Wild Exchanges

24h Fantastical Offords/ image: Maciek Platek

Fantastical Map of the Offords

(by Deb Wilenski) I have been developing a series of Wild Exchange Games, picking up threads from our recent Fantastical Cambridgeshire projects in Cambridge and St Neots.  Each game offers prompts and playful invitations to anyone, anywhere, to explore the many worlds on their doorsteps in real and fantastical ways. 

During our Fantastical Cambridgeshire residencies children and their communities found extraordinary ways to explore local outdoor spaces.  We adventured together into meadows, orchards, churchyards, market squares, school playgrounds and surrounding streets.  The children explored as themselves, but also as other characters including their own grandparents and tiny babies, foxes, unicorns and mice.  They thought about the worlds these revealed and ways to record them.

Wild Exchange Games can be played one at a time or in sequence.  They can last minutes or months.  In our projects each way of exploring was experienced slowly with plenty of time to make discoveries, find further connections and enter into conversation with adult professionals who work in similar ways.

The ‘rules of play’ are printed on each game.  But, of course, in the spirit of curiosity and imagination, they are also offered as starting points for you to develop variations of your own. 

Colleagues in different settings around the UK and further afield are currently testing out the games. After which they will be available to purchase as a set of A4 sheets that can be freely duplicated from the CCI shop.

Game 1 / Maps from other minds

Explore your own location through a map of somewhere else. 

Five maps made by children within our projects are reproduced for this game. Each map has markers numbered 1-5 as well as paths, landmarks and symbols.  This is a game of discovery, orientation and surprise that gives you a wonderful freedom - to let lines and landmarks from another imagination take you on a journey.  You can record your own discoveries as a second layer of the map or make a whole new map to add to the collection.

Game 2 / Messages from other minds

Try out a new identity and explore your world as someone or something else.

This game grew from children’s enthusiasm for ‘empathy walks’ as a way of adventuring.  Emily Sheaff, teacher of Hawks Class at Offord Primary School, coined this term for exploring as other people or animals, creating links with local community and the natural world.   

The messages in this game take the form of brief sentences from children’s own writing, and suggest a new identity for you and a way to begin.  You can explore for a short or long time as your other self, or use the messages as a starting point for dramatic, creative and social projects.  The children we worked with developed stories from their characters and created stop-frame animations to share the stories with the school community.

Old archers exploring the Millennium Green

Game 3 / A map for midnight

Think about a familiar place in a different light - at dusk, in the middle of the night, at dawn.

This game plays with moonlight, darkness, and colours for the hours between dusk and daybreak. We suggest that you take things slowly, making time to get to know or imagine a place, re-visiting often and becoming immersed.  The children we worked with began by imagining the night, but the game also developed during our 24h Fantastical Offords event, when families went walking as darkness began to fall. 

A particularly rich investigation within this game is the exploration of sounds.  We shared some of bio-acoustic engineer William Seale’s recordings with children and adults and were captivated by the drawings, memories and stories they evoked.

Game 4 / Fantastical worlds and where to find them

Look very closely at the fine detail of plant and animal worlds, and use what you find to set off on fantastical flights of imagination – in words, images, 2D and 3D creations.

At many times during our projects we took time to focus on the tiny detail of places.  Children sketched intricate forms of plant life and searched as plant adventurers did hundreds of years ago for fascinating species.  We looked at the curled tongue of a moth and its relationship to calligraphy, searched for underground creatures in the rain, and a collection was made in Round House Primary Academy of children’s tiny discoveries.  Details collected in this way can also be swapped and shared, building a long-term resource for creative making and exchange.

Carp in Emmanuel College Gardens

Fantastical fish skin

Emmanuel College Gardens

Mary O’Malley: Mental Map #2

The gardens were perfect for exploring ‘Truth’, the theme of this year’s festival.  A real location, in a well-known city, with a long and verifiable history, but one which also invites the mind to wander and the imagination to take flight.

Head gardener Christoph Keate is a captivating narrator of the place.  He tells true and detailed stories about many of the plants and has a fine sense of fiction’s relevance to the gardens too.  When I ask what it’s like there after dark Christoph points to a row of tall town houses at the perimeter and says they remind him of The Magician’s Nephew by C S Lewis; a story of strange travelling, first from attic to attic, then in and out of the wood between the worlds, through mysterious pools that are really portals.

The wood between the worlds : original illustration by Pauline Bayne

All of which makes our choice of the carp pond by the Caucasian Wing-nut tree a perfect meeting place.  A tree with fantastical seeds next to a pool full of mythical fish.

As families and groups of friends begin to arrive we search for the roots of the Wing-nut which break through the ground many metres away.  Some of the children draw these when we offer black paper and chalk pastels to record details of the garden.  Other careful and delicate sketches appear alongside collections of fallen leaves, seeds and bright petals.

From visible and tangible details of the gardens we invite fantastical journeying and the copper-scaled carp cruising round the pond lead the way.  The true story of the pond is that in an earlier form it predates the college and was part of a Dominican Priory more than five hundred years ago.  The carp there now are extraordinary creatures, elegant and communicative, they come to you when you stand by the edge of the pond with their great mouths open. 

I tell the story of The Carp and the Dragon Gate, an ancient Chinese tale of magical transformation:

On the Yellow River at Hunan is a waterfall called the Dragon Gate. It is said that if certain carp called Yulong can climb the cataract they will transform into dragons. Every year in the third month of spring they swim up from the sea and gather in vast numbers in the pool at the foot of the falls. It used to be said that only seventy-one could make the climb in any year. When the first succeeded, then the rains would begin to fall.

We offer plasticine alongside the drawing materials used already and everyone’s observational work begins to transform.  Pond water swirls into a ravenous monster, plants grow fantastical blooms, spiked dragons appear amongst gathered leaves, and exquisite fish-skin is made by hand.

With fantastical imaginations wide open we move into the Fellows’ Garden to meet the Oriental Plane.  A whole world in a tree, its branches disappear into the sky and climb down to the earth, where fantastically, they transform into new trunks, rooting themselves and growing upwards again.

Under the tree we hear a second fishy story, The Salmon of Knowledge; an old Irish tale in which an ancient salmon containing all the knowledge of the world, is caught and cooked by Fionn mac Cumhaill, and a single drop of burning fish oil transfers the salmon’s entire knowledge to the boy. 

The children and adults in our workshop need no further invitation to begin writing and illustrating stories of their own, sitting under the branches of the Oriental Plane and the enormous Purple Beech nearby.  Stories run wild, like children discovering that one attic opens into another; they join fish to plants and plants to other worlds, life to death and back again.

Here is Noga’s story, written at the outer edge of the Oriental Plane, on the day of her eighth birthday:

After the fish died, someone took one scale and lost it in this very garden, which made something amazing happen.  It was a root.  Through the years the people watered it and cared for the root.  Until one day it was a young and healthy tree. 

A person came to it and asked: ‘What seed do you have?’ Straight away it answered: ‘I have a salmon scale.’  This day the garden still has this tree and everyone still comes here for answers. 

Noga (age 8) writing her story

A gallery of images from the morning is shared here.

Wild eagles arrive in the Offords’ Millennium Green

(by Deb Wilenski) What do creative explorations add to the identity of a place and the people who live there?  For every location in our Fantastical Cambridgeshire projects there are already official maps, showing points of orientation, possible journeys, historic and current landmarks.  Mapping children’s imagined and newly discovered details doesn’t mean that conventional maps have no significance – but it does suggest that places and identities can also be played with and that this kind of play has value.

Looking back over the three project residencies I’m struck by the fact that a place is not just geographical or historical.  Its identity has also to do with who you can be there.  In Eynesbury, the Offords and Love’s Farm children deepened their connections to immediate locations by asking: who else can I be in this place?  what would it be like?

From hearing the story of James Toller (the ‘Eynesbury Giant’), to the Offord children’s explorations as other people and other animals and the powerful presence of Minerva and her Parliament of Owls at Love’s Farm, children have relished the adventure that other identities bring.

Children’s drawings of James Toller and Minerva (Round House Academy)

Our current education system often puts pressure on children to pursue their individual ambitions and to be the best you can be.  There is little space for being someone else and seeing how it feels.  Yet empathy is being recognised across many fields, including education, as a vital skill for the future. 

In his reflections below Kevin Jones, who was Headmaster at St John’s College School (Cambridge) for 26 years and is a passionate advocate for creativity in education, reflects on identity, empathy and understanding, prompted by our Fantastical Cambridgeshire experiences.

Kevin Jones and children from St John’s College School

Imagining being other (by Kevin Jones)

Of all the wonders of the Fantastical Offord project, it was Ava’s map that struck me most.

It offered an aerial view of the orchard, complete with a key for the shapes that represented trees, my house, stones, human thing, pond and fffffox. There was the mysterious gate that monsters come through, and beyond the mysterious gate there was a mysterious world. And this mysterious world that monsters came from was the school playground, and the monsters were us, the humans. Ava had made the most wonderful leap of imagination, into the mind of a fox. This was the fox’s map. It showed the world through an animal’s eyes and in the fox’s eyes we humans were the dangerous animals. This wonderful act of imagining shifts our view and makes us empathise, as Ava does, with a different view of the world.

Of all the things our children learn, perhaps the most important for them and for our world is to be able to map the minds of others, to imagine being other, to learn to read how others might think and see.

Empathy comes to the young as naturally as the leaves come to the trees but it needs the right conditions to thrive. It needs to be fed and nurtured. It grows in the example we set to children, in kindness witnessed and received by them. But we also need to make space and time for it to blossom in our schools. Our education system often drives children to focus on their own individual attainment, usually in a narrow academic sense. We need to balance this with opportunities for them to look beyond themselves, to use their curiosity and imagination.

That is what the Fantastical Offords project offered to Ava – a space to be curious and to imagine. And with what wonderful results for her and for all of the children.

Ava and Molly getting a snake’s eye view

The mysterious orchard itself becomes, in their descriptions and in their art, a living being with a character – which of course it is, only we don’t usually see it so clearly or so sympathetically.

Leopard eyes in the orchard (Chelsea, age 8)

Look at the messages left for the Robin group’s visit to the Orchard by the older children – sometimes cryptic, sometimes challenging, always generous in spirit and filled with a sense of what it will be like for their younger friends to arrive with new eyes.

Fox den in the right hand corner – a message left for the 5 and 6 year old children

With their curiosity and imagination released, the children readily see through other people’s eyes. Imagining themselves inhabiting the Millennium Green as different people opens up the children’s sense of their community, their belonging, and produces wonderful writing in voices other than their own.

The children use this space for empathy to produce outstanding work. But there is more to it than this. They are seeing beyond themselves and understanding different viewpoints. And we seem to need this now more than ever in our world, to build communities, to break down barriers between people and to see beyond prejudice. That is why it is so important that children can make maps from other minds, imagine being other. What Ava is doing, what all of the children are doing, is mapping a way to a better world.

Offord community, their shadows and the enormous beetle (photo credit: Majiek Platek)

(by Deb Wilenski) How do places get their names?  How do you name a new place where nobody has lived before?  CCI’s third Fantastical Cambridgeshire project with Round House Primary Academy took place on the Love’s Farm development in St Neots.  This 160 acre new-build site has over 1400 homes, a primary school, shops, open space and community facilities and was entirely constructed and named between 2009 and 2017.  During CCI’s project the school children played with renaming their streets, landmarks and empty spaces with a strong sense of imagination and adventure. 

I wondered who we could involve in a wild exchange about naming and human habitation.  I couldn’t help thinking of a place with recent human history that on the face of it seemed as far away as you could get from a Cambridgeshire housing development.  But as you will read in the conversation below there are fascinating parallels between Love’s Farm and the continent of Antarctica; a place seen for the first time only 200 years ago making it the most recently occupied and named place on earth.

There is another interesting comparison too.  The homogenous 21^st century architecture of Love’s Farm stands on fascinating archaeological ground.  An ancient map sits beneath the new map on the surface.  Look up Antarctica on google maps and no matter how far you zoom in, the vast central ice sheets remain empty and white.  But what lies beneath?  It turns out that there is a map of invisible Antarctica which reveals a very different land.

I interviewed Dr Kevin Hughes, Environmental Research and Monitoring Manager at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) about names for new places and underground maps.  From an unlikely geographical comparison, we set off on a fascinating journey.

Q:  Does the comparison I’ve drawn between the newness of developments like Love’s Farm and the wilds of Antarctica make sense to you?  Are there similarities in how we create a human map of these places?

When I first thought about this exchange, I thought how does this work?  But actually the idea of coming to a new place in the UK, naming the streets and creating an identity, there is a comparison.  In Antarctica you’ve got a whole continent that has only had human beings fully aware that it is even there for less than 200 years.  1819 was the first time it was ever set foot on.

We produce maps of the Peninsula (the part of Antarctica claimed by the UK) at the British Antarctic Survey.  There are lots of names on the map and they have all been officially recognised by the UK Antarctic Place-Names Committee.  I talked to one of the people on the committee yesterday and he pointed me towards this book (Antarctic Peninsula: A Visitor’s Guide), the last chapter of which is all about place names.

The Antarctic Peninsula

Q:  Is naming a place in Antarctica a complex procedure?  How does it work?

It’s an official meeting now but there are a discreet number of people who meet and deliver names in as consistent a way as they can.  A lot of the Antarctic Peninsula is named after the people who first went there.  The first sealers went up to King George Island, named after King George IV because they were planting the flag for Britain.  But there have been expeditions by the French, by the Belgians, more French, by the British, the Swedish, and they all stamp their own names on the different areas.  On the website of the Antarctic Place-Names Committee apc.antarctica.ac.uk you can zoom in anywhere you like, every one of the red dots is a name and it will tell you where that name has come from.

So that’s one way of naming.  Another way is having themes. You have to bear in mind that a lot of these areas were explored sequentially and so it depended what was prominent at the time.  Some of them are named after composers and music.  We’ve got Beethoven Peninsula, Monteverdi Peninsula, Shostokovitch Peninsula.  This season I’m going to a place called Finlandia Foothills, named after Sibelius’ Finlandia Suite.  But also there’s an area where they’ve named glaciers and mountains after Irish musical instruments or there are names from Moby Dick, Churchill’s War Cabinet, Homer’s Iliad, it can look quite random.

Q: In Love’s Farm the children named some places according to their physical appearance – a huge clearing was called The Vast Vacation or there was Hairy Swamp and Shredded Wheat Hole.  Other names were emotionally evocative; The Cornfield of Happiness, Snake Shadow, Bleeding Heart Close.  Are there names like these in Antarctica?

There’s a good example here it’s called Deception Island. It’s actually a collapsed volcanic caldera, which is still active, so you can sail through and be completely surrounded by this ring of rock.  It’s called Deception Island because you don’t know what you’re going to get until you sail inside.  In many places there are features that are named after the physical nature of the place, or things that happened on the day it was first visited; Cape Disappointment, Inexpressible Island.

Map and aerial photograph of Deception Island

Q:  When you go to the Finlandia Foothills how will the naming process work, can anyone suggest a name?

We’ll spend the day on the hill doing our sampling and our remote sensing and at the end of the day we’ll be quite tired and hungry and we’ll cram into our little pyramid tent and make our dinner.  We’ll start thinking what shall we talk about tonight?  I know, let’s talk about what we’re going to name some of these features. We’ll just chat about it and see if anything comes to mind, or we’ll think up a particular theme.

And what makes something worthy of being named? 

As far as I understand we tend to give names to things that need a name.  If you’ve got a management plan or you’ve got an operational reason or it’s a prominent feature for navigation, it will get a name.  Otherwise where would you stop?  In the Finlandia Foothills we’ll probably name some of the mountains, some of the valleys, some of the ice streams.

The second comparison I drew between Love’s Farm and Antarctica was the striking contrast between the surface map and what lies underneath.  I imagined that under the Antarctic ice is another invisible land.  Do we know what is there?

In the centre you’re talking about up to 4 kilometres of ice on top of the landscape, this high dome of ice which covers the bottom of the world.  It’s considered there’s no life of any real substance underneath the ice.  On the surface of the ice you might have a few microorganisms that have fallen out of the sky, or been blown up into the sky and rained down and over tens of thousands of years they’ll get buried and become part of the ice but they are only a tiny fraction and they will be unviable.

Saying that, if we take Lake Vostok which is one of around 400 sub-glacial lakes (liquid lakes under up to 2.5 kilometres or more of ice) the theory is that in some cases they may have been completely isolated from the rest of the world for millions of years, and there might have been independent evolution of these microbial species.

But what I can show you is this.  This map is called Bedmap 2 and the idea is to map what is underneath the ice. 

These Transantarctic Mountains that just about poke through on the other map are actually a massive chain.  And the Gamburtsev Subglacial Mountains, these are the size of the Alps, but they’re completely buried.  The only reason we know they’re there is because of ground penetrating radar.  These are the sorts of graphs they produce, that show different ice structures but also the surface of mountains, the topography under the ice.

Q:  Do you get excited about working there still?  This is the first time I’m looking in detail at these maps and it’s amazing.

I do!  I work as a biologist in the geo-politics of environmental protection but there are people in my organisation who are absolute world experts on what’s beneath the ice, and what that tells us about the geology, what it tells us about how Antarctica came together.  Because 30 million years ago there was no ice in Antarctica.

Q:  What does it feel like when you are somewhere nobody has been before, standing on a continent which so few people have ever seen or mapped?

If you’re on a research station it can often be quite busy and cramped and actually quite claustrophobic.  The difference is, if you go deep-field, you get dropped off by your little aircraft, and you’re there with your mountaineer who’s going to help you out, and the same kit that was used by Scott 100 years ago, it hasn’t been really improved upon… then you realise I’m on an island, with someone else, and this island’s the size of Wales and we’re the only people here and we know we’re the only two people.  It’s amazing.

Kevin counting penguins on Lagotellerie Island, Antarctica