L: Lizzie conducting a meditation under the arches (map in foreground); R: Map marking.
L: Rikki playing “We’re off to the Market”; R: Returning to the Albany from the Creek.
L&R: Sensory Reflection at the Creek
A series of photos documenting Local Senses’ walking workshops shared as part of Liberty 2022. Photography by Miles Perry; composites by Benjamin Jenner.
Local Senses at Liberty Festival Lewisham, July 2022. Documentation of Public Walks for Liberty Festival and London Borough of Culture, Lewisham 2022. Directed by Nathan Bather (Local Senses).
Local Senses Collective – Our Journey
Local Senses Collective are Leonie Abrahamson, Nathan Bather, Geoff Clark, Benjamin Jenner, Rikki Jodelko, Natanya Mark, Lizzie Nichols, Colin Palgrave, and Lesley Palgrave.
The Local Senses collective was formed in 2017 from a series of self-initiated creative workshops. Since then the group has acquired new members, meeting regularly to nurture a sense of community through peer-learning, shared experience and collective discovery.
Local Senses members under the arches in Deptford during R&D for Liberty Festival 2022
Since 2019, the collective’s focus has been on generating sensory reflections of the local environment, walking, talking and thinking through the streets, parks, churchyards, play areas, railway arches and creeks that populate that space. Through this process, the collective productively use their individual relationship with vision as a prompt to question the various ways in which a sense of the local might be established. Wondering at the relation between psychic and social space, between what is seen, smelt, tasted, heard or felt with the body, the group question how these sensations might be channelled to effect journeys in the mind.
In order to share this work beyond the group, the collective conduct sensory walks where they re-present their interaction with the terrain through the reading of poems, the playing of songs, the telling of tales, and the handling of alternative cartographies.
Mapping in Lewisham, R&D for Liberty Festival 2022
Video still from Liberty Festival R&D documentation. The video is available below.
In the autumn of 2021 LOCAL SENSES secured funding to develop a new body of work for LIBERTY FESTIVAL 2022, an event that took place in the London borough of Lewisham as part of London Borough of Culture 2022.
In January 2022, the group presented the development of their research at a sharing event hosted by the Albany Theater, Deptford. The following invitation was written by LOCAL SENSES for that event:
Tonight, LOCAL SENSES welcomes you to join them on a psychogeographic journey of Lewisham. Via ulterior sensory phenomena the collective will enter your mind and motivate your body in a bid to inspire you to communicate with the local environment beyond the visual. To succeed in this audacious act, they ask you to join them in a period of meditation where you will be led through the local streets towards the water of Deptford Creek. On returning to the room there will be a chance to compose a collection of Haikus and handle locally inspired talismanic forms before heading out to explore the local terrain for yourself. Here, you will join a short walk with musical accompaniment, navigating the area between the Albany and Deptford station. As we walk, we will stop and reflect on the ways in which the environment is shaped by sounds and smells and how this sited information can be captured in language. We will also speculate on the power of the terrain to lead both mind and body beyond themselves, as we move towards previous experiences held in different places and other times. We look forward to welcoming you on this journey with us.
Examples of some of the Haikus, along with other written work, can be seen below:
An audio recording of some of the poems is available here:
This film documents the research and development stage of LOCAL SENSES’ project MAPPING IN LEWISHAM.
LOCAL SENSES: MAPPING IN LEWISHAM 2021 R&D. A film by Nathan Bather.
Mapping in Bloomsbury
Mapping in Bloomsbury, tactile map in use on route.
In 2019, the group began collaboratively developing strategies for exploring and navigating outdoor space around the Royal National Institute for Blind People. This work was funded by an award from the Mayor of London’s Culture Seeds Fund, and resulted in the publication LOCAL SENSES MAPPING IN BLOOMSBURY, a PDF of which is available to view below:
An audio recording of the book’s content is available here: