(Potential) Situated Pedagogies in the Industrial South: ‘Big Shipping’, sewage outlets, sunburn, and ‘strolling’ through history…

This paper offers an account of TIDINGS, Tide 1: Tilbury, June 2025, a participatory artwork which found material form as written and visual artefacts that became part of the landscape that initiated them, and explores its pedagogic potential.

Participants in TIDINGS were invited to discover the works as they explored a small part of the route that was walked in their production. People were placed in a situation where they searched and re-searched, simultaneously piecing together and becoming part of an ongoing journey that examines contemporary landscapes to provide glimpses of the, often obscured, histories that shape the land we inhabit.

As participants stepped into TIDINGS, they became part of the artwork. Their experiences, thoughts, feelings, and reflections situating them at the centre of a moment by their participation (whether knowing or unknowing) in a place where the only constant is change.

Walking as an active research method was central to the conception and execution of TIDINGS. Within this exploration a dialectic anamnesis emerged – a correspondence with a future that exists as a past present destined to return.

This paper explores some of the learnings that occurred during the production and ‘exhibition’ of TIDINGS, the radical pedagogic potential of its method, and the confounding space that the work made apparent.

More provocation than treatise, the paper offers notes towards a methodology that builds on the work of philosophers such as Henry Bergson, Guy Debord, Jacque Derrida, and Alva Noë; and educational theories developed by Josef Albers, John Dewey, and Tim Ingold to offer frameworks of understanding and of action without being prescriptive or bound to the locus of its origin.