Walking the Commonplace of Commemoration

This is a proposal for art therapy to align with commemoration in the landscape of the commons. The commons is a shared landscape that can exist as a park, community garden, nature sanctuary, or as an open access public space. It is a location for gatherings, happenings and assembles people in connection to a shared living environment or commonplace. It can be a place to find serendipitous objects (natural or otherwise) that allow for commiseration and commemoration. The word commemoration relates to acts of ceremony, remembrance, observance, and tribute. It can be a forming of place for compositions that are personal, collective and civically minded. The commons is a space for aesthetic connectivity, and a social sculpting of landscape for personal and collective creations. It may be found in every community, neighbourhood and region as a space for reparative metaphor, imagination, and rituals of passage (Till, 2012). The commons can become a terrain for enacted assemblage with associations to physical and emotional memories, affects and shared communal stewardship. It is shaped by multiple forms of design, authority, resistance and cultivation, and its materiality can be adapted according to the aesthetic preferences of the many—the multitude of participants, who make it their own.