ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces Play Your Place in more detail and examines the critical backdrop across which the largely empirical discussions evolve. It explains how the experience of participating in Play Your Place was shaped through practices of drawing. The chapter explores the process as one of mapping in order to understand how it is that one might think about the project as connecting and reconnecting existing communities and creating new ones. It considers ethnographic work with the participatory arts project Play Your Place to query the nature and possibilities of the connections that arts practices might produce. Play Your Place is surrounded by the kinds of claims that have come to be associated with contemporary art: namely that participants, communities and places are transformed through their encounters with these art projects. However, Play Your Place might also be considered to 'foster the formation of political subjects, the formation of collective action frames, and collaborative formation of shared knowledge'.
