When starting a research project that intersects with notions of place, particularly urban place, the reference points are bewildering in their conceptual range and volume. As the chronology of this writing suggests, theories of place were not the first area to which I turned to ground, develop, and position this research. Rather, the earlier stages of the project, as described on the previous pages, were dominated by contextual research into Salford’s cultural history, as well as documenting my experiences of this new place.

This led to reading around Maurice Halbwachs’s (1992) notion of ‘collective memory’ and a desire to intersect with and interrogate the monolithic or singular ‘frameworks’ of national or community history, such as monuments or commemorations, which ‘reconstruct an image of the past which is in accord, in each epoch, with the predominant thoughts of the society’ (40). In my intermedial making and mixing, I wanted to avoid the ‘inner hierarchy’ and ‘common core convictions’, which Neiger et al. argue are ‘concretized and materialized’ through these ‘physical structures and cultural artefacts’ (2011, 5). Rather, I was interested in geographically situated popular music and affective memory, as well as in employing the practice, not to find coherence and unity, but to revel in the edges of things and the clashes/collisions between them. 

As the project developed, the focus started to shift from a consideration of times past and memory to bringing some of these historical markers of place into conversation with the city's present. It was at this point that it became clear that I needed to address in more detail, how I was conceiving of place through the research. Robin Nelson (2013) points out that practice-as-research is often an endeavour that engages with discourses and practices from a range of different disciplines and that, as such, the practitioner-researcher cannot expect to gain expertise in all these distinct areas. Rather, Nelson points to rigour as evidenced through ‘syncretism, not in depth-mining’ (34), in the intersection between elements of these disciplines within the core site of the research – the practice.

Thus, I engaged in a programme of research, seeking points of resonance and illumination in ideas surrounding what place is and how it manifests. I had already had the opportunity to work as a research assistant with Professor Sally Mackey of the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, London, on her AHRC-funded project ‘Challenging Place’ and, through this work, had been exposed to the place-engaged performance practices that Mackey and the team that worked on the project created.

My first theoretical engagement was also through Mackey’s theories in relation to place, specifically her invocation of place as ‘space (or site) animated through operations and actions and made personal’ (Mackey 2015), as well as Doreen Massey’s notions of place as a ‘constellation of social relations, meeting and weaving together at a particular locus’ (1994, 154).

The emphasis of both theories, not on the physical matter of the lived environment and rather on the ‘operations’, ‘actions’, and ‘relations’ through which place happens was particularly useful in relation to this project. As referenced on the Live Intermediality page, the practice I create is characterised by particular operations and actions, activating materials through the use of digital technologies, primarily in live and developing events. The formal and thematic intersections between the ‘constellation’ of relations that characterise a place, through Massey’s lens, and the parallel constellation of materials, actions, and people that formulate the events I create piqued my interest. In addition, Mackey's focus on the ‘personal’ nature of place (as opposed to space) mirrors an insistent interest in my practice in work, which is primarily disposed to appeal on an affective level.

Such were the starting points for my engagement with place in this project and these threads of ideas about what place is, and how it is made, persist in the making of and reflection on the practice so far. As referenced in the Findings page, there is an ongoing inquiry about what mode of place is made within and through such mixes. In addition to this, certain key threads related to theories of place have emerged through both the studio- and book-based research processes, as well as through the sharing of the practice. These are detailed on the Findings page and represent the singular threads emerging from the more amorphous notions of place that prompted the project. Such threads are those I plan to pursue as I move forward with the project, as well as researching other current practices that respond to or seek to explore urban place. Before expanding on the theoretical strands of the research that have arisen from the practice so far, the events of practice themselves are outlined on the next page.