SolarUSB Culture Stations || SOUCCS
Power to the People! But what are they getting? How do they get it? And which people?
As ‘Visibly Different’ trans-media professional educators, educators we find the idea of Differential Mobilities overlaps with the different modalities, personas and traces we construct in order to operate in the “normative” environment of higher education. We have found ways of being that have let us be successful in this environment, where as many others have been excluded, due to their differences.
SOUCCS is an in-the-field research project through art endeavor. We will install a number of rogue solar USB charge stations around the conference city of Montréal in various areas of the city which are being impacted, (re)developed, transformed and (re)imagined into being.
These solar USB charge stations will be aesthetic oasis where the recharger can pause to appreciate the various aspects of the city and learn about the area via griots tales that are embedded in the station and become apparent when one begins the act of taking power.
The stations will present gathered stories (visual and/or textual) which Valerie has been collecting for over twenty years throughout the island of Montréal, since her arrival as a displaced Pacific-Island Atlantic Diaspora Inheritrix. Phobic tendencies of all kinds provide a leaping off point from which we can (re)create and emphasize another, different perspective of the changes and assumptions involved in changing the mobility and therefore visibility of the other, the recipient of that objectified gaze that is somehow always defined in the laps of a particular subset of the societies we live in, yet not the power structures which control us.