Invitation to contribute to online Urban Pastorals: A Project for Somerville

[Thomas King]

Somerville residents, workers, and visitors:

Hello. I'd like to invite you to contribute work in any media (available as a digital file) to Urban Pastorals: A Project for Somerville. A participatory project co-sponsored by the Somerville Community Growing Center and the Racial Justice Collaborative, Urban Pastorals brings together Somerville-area residents, workers, volunteers, and visitors in small acts of attending to, and tending, our shared ecosystems. Urban Pastorals aims to facilitate conversations among diverse Somerville-area communities and individuals by building awareness of our shared built and natural environments, reengaging the commons by joining together in community, and contributing responses – reflections, poetry, photography, sound, and other media – to an interactive online map of the city. 

Your contributions to our interactive map of the city can take any form, through which you choose to engage with small, built or natural places in the city of Somerville. I hope you will consider contributing poetry, reflections, interviews, photography, sound, dance, visual art, and other media engaging with any Somerville place that is at hand for you and to which you are called to direct your attention.

Urban Pastorals asks: How can practices of care help us imagine and build justice, inclusion, and belonging in Somerville, among the diverse humans and heritages of our city, and between human and nonhuman life forms? What future relations to our built and natural environments can we imagine and then begin building together? How can we use the arts and creativity to facilitate this process of imagining together?

Imagining a just future together is the first step to building it together.

As creators of the project, Aparna Paul, Lee Meichner, and I look forward to featuring your work. We are hoping to launch the website by mid-September, featuring initial contributions and adding more to produce an ever richer "map" of encounters by Somerville residents, workers, and visitors with the city's built and natural environments. We hope that by giving form to your experiences of shared space in the city, we can collectively discover the city's potentialities, its possible futures, our relation to the city's history, and our capacity for building dialogue across our various perspectives.

if you would like to share your work with the Urban Pastorals website, please:

• Select up to four works (any media) that you feel most connect with and speak to a particular location (address, street, landmark -- depending on your comfort); that is, select works that engage with up to four locations on the map of Somerville;
• You are also welcome to submit multiple works (e.g., a photo essay or series of poems or reflections) that engage with a single location in Somerville;
• Submit the work (as digital files) to Lee Meichner (l...@thegrowingcenter.org) and Tom King (tk...@brandeis.edu) along with information about the location on the map to which you'd like to link the work; (Lee is building the website for the project);
• A brief artist's statement about you, the work, its location, a thought about Somerville, a memory, a mood, a hope -- whatever speaks to you (no more than three or four sentences, ideally); feel free to move more in the direction of an artist's bio or more in the direction of a reflection on Somerville, and please provide a version of this for each work submitted (they can overlap with each other);
• If you wish to remain anonymous, that's also cool; just let us know; and
• If you wish, you can share a link to your website or invite folks to contact you by providing an email address.

We also invite you to consider writing more extensive thoughts about what an "urban pastoral" might mean in and for the city of Somerville. Again, this may be from the perspective of a visitor, resident, or worker. If this interests you, please let me know. 

“Urban Pastorals” is co-sponsored by the Racial Justice Collaborative (Diane Wong, founder and leader) and the Somerville Community Growing Center. This project is supported in part by a Public Humanities/Community Engagement Grant from the Mandel Center for the Humanities at Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts. 

With gratitude,

Tom King (with Lee Meichner and Aparna Paul)