03/10/2022
This evening, our guest lecturer from Malaysia, Janet Pillai, shared her approach to community engagement and place-making by demonstrating the various artistic and pedagogical applications of "Cultural Mapping", which is also the title of her book. It was an invigorating 3-hour session that provokes us into rethinking about our tangible and intangible cultural assets, and the creative tools we can use to gather data and map it out, eventually translating the cultural data into acts of advocacy, planning or intervention.
Cultural assets may include the beliefs and cultural expressions of a community, as well as stories that are passed down from generations to generations that may give meaning to an object, a building, or even a marking on the wall. They could also refer to the social interactions people have with each other, the kind of greetings exchanged, or even foods served in non-ceremonial occasions.
What's more important in this process is the active engagement with all stakeholders in the economic and social dimensions, without which the cultural mapping would just be a geographical exercise that most architects use in drawing the lay of the land. The social and cultural dimensions are the hardest to capture because they are fluid, site-specific, and are probably time-bound. Stakeholders are engaged right at the start, not at the end of the project.
As arts educators, we need to know what these intangible cultural assets are because they are, after all, systems of knowledge-making and place-making. Knowing how to identify them, then finding ways to preserve vernacular assets, would be one way to preserve and transmit embodied knowledges.