Paper short abstract:

A practical demonstration of the 'Role of Perception in Co-witnessing Generative Acts'. In this example, the skillful orchestration of ancient tools nurtured in a mountain village in Yunnan helped to reveal a comprehensive range of affective engineerings in the city.

Paper long abstract:

This paper is based on a talk given on the 11th December 2018 to the Social Aesthetic Education/Practitioner Forum organised by the School of Art Management and Education at China Academy of Art, Hangzhou, China. The talk reflects on how my first stay with the He family in Jixiang Village, Yunnan, China which was hosted by Lijiang Studio back in 2006, affected my art practice. Witnessing a Dongba's skillful orchestration of mobile, modest techniques in order to weave a cognitive web enabled me to develop a methodology for a walking practice 'walk with me' which draws attention to a range of affective engineerings in the city. The outcome are geographies of affects or 'writings of earth' that visualise such small daily encounters, like an act of kindness; a sense of being out of place or simply another person waiting. These maps are based entirely on empirical fieldwork gathered during one to one walks along predetermined routes. They show how taking note of and visualising 'ordinary affects' as defined by anthropologist Kathleen Stewart (2007), can nudge our relationship with our environment toward a more fluid comprehension.