Park benches are distinctive public spaces that invite a temporary pause for thought and time out from everyday activities and worldly preoccupations. Park Bench Sojourn is a multi-modal arts project that explores the uniqueness and universality of these spaces and the kinds of experiences they foster. Approaching the park bench both as experience and as metaphor, it is formed around ideas drawn from Jean-Paul Sartre’s book Nausea and the Andalusian scholar Ibn’Arabi’s metaphysics of unity. Put simply, the project is about awareness.

Park bench sojourns are experiential and require participants to find a bench to sit on for the purposes of the sojourn. Any bench is fine, it does not have to be in a park, and little deliberation is needed over which bench or why. You are invited to participate in the project through the selection of sojourns available, any number and type, as appropriate, per outing.