The Play’s the Thing: An Interview with Rosten Woo

Abstract

I think that “creative place-making” as a concept means something very different from when you combine the words “creative” and “place-making”; it is an extremely contested term and contested set of practices. It’s equivalent in some ways to the words “social practice.” It’s bizarre to describe some art as being social practice; this implies that other kinds of art are not social in their construction, which I think lets those other artworks off the hook. Painting is a social practice—but a social practice that is largely organized around producing objects for rich people. That’s social as well. I don’t want to say that everything is everything, but certainly creative place-making is—in the same way we are talking about democratizing the idea of who can be a curator, I’m interested in democratizing who is a creative place-maker. I think the mode in which I am most comfortable working on the idea of place-making is the mode of documentary. I’m interested in working to change the way that people can see a space and, via that specific moment, change the way that the space can grow or what it can become.