Wayfinding | Kathryn Sclavi
For her residency project, Kathryn Sclavi created an explorer’s club for charting new pathways in response to changing emotional needs. Modeled loosely on youth scout clubs, Sclavi’s Wayfinding Club is dedicated to encouraging greater awareness of one’s bodily experiences and developing new cognitive strategies for spatial negotiation. Dressed in hand-embroidered neckerchiefs and collection clothing in the club’s color scheme participants sailed out on imaginative solo journeys through the open waters of the museum, departing from a mobile fabric fort Sclavi built as the club’s headquarters. After locating sites of emotional significance and marking them with geotags, they returned to the clubhouse to share tales of their adventures. Using methods of collaborative play, the club conducted exploratory research that queried the spatiality and temporality of emotions, the way emotions coalesce around or within particular places, and the lines of desire that inform our movement through space.
In addition to hosting Wayfinding Club meetings for fellow Elsewherians, Sclavi held public club events at the Greensboro Children’s Museum and at Elsewhere. To encourage visitors to continue the club on their own, she installed a painted black board with instructions and materials in Katie Ford’s installation The Faraway (2013) on the first floor of the museum.
