Imaging a sense of place and community

Welcome to my site

On this site, I will present part of the process of my Ph.D. research. My study examines Socially Engaged Art (SEA) interventions through Art-Based Action Research (ABAR) as a strategy for building a sense of place and community. I will invite selected members of the community to imagine alternative futures. Using ABAR, I will implement three interventions in my new home: Griffintown, Montreal. Building from SEA, built environment pedagogies and a Futures Studies framework, my research will contribute to the knowledge of the Griffintown community and urban pedagogies.

Who am I?

I am an artist and researcher who deeply believe in the new ways of connecting, in the solidarity of the networks of knowledge, creativity and art that are showing a new face of our specie.

I see myself as part of not just a result of a country crisis but a global and timeless question of belonging, identities, and territories. I thought about my origins and identity, and living in Montreal, I also was confronted with migrants from all over the world, in many cases finding connections with them or learning other points of view and cultures.

I think migrancy and identity are an important part of my positionality. Without planning, all my world changed because of the migration, or in my case, exile. I found myself immersed as Aian Chambers, defines: “An impossible homecoming”: “The author also argued about the fiction of identity and how identity is formed on the move: “Such a journey is open and incomplete; it involves a continual fabulation, an invention, a construction, in which there is no fixed identity or final destination.” (p.25). As I find myself on this journey, my conceptual inquiry and making meaning of the place and the community is part of the global phenomenon of migration and displacement.

I hope to invite more people to learn and enjoy this “uncanny displacement and ambiguity", mending ourselves, building communities, repairing the world.

Elsy Zavarce