Over the course of three years, Co/Lab has partnered with the Young Architects Forum (YAF) and the AIA to install a large scale mapping project in Downtown Raleigh. Connected with SparkCon, a festival and conference focused on Creativity in the Triangle, these projects have acted as instruments to understand how citizens and visitors to the festival move through the city, understand and project it’s history, and imagine the city’s future.
This Happened Here, 2014
In 2014, Co/Lab asked visitors to the festival to mark an historic spot on the map—a spot they felt deserved commemoration. Whether a public or more personal event, person or landmark, the activity of place an historic marker alongside representations of the existing Raleigh historic markers aimed to provoke a discourse about official and unofficial histories and what is commemorated in public memory versus what is not.
Re:Marking Raleigh, 2013
“Re:Marking Raleigh” asked visitors to tag a spot on a map of Raleigh and it’s surrounding areas with a memory of a space, place or event that had special meaning to them. The dots on the base of the map included public spaces that visitors wish were a part of Raleigh’s urban fabric. The timing of this installation was aligned with a current and heated debate about the future of Dorothea Dix, a former mental institution that had recently been sold to the city to be transformed into a public park, only to be taken back by the state for potential commercial development.
Map Your Ride, 2012
“Map Your Ride” was a large-scale street map that asked participants to record where they came from, and the method by which they travelled to SparkCon. The result was a growing city of blocks that showcased the diversity of visitors to the event.