Stomping Grounds

Share Your Story…

What’s your favorite place, haunt, or home base? What makes it special to you? How does it make you feel? What does it look like, smell like, sound like? What makes it home?

Stomping Grounds invites you to share your perspective and experience about everyday spaces, to be heard and seen. Collectively, shared stories document and narrate community that is representative of, and represented by, participant voices. By definition and design, the project catalyzes ongoing and expanding circles of community engagement and fosters conscious democratic participation in creative placemaking. Process and product call attention to the mechanisms by which community is made, sustained, and remembered by those who inhabit the site(s) community occupies.

The project deploys pinhole camera photography, story-telling, poetry, and community participation to explore memory, loss, and transformation. Paired with participants’ burning questions about their home landscape, we draw substantially on the extraordinary depth of field made possible by pinhole photography—limited though it is by vignetting and distorted by high contrast, much like our memories—to document everyday landscapes and create representative collages of community, located in time and focused by participant perspective. Medium serves as metaphor.

Participants build (or borrow) their cameras, posit personally meaningful burning questions, and use participant observation, to capture their stomping grounds on film. Resulting photos combine in a community assemblage as a “quilt-portrait,” installed in public spaces. Installation visitors of all ages are invited to contribute their own observations, memories, and photos to the collection to create a living exhibit that grows with each visitor. Additionally, social media expands the opportunity to “share your story” online and extend the community beyond the local. Click here for details.

Stomping Grounds Waltham: The Pilot

In 2023, the project launched in Waltham, Massachusetts to pilot and nuance the model. Ultimately, Stomping Grounds seeks to create a replicable and tailorable model that empowers communities—rural and urban—to foster mutual and reciprocal community-making across diverse constituencies. The Waltham pilot laid the foundation for a documentary experience and community story-telling vehicle with independent momentum, near and far, and plans are in the works for iterations of the project in 2024.

Pilot Project Land Acknowledgment

Prior to colonization, the local project territory, now known as Waltham, was shared among the Pawtucket and Massachusett people, and it includes sites that are sacred to their living ancestors. The Pawtucket do not exist today as a band, tribe, or nation, but many contemporary Wampanoag, Nipmuck, and Massachusett tribes claim Pawtucket ancestry. The four contemporary surviving tribes of the ancestral Massachusett people are the Mattakeeset, Natick, Ponkapoag and Namasket. Stomping Grounds acknowledges their first and current stories, whether overt, hidden, obscured, or erased and offers its frame to amplify these stories for all who choose to share them.

2023 Partners

Stomping Grounds Waltham was supported in part by a grant from the Waltham Cultural Council, a local agency which is supported by the Mass Cultural Council, a state agency.

2023 Press