 pm in Bauer-Wurster Hall, Room 214B, on the UC Berkeley Campus. Students may enroll for 1-2 credits. Find additional information here, or email melodyychang@berkeley.edu.
