Understory; exploring attachment as a means to mobilise
Understory is the story beneath a community; the network of unseen memories, connections, challenges and imaginings that form the context of that place. It's the practice of making the invisible visible; highlighting the ways in which humans are in relationship with their surroundings. It is about our connection to each other, to our places, and to our other-than-human kin, and it is about exploring those connections across time, from our deep past to the future.
This phase of Understory (2025-2029), funded by The Lottery UK Fund, sees a four year expansion of the Understory family from its original core team of Parlour and Onion Collective. We are working in and with four places- in Watchet with Onion Collective, in Minehead with the Minehead and Coast Development Trust, in Dudley alongside CoLab Dudley, and in Amber Valley alongside Make/Shift Derby.
Understory’s mapping technologies, playful invitations and imaginative practices provide the enabling infrastructure for communities to imagine and participate in new worlds.
In the last phase, we set out to make visible and explore the social capital of the third sector in 30 places across the country - the bonded, bridging and linking social capital that flows into and around our places, with a hypothesis that making these relationships visible would help to bring people together and strengthen the social fabric of our places.
In this new phase of work we are seeking to deepen this relational practice by revisiting it with a different lens, to explore mycelial behaviours and commoning practices; to include the more-than-human in our conception of community, and to explore the deep memories of our places, which we hope will ultimately unlock our collective imagination and agency.
Our tools for inviting people to imagine and participate in alternative futures are maps and collaborative, real world play.