Storyville Gardens
From an interview at Q Ideas Culture Summit
There are people who think of story at a level of scale that most of us couldn't comprehend. One person is Delisa Guerrier who is a co-founder of Storyville Gardens being concepted and created now in Nashville, USA. Another is Mel McGowan, co-founder and Chief Creative Officer of Storyland Studios. And he leads them in spatial storytelling practice. They were interviewed about the Storyville Gardens project which is in development:
Q: What was the problem that you were seeing in your community, in your area that you said it needs to be solved?
In Nashville, as much tourism as we have, I was taking my children to the movies every weekend. And growing up in California, there was always some adventure around the corner. So I looked at my husband and I said, "I think we should build a park." I was thinking it would be some small little 8 acre park and God had other plans.
I wanted to build a small little adventure theme park and it was a grew to be a lot bigger than what I originally planned. We now have 700 acres. The park is about a 10th of that. It's a destination. It is a family destination, which is really lacking.
It's called Storyville Gardens. Stories matter especially for parents and kids, hearing stories telling stories, understanding stories. In Tennessee, at the time when this vision first came, three out of five children were not up to Grade Level Reading. Now four out of five children are not up to Grade Level Reading. There's a study that shows that if we can just get children to read for fun that it will significantly increase test scores. It was at that moment where the dots connected and we said, "Let's build a park based off of books and stories from all over the world and design it with the intent to promote literacy, so that we can really make an impact."
Q: Why is it going to be so important now and into the future that we create beautiful spaces where people can encounter physicality, something in reality in front of them?
I know how hard it is to get the eyes of my kids unglued from a screen. I just came to the conviction that God is a God of place - from the Garden of Eden to the Temple to the Cities of today. God hasn't given up on place.
As we try to fix the consequences of our brokenness in the world, to me this is what this project is about - the value of place. Restoring that broken, vertical connection with the creator and then that horizontal connection between neighbours or people that don't have really much in common in terms of cultural backgrounds or ethnicities. What I love here is that we've leveraged the power of story to bring people together.
Q: What's being created in Storyville Gardens?
When you walk in it's going to say, "In the beginning was the Word". It's because every single story is crafted, starting from the Word. The Lord told me that this park would be a redemptive park. That has led us to stories that have withstood the test of time.
The structure of the park is based on stepping into stories from the four corners of the world. We're starting off by going into African creation narratives. Then we go to Europe and the Renaissance and stories from the Black Forest in Germany with the Grimm Gardens. Then there is Middle East/Asia and USA. The art style, the environments reflect the cultures. It's all about surprise, delight and discovery.
There has always been storytelling in sacred architecture, for example stained glass windows, which were absolutely state of the art immersive technology in their day in terms of connecting people to the power of storytelling. Rather than design today's version of a cathedral, I feel like God just handed me a shovel and said, "I want you to dig and find today's version of Jacobs Well." That's where the Samaritan of today has zero interest in finding a church or checking out religion before she takes care of a daily needs.
It's the idea that you could actually create a natural gathering place that someone could come to but then unexpectedly encounter a word of eternal life.
Watch this 3 min video:
The Storyville Gardens website is here.
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From an interview at Q Ideas Culture Summit, 02/08/2023