During this week’s session, our team of Regent Turtles was able to get to know each other better with icebreaker activities, have a deeper understanding of the religious built environment of Regent Park through a walking tour, find several themes to choose from for the future project, and choose a type of media to work with.
The session started with us gathering in teams and doing the icebreaker activity. The activity challenged us to tell each other stories of our lives and write a sentence on it. This helped to locate the backgrounds our team members come from, what we are interested in and passionate about, as well as start the conversation about our lives outside of the school environment, which makes us more comfortable with each other in the process of project-making.
After the activity, our team decided to go to the field to explore spaces of religion and the context, in which those spaces locate because it allowed us to brainstorm on the themes across all the places of worship in Regent Park. We started the tour with St. George’s Macedonian Bulgarian Eastern Orthodox Church, where the first thing we noticed was the poster with the inscription “hall for rent” on it. What we started wondering about is for what purposes the hall might be used, is it only for religious rituals or not? Then, we went up the stairs to find out that the church was closed, but on the staircase, we found a wrapped condom that talks about the poor management and lack of surveillance, despite the cameras located outside.
Hall For Rent at St. George’s and St. Silouan Churches
Found condom in front of St. George’s Church
On the way to the second location, we discovered two streets, St. David Street and Peaceful Way, which demonstrates religious importance in the community that we could potentially talk about the research. When we reached St. Silouan Orthodox Church, we noticed the sign for rent too. However, on top of “hall for rent,” the poster advertised space of the church for school renting purposes. This challenged us to ask questions of why the church would provide space for school purposes if it is not even religious? When we got closer to the church itself, we realized the part of it is already a private school, with its separate doors. The doors of the church were closed, but there was a schedule of religious events that the church is holding weekly, together with 10 AM Sunday services.
Religious street names
St. Bartholomew’s Anglican Church, where we travelled next, also had a list of events, with weekly Sunday services at 10:30 AM, while the church itself was also closed. The interesting object we discovered next to the trash bins of the church is the old event schedule on the panel that we later compared to the current one and came to the conclusion that there are more religious events now than there were before.
Our final stop was Masjid Omar Bin Khatab Mosque, which we had a chance to briefly glance at last week. This was the only place that was open because all the churches we visited were closed. Through the glass, we were able to observe people praying on the first floor, while on the second floor we noticed a room with a TV screen of the security camera footage. The broader questions that we started to explore were the surveillance and how they preserve the sacred space in places of worship in the community of Regent Park? If it was evident that the mosque had strict surveillance, we were not sure about the churches we visited before because the existence of security cameras there does not provide safety, as we found a piece of vandalism in the form of a condom on the church staircase. What does it talk about the church’s security?
Found event board at St. Bartholomew’s church
Security cameras that are seen through the glass
When we came back to the classroom, we had all those ideas and were motivated to start the project as soon as possible because we went to the field and observed all the issues with the religious built environment and its surroundings. However, the difficulty that we faced was to find one theme that we want to explore, instead of having a list of them. After a long discussion, our team succeeded to end up with studying the questions of security and surveillance within the religious spaces, while connecting it to the usage of space and control the worship places have over the public safety and accessibility. This session’s experience led us to the decision that we want to work with photography, so for the future week, we plan to explore more on the spaces we already visited with a surveillance theme in mind, as well as collecting historical data and photographs. When it came to the question of the media piece, we want to collect data first and then see how we can incorporate photography into a magazine, tour guide, photo essay or classifieds.
Here is the timeline of our project:
The Regent Turtles are Kamila, Rushay, Xinyi, Huda.