Space is the Place // Spacemaking as Sanctuary ✨ portals of possibility
(2023–Ongoing) • Transdisciplinary Practice-Based Research, Archives & Social Practice, Embodiment, Sound , Workshops, Zines, Painting, Community Building, Ethnographic research
The Inquiry
How do we cultivate portals of possibility, sensory exploration, and collective care to experience structural spacemaking as a literal site of sanctuary? This ongoing project explores how we reside in relationship with our environments, especially when navigating systemic power dynamics, institutional friction, or physical limitations.
Practice-Based Research as a Site of Care
Grounded in my commitment to disability justice and sustainable ways of being, this research project operates through a bottom-up, relational framework that treats space as an active dialogue.
how do we create portals of possibilities, explorations and care (self + community) to experience spacemaking as sanctuary? ✨
Through this inquiry, i attempt to explore these themes through practice-based research projects. I developed alternative infrastructures for community care, tracking whether our relationship with our surroundings is extractively or generatively rooted. .
Connected Research Strands
- A defining pillar of this project is the construction of FEELINGS Radio- a living, evolving independent station broadcasting 24/7 as an open site for sonic experimentation and decentralized, non-hierarchical storytelling.
- Spacemaking as Sanctuary// Water Memory: An interactive worldbuilding exploration commissioned by Healing Justice LDN.
- Participatory Learning Labs: An accompanying embodied zine alongside a series of public community workshops hosted at Peckham Levels and Central Saint Martins for UAL’s inaugural Poetics of Care Festival of Creative Health (May 2025). Summaries of these featured artworks continue below.
Commissioned by Healing Justice LDN, this transdisciplinary project is home to Spacemaking as Sanctuary // Water Memory 🌊 a transdisciplinary exploration in worldbuilding and remembering alternative infrastructures.
It asks:
How can our connection to and with nature - specifically water - guide us in creating sanctuary spaces rooted in healing, resistance, and collective care?
As research and in response to the prompts below, I created a sound art piece, exploring how we are in relationship to and with space. You’re invited to explore your surroundings via this interactive and immersive sound art piece from wherever you are in the world. Entwining binaural recording techniques, field recordings, archives, text, mark making, embodiment and somatic practices, this piece is best experienced using headphones.
- How are we in relationship with the space around us?
- How do we feel safe-enough in the spaces we’re in?
- How do we belong? How do we be in relationship with our environment, especially if there’s tensions with power, safety and limitations?
- How do we cultivate / practice / rehearse building and repairing community / relationships?
- How do we repair our relationship with space?
- How do we relate to our environment? Is it rooted in extraction or is it generative in nature?
- How do we make our relationship to and with our environment irresistible? Safe enough? Accessible? Inclusive?
- How do we wrestle with tensions of becoming ‘experts’ in and of a space?
- How do we ‘decolonise’ space beyond performative empty gestures?
You can listen here.
Spacemaking as Sanctuary: art + embodiment participatory workshops
As part of this research project, i made an accompanyting embodied zine (Water Memory) and ran community workshops at Peckham Levels and Central Saint Martins as part of the Poetics of Care, UAL’s first ever festival of creative health, in May 2025 which you can see below. You can also find a collection of some of the initial stages of research via my notion archive here + below.
Spacemaking as Sanctuary // Water Memory Zine