THE ROOMS WE BUILD
An ALCHEMIA Art Workshop Recorded Conversation Series
Conversations about the spaces that make us , and the ones we choose to make next.
EVERY CONVERSATION HAPPENS SOMEWHERE.
Around a kitchen table.
In a classroom. A boardroom. A locker room. A hospital room. A shelter. A studio. A family home. Behind a closed door.
Long before we understand the world, we begin learning its rules inside rooms.
We learn who speaks. Who listens. What power looks like. What love looks like. What anger looks like. What gets discussed openly and what makes everyone suddenly quiet.
Some of those lessons stay with us for a lifetime.
The Rooms We Build is a recorded conversation series and growing public archive about those spaces, the people shaped within them, and what we might choose to build differently.
EACH SEES A DIFFERENT PART OF THE ROOM.
The Rooms We Build brings together people whose knowledge comes from very different places.
Policymakers. Academics. Frontline workers. Survivors. Families. Artists. Writers. Advocates. Cultural voices. Public figures.
Some have spent decades studying a subject.
Some have spent decades living it.
A policymaker can tell us how a system was designed. A frontline worker knows what happens when that system meets someone in crisis. An academic can identify patterns across thousands of lives. A survivor knows what those patterns feel like when they become your own.
Artists and writers bring another kind of knowledge. They can give language, image and meaning to experiences we recognize but sometimes struggle to describe.
The series will also welcome cultural icons and significant voices whose work has influenced how we understand ourselves and the world around us.
Some guests will be widely known.
Others will be people whose stories have rarely travelled beyond their own communities.
Each sees a different part of the room.
And each belongs in the archive.
A RECORDED ARCHIVE
A conversation can disappear almost as quickly as it happens.
Recording allows it to remain.
The Rooms We Build preserves these conversations as an accumulating archive of lived experience, professional knowledge, research, policy, art and cultural thought.
As the archive grows, the conversations begin to speak to one another.
Something described by a survivor may be illuminated months later by a researcher.
A frontline worker may complicate an assumption held by a policymaker.
An artist may find language for an experience that someone else struggled to name.
No single conversation has to carry the entire subject.
Together, they begin to reveal the room.
THE LISTENER IS PART OF THE WORK.
Listening is participation. A conversation can introduce us to a life completely different from our own, give language to something we have carried for years, or challenge an assumption we have never thought to question. We may disagree with what we hear. We may become curious about something we had previously dismissed. We may come to understand another person, or ourselves, a little differently.
We cannot know what someone will carry away from a conversation, nor do we need to determine it for them. Our responsibility is to create the conditions for an encounter: a space where different experiences and forms of knowledge can be heard, considered and carried forward.
Transformation is an ambitious word, and we use it carefully. It does not always arrive as revelation. Sometimes it begins quietly, with a thought reconsidered, a prejudice disturbed, a question asked for the first time, or an experience finally understood from another person's point of view.
Whatever happens in the room, the listener leaves carrying something of the conversation with them.
And that is where the work continues.
The Host
Christopher W. Quigley
Christopher W. Quigley is an artist, designer, writer and the founder and Executive Director of ALCHEMIA Art Workshop.
Educated in interior and urban design, Christopher has spent much of his life thinking about rooms: how they are built, who they are built for, and how the spaces around us influence the way we behave within them.
That curiosity eventually moved beyond physical space.
His work now explores the cultural and social rooms we inherit , the places where we learn about power, masculinity, violence, vulnerability, belonging, responsibility and one another.
Through ALCHEMIA Art Workshop, Christopher develops experiential projects that ask audiences to become active participants in the work. These include Transformation of Dangerous Spaces, an immersive public-art project examining gender-based and intimate partner violence, and The Listening Room, a live storytelling series built around the simple act of giving someone the room to speak while others listen.
The Rooms We Build extends that practice into recorded conversation.
As host, Christopher approaches each conversation with the instincts of an artist: curious about how people became who they are, what experience has taught them, where their certainty has changed, and what they understand now that they once did not.
The conversations bring policymakers, academics, frontline workers, survivors, families, artists, writers and cultural voices into a growing archive of knowledge and lived experience.
Christopher lives and works in Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia.
“I have spent much of my life thinking about rooms. Eventually, I became much more interested in what happens inside them.”
ENTER THE ROOM
We are now beginning to build the first collection of conversations for The Rooms We Build.
And we are looking for people.
You may be a researcher who has spent twenty years studying something.
You may work on the front lines of a system most people only encounter from the outside.
You may make art, write, teach, govern, advocate, build, care for people or lead a community.
You may have lived through something that changed the way you understand the world.
You may simply have spent a very long time thinking about a question worth exploring.
You do not need a public profile to have something worth preserving.
We are interested in experience, knowledge, curiosity and perspective.
If you believe there is a conversation we should have, tell us.
If someone immediately came to mind while reading this page, tell us about them too.
About ALCHEMIA Art Workshop
ALCHEMIA Art Workshop is a Nova Scotia-based arts organization creating immersive, participatory and conversation-based work exploring gender-based violence, intimate partner violence, masculinity, power, socialization and cultural change.
Through projects including Transformation of Dangerous Spaces, The Listening Room, and The Rooms We Build, ALCHEMIA creates spaces where art, lived experience and public conversation meet.
At the centre of the work is a simple belief: thoughtfully constructed spaces can create the conditions for listening, reflection, the exchange of knowledge and meaningful change.