Chartered Selves – Year 3

Year 10 students from St Pauls Community Way School worked with artists Shiraz Bayjoo and Othello De’Souza-Hartley to explore ideas around their individual and collective identities and to consider how they feel their identities are reflected in the world around them.

Working with Shiraz Bayjoo, the group created maps using personal and collective cultural references that reflect who they feel they are in today’s world. Using photographs of themselves and their families, collective imagery such as logos, flags and other symbols, participants created collages over maps that illustrate and reflect a part of their individual and cultural identities.

Othello De’Souza-Hartley invited the group to design a collaborative culture map. They mapped their individual routes to school with photographs, documenting cultural reference points along the way. Each participant’s route represents the individual reflected by the environment surrounding them. Their choices about the reference points they use demonstrate how they contextualise themselves and the environment around them.