Angela Molloy Murphy

2.39 Multimodal Place – Mapping: (Re)Storying our Earthly Relations (Paper)

Angela Molloy Murphy – Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne, Australia

Abstract:

Multimodal Place – Mapping: (Re)Storying our Earthly Relations Friends of the Secret Underground (FOSU) is a child-artist-researcher collective that came together informally in 2022 to create a multimodal exhibit for children in the U.S. Pacific Northwest: The Secret Underground: A Glow World Experience. Through arts-based inquiry, FOSU produced a fabulated underground world at a community centre in Portland, Oregon, intended to disrupt settler-colonial ways of thinking and doing. Plumwood (2002) maintains that our problem as humans lies “not in silence but in a certain kind of deafness” (p. 22). In response to this, FOSU worked with experimental sound processes to open up perceptual and communicative possibilities with place. We produced audio such as “feet stomping overhead,” “burrowing sounds,” and “loud rustling” — small audio stories that were incorporated into larger multi-layered, multimodal artefacts that included poems, music and questions spoken aloud by children. The result was haunting; discombobulating, so exhibit-goers felt as if they were in an unexpected territory and would need to (re)assess their place in things. Children took photos of the site and gathered images from the web to compile with our own original drawings and artwork. These video compositions were set to audio and projected large-scale onto surfaces of varying transparency, giving the space a sense of vitality and movement. While the site appeared to be a gathering place for human communities alone, we were aware of a thriving community beyond the human that also dwelled there. The digital projections intentionally exaggerated the scale of other-than-human beings, such as worms, bones, and trash, to create a feeling of unease. In a break from the fixed aerial views of Western mapping that offer a sense of surveillance and control, our multimodal place-mappings revealed a pluraverse of multimatter/multispecies creatures and provided a sense of movement among “a sea of agential relations” (Cajete, 1994, pp. 74–77).