Witness That Place is a locative media project that explores interactivity through a series of marked online mappings and site-specific locations indicating stories of trauma in public urban spaces. Working with the psychogeography of the city, an interest in the city’s ability to repair itself from, what Nigel Thrift calls “urban trauma”, (Nigel Thrift: But Malice Aforethought: Cities and the Natural History of Hatred, p.135, 2005), underlines some of the thinking in behind this piece. The notion of urban trauma, and trauma in general, is interpreted here to allow for individual and thus relative perceptions of negative experience and relationship to place.

In creating an alternative geography of the city, which makes visible, memories of personal notions of trauma, i.e. broken hearts, accidents, and assaults, Witness That Place explores the tension between modes of storytelling, and witnessing.

Just as one could argue that a story exists, be it a film, a painting, or a poem, only through the interpretation of the beholder, so too is the paradigm of storyteller and witness developed in this project. Therefore, witnessing is not only in the form of a testimony to information but also in the form of a gesture or action.

Patricia Lee works in the fields of broadcast documentary film, video, and interactive design. Her work explores the intersections and polemics of identity, space, nation and the creative possibilities for social change.