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Starts at Home

Explores the variety of personal and public notions of land and landscape that construct our sense of Place. Utilizing the form of the audio walking tour, “Starts at Home” combines narrative and poetic strategies to guide the listener through an unpredictable landscape: the listener’s own neighborhood. By recalling autobiographical, historical, sociological, environmental, and contemporary details of the author’s own experience of Place, “Starts at Home” both guides and dislocates the listener, alternately evoking home, foreign-ness, and everything that is unheimlich in-between. “Starts at Home” explores the triangulation of Person, Map, and Place, asking: how do we understand our landscapes? how do we map them? and how do our maps recreate our identities and/through sense of Place? The audio tour format creates a simultaneity of public and private space: in the ear a voice describes a deep landscape while, around the listener, a familiar, populated landscape shimmers. “Starts at Home” employs a long and wide timeline: exploring the history of a particular location; the shifting ways that “particular” locations are defined; and the author’s personal history of travel and place-making. Through these various cohabitations, “Starts at Home” questions the listener’s historical and environmental range. Where do you guide or take guidance from, and what are you leaving behind? A recent revision of “Starts at Home” includes an internet bulletin board for discussion, revision, and distribution of unconventional maps.

artist

Jen Tynes is a Poetic-American, who has over the past decade migrated north. She suspects she will head back home some day. In the meantime, she is a Brown University graduate student, a confirmed pedestrian, and an enthusiastic Rhode Islander.

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