Living with water: an exhibition
Space 3 - An Inter-cultural exploration
There are similar and different issues relating to flooding, and similar and different ways to respond according to different cultures.
What can we do differently?
What can we learn from one another?
This section is part of an art publication created by Nicole AL Manley and Xilina Tankiamco along with other co-authors:
Angelo Carlo R. Galindo, Anthony Schrag,
Tuan Anh Nguyen, Thuy Hang Dao,
Tat Thanh Duong, Maria Aileen Leah G. Guzman and Andres Payo Garcia.
Responding to reflections of other researchers was not easy, but dividing the reflections into themes, we were able to respond in a creative way that gave voice to the experiences, emotions, thoughts and ideas of the researchers who to part in the creative practice study. This section shows these responses.
Sandy Island - A viewpoint from researchers
During this creative practice study, all researchers were introduced to Sandy Island and divided into three multi-cultural groups. Each group contained between eight to ten people from each of the three countries: the Philippines, Vietnam and the United Kingdom. The researchers were then asked to read four flood experiences from countries other than their own country. They were then given time to reflect upon what they had read and then discuss within their allocated group what they thought/felt about the experiences of flooding from other countries. They were given the opportunity to draw, make marks or write words about whatever they wished to express on a map of Sandy Island.
Sandy Island (located at latitude 19° 12’ 44” S, longitude 159° 56’ 21” E) once existed on authoritative and official maps, was located approximately 1,200 km east of Queensland, Australia. Alastair Bonnett, (2015) describes this island as having legitimacy particularly because it was included on a British Admiralty map in 1908 and was associated to a claim that Captain John DeGreaves, ‘science adviser’ to King Kamehameha of Hawaii, had picnicked on one of these islands in the company of Lola Montez, a famous ’Spanish dancer’ and mistress of King Ludwig I. However, recently an Australian survey team found that the island was mythical because the water at that location was 1,400 metres deep and there was no island at that geographical location. In November 2012, Google Maps erased Sandy Island from its website and replaced it with generic sea.
Today we have the expectation that the world is fully visible and very well known, however, the disappearance of Sandy Island, suggests that not all is what it seems. Is it possible that islands remain undiscovered? Or ones that we have discovered are not real? Sandy Island provides us a means of thinking of other possible futures and/or new territories of thought and physicality to cross and make bridges. The shifting away from our own country allows us to also focus on inter-cultural knowledge – knowledge that exists between different cultures.
The following is the outcome of some of the researchers ideas and thoughts that came to the surface during the creative practice study.