About This Place Speaks

Our Origins

This Place Speaks was born out of the mind of founder and director Rob Dart. Through years of facilitating creative projects in schools, communities and natural spaces, Rob began to imagine a programme that reflected his own values and way of seeing the world. A programme rooted in attention, connection and creativity.

From that idea, This Place Speaks CIC was born.

Introduction

The core goal of This Place Speaks is to challenge behaviour around attention and to reconnect people with themselves, their community and the natural world around them. We don’t believe that this can be done by telling people to live differently. Through gradual shifts in behaviour around attention over time people often rediscover:

• confidence in themselves
• connection with others
• curiosity about the world around them
• creativity and self-expression
• belonging within their community
• pride in the places they call home
• healthier routines that become part of everyday life

All of these outcomes are natural by-products of the programme. Our role is simply to help people shift their attention. All of the things listed above will follow over time and will be found within each participant as they follow their own path.

Removing Barriers

Through working in partnership with local councils, NHS Primary Care Networks, Schools and a variety of external funders and organisations we aim to create programmes which are free at point of use. We aim to remove barriers to access in any way we can, tailoring the programmes to meet individual and organisational needs.

Through going out into the community our programmes will aim to meet people where they are. This means considering geography, physical and mental health, language, culture and any other barriers that might prevent someone from taking part.

Every programme will be tailor made to suit the needs of individuals and organisational structures.

Listening In

Through attention participants will be encouraged to “listen” to the world around them. This will be done on a variety of levels and using senses, perceptions and inference to hear the place we find ourselves. This is achieved through using our bespoke listening packs where participants will be tasked with creating some kind of recording of the place they are within. This could be sound recording, video, photography, rubbings, any kind of physical recording of the environment within which they are making the record.

All of these processes encourage a zoomed in view of the world, a hyperfocus of attention. Over time and practice participants become more adept at finding this state in their everyday lives. Over time participants will learn to slow down and notice the small but beautiful fragments of the world.

Speaking Out

Through paying attention, people often begin to notice things they have never noticed before. Small details. Moments. Memories. Questions. Over time these fragments begin to gather, and many participants feel a natural desire to respond.

There is no single way to tell the story of a place. It might become a poem, a piece of music, a photograph, a painting, a recording or a conversation. What matters is not the medium, but that the participant has found their own voice within it.

Every place has something to say.

Every person does too.