By: Steve Bottoms

Steve Bottoms — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 10:49:34 +0000

Hi Alison. Back from Cuba yet? Just to say how much I appreciated this posting and would love to talk about the implications further – whether here on the blog or in person in Scotland in a couple of weeks. Looking through our notes from the Fountains Abbey event (I’m just about to do a posting about this), I’m struck primarily by the complexity and ambivalence of our responses to the site and its various narratives and possible futures — and only a ‘holistic’ conceptualisation of that complexity, through creative means, could start to do justice to the questions/issues involved. Of course, this is precisely the value of the arts, as you keep pointing out to me… their ability, at their best, to capture and process something not just three-legged but positively hydra-armed… I guess I’ve been coming from the opposite perspective – as an arts person feeling the need to be more “useful” in the current, ahem, climate… and thus wondering how we can be more “direct” about raising awareness of environmental “issues” (without resorting to tedious didacticism). But as you suggest, we need to think more broadly than that kind of issue-based focus, which always misses out part of the equation – and so maybe the very things I was starting to feel frustrated with (ambiguity, indirection, layered complexity) can be our greatest assets. And maybe the network’s focus on sites – and thus the multitudinous stories that can be excavated or spun out from them – is precisely what we need in order to think this through further.

Comments on: Narratives of what?

By: Steve Bottoms