Design Project for the year

06.12.09
DS9 _ 2009/2010

Roxanne Walters 08079090

Eidetic Memory

Exploring “otherness” within and without by the projecting of knowledge through form and shape by visual imagery in a manner vividly experienced and readily reproducible with great accuracy and detail.
How can “the other” live authentically in a cross-cultural dialogue without losing any of their own values?
What is the method of modernising a civilisation while it remains “culturally other”; preserving its integrity as a distinct society?
What is the physicality of the space between two cultures marking the intersection of each?
Can there be an immersive experience to vividly imprint the recollection of “the other” in the psyche of the [collective] consciousness?

Brief

The DS9 project aims to solidify the memory of the Arawak community in Barbados by building for the potential conversations that can happen at the meeting of other cultures. Therefore preserving the cultural memory of the peoples who are indigenous ancestors of the island, whose descendants and culture are otherwise “lost” and remote from contemporary Bajan society.
The proposed site of learning is an agent of personal expansion, cultural citizenship and social cohesion, with the production of the [indigenous] Arts as the driving vehicle of the social centre. The architecture of this living community as cultural signifier - as it supports the Arawak’s fundamental ideological belief in “community” rather than “individualism”. Therefore supporting Chief Corrie and the Arawak descendants to live authentically in their chosen complex socio-political structure and practice their traditional way of life, effecting trans-cultural exchanges, education and agitation.
The site is one of the original 11 Arawak settlements in Barbados, located to the north-east of the island at Hill Crest Bathsheba.
It is intended that the changes to art, lifestyle, cultural values and norms to the Bajan society would be affected as much as the Creative Industries redefine and modernise the practice of Art and the meaning of culture in the Arawak civilisation as it displays itself as culturally significant and advanced.




Therefore, the ethno-scape accommodating all aspects of traditional tribal village life will include:

• Tribal government centre
• Tribal cultural centre with a Sun Dance ritual plaza
• an interpretive centre
• educational facilities/school
• accommodation
• housing
• radio station and TV production studio
• tele-communications
• print and publishing centre
• digital media centre
• sound recording studios
• retail
• offices
• studio space (pottery, jewellery, ceramics, shell works, painting)
• kilns
• meeting space
• exhibition space
• campground and gardens
• extensive outdoor space for ceremonial activities
• interpretive trails
• access to the historic landing site on the Atlantic Ocean.


Therefore achieving an exercise in cultural [public] diplomacy as East Indian Culture can gain from Western Technological developments as they trade and establish business within the Bajan community. The identity of Barbados as a nation-state is re-defined internally within contemporary Bajan society and externally to other nation-states. By the construction of a cultural signifier to show the nation embraces its European, African and East Indian Heritage.
This design exercise for Barbados would be analogous for the global need to ‘house the Artisan’. That is, the popular encyclopaedias of mankind - the Artisans - aim to reconnect the modern world to its cultural origins. In an effort to root modern civilisation, to its origins and cultural roots, otherwise caught in the shifting realities due to the Creative Industries and globalisation. While civilisation progresses in the throes of the digital sphere, yet retaining human experience and engaging the people.