Place as Method

An interdisciplinary project co-created by Film and Digital Media graudate students Hannah Jayanti, Sarah Bird, and Gonzalo Galetto. For a year, the three met regularly as Climate Action Lab Fellows in OpenLab to discuss how place shapes methodologies, creative practices, and scholarly approaches. Through their time together, they created a hand-sewn booklet that combined transcribed conversations alongside artworks. Their collaboration culminated in a roundtable held at the Seymour Center on April 11, 2025, in which twelve artist-scholars convened for four hours to discuss the possibilities and constructive challenges of centering place as a method within artistic practices.

Through generative, thoughtful, and nourishing dialogue, the group covered a wide range of topics that spanned commonalities and differences across practices and perspectives. Each participant received one of the booklets as a gift and practice of reciprocity. The discussion was recorded with the intention of serving as a departure point for a future collaborative publication project. The participants of the roundtable were these UCSC faculty and graduate students: Anna Friz, Jonas Banta, Merve Unsal, Caludio Bueno, Jorge Menna Barreto, Jennifer Parker, Jonathan Jackson, Irene Gustafson, and Luling Osofsky, with Hannah Jayanti, Sarah Bird, and Gonzalo Galetto.