Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how the everyday super-diverse space of the city is experienced and disrupted through visual exhibition. It argues different understandings of conviviality can come into contact and emerge through the exhibition space, intervening on the conceptions of the neighbourhood.

Paper long abstract:

This paper reflects upon how super-diverse places can be (re)presented and (re)produced through visual exhibition. It explores the potential of public exhibitions to construct, represent, layer and interrupt different narratives of everyday super-diversity and conviviality.

The paper is based on an audio-visual exhibition, 'Superdiversity: Picturing Finsbury Park', that was part of my doctoral research project based in London. This public exhibition signalled the culmination of 16-months field work exploring vernacular geographies and experiences of place in the multicultural area of Finsbury Park. 'Superdiversity' displayed the visual and participatory elements of the research through three aesthetics: vernacular cartographies, video encounters and place portraits. It was framed as open and provisional to reflect the dynamism and multiplicity of neighbourhood, recognizing that the vernacular geographies of the area are continually being remade.

However, the exhibition also became a process of representing and disrupting the everyday super-diverse space of the city through a constructing a relational space of encounter. Different understandings and affective spatial narratives of Finsbury Park came into contact and became layered to question the 'representational space' (Lefebvre, 1991),'the everyday space that people produce, inhabit and act within' (Bloch, 2010:2603), of the area. This paper argues that through vernacular aesthetics the exhibition entailed a process of translation and a form of learning (McFarlane, 2011), manifesting the co-production of place. The paper questions how this exhibition intervened on Finsbury Park and whether translations of place had the potential to lead to urban attunement and dwelling in multicultural space.