My positioning in the city of Salford and perspective as a new resident of this place, or ‘incomer’, were both instrumental in how I was approaching its cultural heritage and the contemporary lived experience of being here now, as part of this project. As such, I started to consider a more direct use of this experience as part of the intermedial mix. My imprint, as a solo maker and performer, is present in the forming of all the mixes I create and is particularly prevalent in live events – you hear my voice, the fragments of songs that make me feel something (I very rarely work with musical material that does not affect me on one level or another), you see shaky footage of the places I have been and the things I have seen. I also write live responses to these developing mixes, as the event unfolds – there is a lot of me in there.

The writings themselves were used in various ways in the three forms of The Salford Samples, from being read out live in the solo performance, to being part of the soundtrack of the video-text, to being positioned within the participatory event as a separate audio track, available to those present on MP3 players with headphones. Again, my reflections on these events themselves can be found by visiting the ‘Salford in the mix’ page. Before that, some of the theoretical and practical engagements with place in the work are considered on the next page.

Returning to this earlier stage of the project, as part of the research I documented my everyday experiences of and responses to this new place, through a series of fairly standard diary entries. They were written freely, with minimal editing; if not free writing as such, then certainly fairly unfettered musings. These writings covered the period of time when the River Irwell broke its banks on Boxing Day, 2015, and parts of Salford nearby flooded. The flooding and the way it affectively connected me to the path of the Irwell through Salford became a strong thread of the developing work, as reflected in the diary entries, and continues to inform both my relationship with this area of Salford and strands of the research, as outlined in ‘Findings and ways forward’.

And yet … this is not autobiographical performance, which, according to Deirdre Heddon (2008) is ‘work which foregrounds some aspect of a life-story, a bio’ and where ‘the “auto” signals the sameness of the subject and object of that story: that is, the “author” and “performer” collapse into each other as the performing “I” is also the represented “I”’ (8). The type of subject–object collapse described by Heddon is not a feature of this work. I may gather, curate, and mix together the materials, but I always sit in relation to those materials as a performer and a maker – they are not representative of a life-story or ‘bio’. Rather, as samples from songs, texts, video images, and objects, they are abstract, shifting, elusive combinations, which could speak of many contexts, circumstances, and experiences. Equally, as an act of research, the practice does not inquire in these ways; it is not an exploration of self.

In addition, this practice-as-research project operated reflexively,   bending back to me as the researcher and in turn that the standpoint, affect and disposition of the researcher is a key part of the methodological calls that are made.

Finlay and Gough talk of reflexivity in research as emerging through ‘thoughtful, self-aware analysis of the intersubjective dynamics between the researcher and the researched’ (Finlay and Gough 2003: ix), while Robin Nelson discusses the condition of reflexivity as ‘not only reflecting on what is being achieved and how the specific work is taking shape but also being aware of where you stand (‘where you are coming from’)’ (2013: 44). The latter, as referenced above, was particularly significant in this research project as ‘where I stood’ was within the place I was exploring, as a new resident.

However, in the case of this project, there seemed to be a value in revealing rather than obscuring my subjective positioning in the research and using it as a way into some of the issues and ideas that were arising about the place in which I lived. This positioning, as explored in the final section of this article, has actually become a crucial part of how the project is now moving forwards. Acknowledging my perspective as an ‘incomer’ and therefore my sense of being an ‘outsider’ in this place has crystallised how the research can intersect with Salford and its residents, as well as that encounter becoming of significance in itself. This mix of being embedded in a place physically, but not necessarily feeling of that place, in terms of historical or familial connections, is a state that I have come to see as a productive one, in research terms.