The piece arose as a result of a first press release going out about the new “Towards Hydro-Citizenship” project which is to run from March this year for 36 months. Funded by the AHRC, this a large, inter-disciplinary project involving a consortium of co-investigators, under the ‘Connected Communities’ funding theme. (Further informational blurb follows after the next paragraph, for anyone interested..)

In a sense, the Hydro-Citizenship project can be seen to extend, on a larger and longer scale, the Multi-Story Water project (2012-13), which was in turn a follow-on from the network project that this blog-site was originally set up to support. So the ball keeps rolling … and interestingly, it was the question of (dis)connection between local and global environmental awareness – which was the question animating the network itself – that Guardian journalist Oliver Balch picked up on from our phone conversation, and quoted me about (or, I think more accurately, attributed a quote to me that was sort of the gist of something I said at more length…). What I was not expecting was the emphasis he places on corporate sustainability messaging… It turns out Oliver writes for the Business pages, and when he asked me about what message I’d have for businesses I was a bit stumped at first. It also seems to have thrown Sara Penrhyn Jones – one of my colleagues on the project – who left a comment below the article on the Guardian site somewhat distancing herself from its direction. I have some sympathy with her point about (to put it crudely) artists not whoring themselves out to corporate interests… But at the same time, I wonder if it’s not also important to explore and pursue dialogue with whoever wants to talk to us. One thing I’ve learned from Platform is that talking to the people that some of might easily dismiss as ‘the bad guys’ (bankers, oil corporations, etc.) is as important as shouting from outside the gates. And on a smaller scale, when I overcame my own initial hesitations and contacted the property developer who had bought the abandoned riverside mill site at Lower Holme in Shipley (during the Multi-Story Water project), he turned out to be a very likeable, reasonable man who was more than willing to meet the residents and listen to their concerns… You never know what can arise from being part of a conversation.

++++

Towards Hydro-Citizenship: (from the press release…)

As the project’s title suggests, its focus is researching within, and working with, a range of communities to address intersecting social and environmental challenges through an application of arts and humanities approaches (including performance and film making, history and heritage, interactive mapping, etc.). The environmental focus is on interconnected water issues, which include such issues as flood risk, drought risk, supply and waste system security, access to water as an amenity and social (health) benefit, waterside planning issues, and water-based biodiversity/landscape assets. Given recent, extreme storm surge and flooding incidents in the UK, as well as other pressing water issues, this research is particularly timely.

The research will involve reviews of current work being undertaken elsewhere in a range of disciplines and international contexts and also 4 large scale case studies of community-water issues. These case studies will be in Bristol, Lee Valley (London), Borth and Tal-y-bont (Mid Wales), and Shipley (Bradford). Each case study will be conducted by a local team working with artists, community activists, and selected community partners ranging from small community groups to larger organisations charged with aspects of regeneration and community resilience. There will also be exchange and comparative research conducted between the case study sites.

The seeds of the project were sown at a three-day AHRC research development workshop, held in May 2012, on the theme of Communities, Cultures, Environments and Sustainability. The workshop aim was to stimulate the development of innovative proposals for transformative, cross-disciplinary, community-engaged research with the potential to make a significant contribution to the ways diverse communities respond to the challenges posed by environmental change, support the transition of communities towards more sustainable ways of living and cultivate the development of sustainable environments, places and spaces in which community life can flourish. The workshop sought to foster cross-disciplinary and collaborative approaches by bringing together researchers from a wide range of disciplines and other experts from policy and practice communities. A key theme was the potential to engage with diverse cultural communities in all stages of the research.

The Primary Investigator is Dr. Owain Jones, at the University of Gloucestershire’s Countryside and Communities Research Institute (CCRI).

Following the recent mini-revival of activity on this blog, here’s a dubious little Christmas gift… a link to a recently finished film:

The footage here was actually shot back in July, during a mini-heatwave, which accounts for the sheen of perspiration on some of the people being interviewed. The occasion was the after-party for a “think tank” event in Sheffield on “River Stewardship”, hosted by the Environment Agency and Sheffield’s River Stewardship Company (a social enterprise which the EA had a significant hand in founding). As such, the film spins off from the Multi-Story Water project that is documented under the “Projects” tab on this site. It doesn’t, however, relate directly to either of the case study sites for the MSW project (Shipley, Bradford, and Eastville, Bristol). If there’s a “site-specific” angle here, it’s to do with Sheffield, and the location of the party by the city’s main railways station, and the invisibility (at least from here) of the rivers being discussed…

It’s taken a little longer than was ideal to finish editing the material, and it may yet get re-edited again… Jonathan Moxon, at the Environment Agency, has said he can imagine the film being useful to them in a number of contexts, but that it would need to be shorter than its current 14+ minutes. But for now, here’s the “director’s cut” – such as it is.

This last weekend (December 6th and 7th), I was invited to another “environmental arts” symposium, this time in Cardiff… Where November’s event at Central School of Speech and Drama, in London, had crammed a huge (slightly exhausting) amount into one day (see November blog posts), the “Environmental Futures” dialogue/network event  was sort of the opposite… Spread over two days, there was actually very little formal symposi-fying, in terms of prepared papers etc. In fact, there were no ‘papers’ as such at all (!), which might be regarded as a mercy… The emphasis instead was on a more leisurely pace of debate, with roundtable-type sessions featuring invited participants: e.g. I was on one where the eight contributors all spoke for 3 or 4 minutes in response to a pre-circulated document (the lone female contributor in this session was the ubiquitous – and always worth listening to – Wallace Heim). Other sessions involving facilitated conversation among all the attendees around, well, round tables…

The idea was to facilitate cross-disciplinary dialogue between researchers and practitioners in both the arts and social sciences, and this was achieved up to a point. Still, personally I would have liked to hear from some of the social scientists who were present in a somewhat more structured, sustained way, in order to feel like I’d learned something from them. The problem with open discussion when you don’t share a clear sense of an agreed knowledge base can be that you end up engaging less in dialogue than in a series of intercut monologues (including my own, no doubt)… There was a slight sense of mutual incomprehension between people coming from very different contexts, as well as moments of unexpected understanding.

The highlights of the event were definitely the presentations by the various invited artists. David Harradine, artistic director of Fevered Sleep (and previously a participant in our performance footprint network event in Scotland back in 2011 – see February 2011 blog posts and the ‘David Harradine’ page under ‘Glascove’ in the ‘Documents’ section of this site), presented and talked about his short film It’s the Skin You’re Living In, which you can view here.

This rather wonderful little film, which playfully “brings home” the rather distanced, cliched climate change imagery of stranded polar bears, prompted much discussion. So too did the outdoor Tumbleweed performances by solo artist Claire Blundell Jones (with whom I collaborated on the original, live version of our Red Route corridor performance in Leeds back in 2008 — see under the “Projects” tab on this site). Claire had been invited to revive her signature Tumbleweed piece, last performed 3 years ago, by symposium co-organiser Simon Whitehead (a wonderful artist in his own right, of course), and she could be seen out and about in Cardiff twice on Friday, blowing her lonely tumbleweed along in a laconic presentation of futile, lonely, urban busy-ness — readable on all sorts of levels.

I was invited by symposium co-organiser Carl Lavery to provide an overnight response to David and Claire’s pieces. The result was the following text piece which I presented first thing on the Saturday morning (it also includes an oblique nod to Stefhan Caddick‘s lecture-demo about some of his site-specific environmental sculptures – I was particularly struck by his water-powered light sculpture inspired by the Sex Pistols’ “No Future” anthem from God Save the Queen). My delivery of the text was greeted very positively by those present (more so than I’d expected, to be honest), so here it is for the record…

It makes more sense, of course, if you’ve viewed David’s film… Or indeed if you’ve ever slept in a hotel like the one we stayed in on the Friday night…

Stark  (7.12.13)

3.31am

And as so often in these places I’m lying here sleepless

Listening to the whirring and throbbing of the building’s innards

Artificial air flow

Artificial heat

Hermetically sealed exoskeleton

A shield against atmospheric unpredictability

An exquisitely tuned, insomniac’s torture machine

What was ever wrong with just opening a window?

“Unsustainable lives are disconnected, fragmented lives”

Says the briefing document

Perhaps we’re here in this 5 star hotel as an object lesson in such disconnection

A hotel whose lobby hits you with the humidity of  a swimming pool as you step out of the endlessly revolving glass bubble that seals it off from the outside

“Be Environmentally Friendly” says the sticker by the switch by the door of my room

But even turning off the lights turns out to be an ingenuity test that has defeated me

Unless I go around individually turning off the wall lamps

And even then there’s a light inside the wardrobe for which there is no discernible switch anywhere

Shafts of golden warmth spilling out beneath its doors,

Eerily lighting the floor

The only way to extinguish it is to remove the card key from the wall plug

Thus killing all electrics in the room

Preventing my smartphone recharging

Disconnected

Fragmented

3.49 am

And I’m thinking about that stark, white landscape in David’s film

Harsh, unwelcoming whiteness

But also about the warmth of that golden light that, elsewhere in the film,

Spills across the exposed chest of the bear-man-man-bear

Evoking for me the eternal late summer sunshine that seems forever to be lighting the way of William Morris’s protagonist in News from Nowhere

Late Victorian utopian vision of reconnecting man with nature

Nature figured permanently as welcoming, warming, climatically temperate

Gorgeously appealing sentimental tosh

Ruthlessly exposed by that

Stark

White

Wind

Snow

Bear

Bear?

Sitting right there

Posing for the camera, centre stage

How did he get the bear to oblige?

Oh, I see, not bear but man

Man in suit

Thin, soft, white suit

Woefully inadequate protection against the inclement environment

Feeble exoskeleton

Modularised in sections

Held away from the body by foam padding and straps

The words ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ scrawled on opposing arm sections

I’m put in mind

of a kind of satire

on Iron Man

Marvel Super Hero

Golden, modularised, metallic exoskeleton

It’s this skin we’re living in

In our dreams

Safe, invulnerable

Internally regulated

Jet boots

Hand blasters

Man as master

Macho malarkey

Robert Downey Junior

Tony

Stark

Industries

4.04am

Split screen

A mountain, cleft in two by vertical dividing line

Two images,

Two locations

side by side

Arctic

Monkey Business

Stark – white – golden

Split screen Andy Warhol superstar

Super hero

Bear in underwear

Part stripped

Wholly exposed

No Future

No Future

No Future

For You

4.12am

Zero Degree Dance

A phrase I heard the other day for the first time

Zero Degree Dance

Befittingly literal description for this bear-man-man-bear

Though in the book it referred to a trend in art gallery installation

In the illustrating photograph

In Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall

A group of semi-naked dancers are huddled together

Dribbling on the floor

While a man in riot police gear sits on horseback marshalling the crowd

In the picture

Just beyond the dancers

An unexplained pool of liquid covers a large expanse of the shiny grey floor

An unexplained pool of liquid which I can only assume

Is horse piss

The revenge of nature on art.

4.18am

In my mind

The man-bear-bear-man

Is walking across the descending side of a curved pedestrian bridge

Straddling a motorway

Noise

Fumes

Concrete curvature

Beneath the soft, white feet of the laughable bear suit

The bare feet of the dancer

Bare feet on cracked tarmac

Bare feet on gravel

Exquisitely simple, human vulnerability

To this world we built for ourselves

As somewhere else

Somewhen else

A young woman in metallic ear defenders

Battles to propel an invasive tumbleweed

With a petrol driven leaf blower

Across an indifferent urban landscape

Lonely

Futile

Sisyphean task

Vulnerable

Noisy

Polluting

Gratuitous

HSS-rented gas-guzzling hand blaster

Its minor unsustainabilities standing in for all those other major unsustainabilities

That we tolerate, enjoy, condone

Every day

In our various metal exoskeletons

Cars, trains, ear defenders, 5 star hotels

Stark

White

Milk

Alkaline

Out of the fridge

On the turn

Off

4.32 am

Still sleepless

Punchdrunk’s The Drowned Man – a co-production with the National Theatre – is a massive, interactive spectacle taking place over four floors (though I think I only discovered three of them) of a disused building adjacent to Paddington Station. The place has been made over as a labyrinth of Hollywood-movie-themed spaces (producer’s offices, Western saloon, American high street, etc.), and there is an enormous cast of performers that you follow all over the building. It’s almost totally random motion – you make individual choices about where to go and what to see, who to tail, where to veer off… It’s a voyeur’s paradise, because every member of the audience is masked, so nobody can ‘see’ you, but you can get right in close to the action. Physically and viscerally it’s thrilling (some amazing close-up dance sequences, etc.), but plot-wise it’s pretty non-existent because you see the scenes – which are repeated in a looped sequence – in no particular order. And many of the scenes you don’t see at all. (At the curtain call, many of the performers taking their bows were completely new faces to me!) All of which means, in short, that it’s great fun but utterly without coherent narrative, content or any particular meaning beyond the thrill of the chase. One’s mind is not taxed in the least. 

OK I’ll come back to this… But back to Oil City, which does engage the mind as well as the body. It was also a piece of particular personal interest to me for two reasons: (1) the piece’s origins can be traced directly back to a walk along a similar route that was first devised by Platform’s James Marriott and Mel Evans for the London meeting of our performance footprint network back in May 2011 (for a full, illustrated account of which, click here). In the image below, for example, my tour group is pictured moving along the same corridor between Liverpool Street Station and London’s RBS offices that was also a key stage in the earlier walk… 

(The woman on the phone ahead of us is one of the performers – but the blend with the environment is such that everyone else who just happens to be there also becomes part of the mise en scene…)

(2) The second personal connection here is Mel herself, who very much ran with the idea of developing the earlier tour as a theatre piece. Mel was, back in the day, a student of mine at Glasgow University, and to direct the piece she also recruited a fellow former-student, freelance director Sam Rowe (the pair of them featured in a number of fondly-remembered shows I myself directed in Glasgow – e.g. they doubled as the Stage Manager in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, in 2003). Leaving nostalgia aside, though, I want to focus here on the particulars of Oil City as a theatre piece… Because unlike the works focused on in the previous sections of this blog sequence (an audio tour and a conceptual art piece), Oil City draws quite openly on theatre conventions – and indeed on some of the conventions of participatory theatre established in recent years by companies such as Punchdrunk.  Where the 2011 tour had James and Mel playing narrators who were essentially versions of themselves (as in storytelling or performance art), Oil City used three professional actors to multi-role in several different character parts each — as journalists, campaigners, oil industry employees, political fixers, etc.

Here’s one of the actors (sorry – I can’t find any record of their names) leading us out of Liverpool Street Station towards an escalator up to that RBS corridor. At this moment she was, if I recall correctly, playing a whistleblower who was trying to provide us with evidence of corporate malpractice …

This is a game of intrigue, with the audience cast as players…  This engaging, entertaining format is used to introduce participants to some of the complex issues around the controversial attempts of oil corporations to drill in the Canadian tar sands (given the increasingly scarce resources elsewhere). This dangerous and environmentally destructive process also violates longstanding treaties over the territorial rights of First Nations peoples…. Hence, the actor pictured above later plays a First Nations activist who has come to London to bring the fight to the beating heart of the oil giants BP and Shell. (Incidentally, the choice of tar sands as topic marked another significant shift from the original 2011 tour, which was premised around the first anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico.)

This doubling and trebling of roles by the actors no doubt arose in large part from budgetary limitations on the number of actors that could be hired… Unlike the resource-rich Punchdrunk, Platform’s is clearly a shoestring operation. And on the one hand, the multi-roling created a certain degree of confusion as to who exactly was playing what part when. But it also struck me that the the company made a playful virtue of necessity, by actively playing up these confusions as a way of highlighting the performance’s self-conscious theatricality. For example, during our initial car journey from the piece’s starting point at Toynbee Studios (HQ for the 2 Degrees festival) towards Liverpool Street, our audience group of four was informed by the driver – also the one male actor in the show – that we needed to keep an eye out for a certain untrustworthy oil executive… The actor was at this point playing a campaigning journalist who was enlisting our help in getting his ‘scoop’ – but the identifying photo that he showed us of this shady executive was a photograph of himself… The moment drew knowing smiles from his audience, and introduced a sense that the details of what was coming would — like all the best mystery plots — be somewhat blurry and confusing.

When I saw the same expositional device used in the Punchdrunk show (as we were escorted into the depths of the 4-storey building in a lift, the lift attendant showed us headshots of various stars and starlets we had to look out for), it occurred to me to wonder if Mel and Sam had drawn on Punchdrunk as an influence for Oil City… We are, after all, constantly being told by the press that Punchdrunk are influential… But where Punchdrunk used the photos simply as a signposting device, there was much more of a sense of knowing wit in the doubling-up used by Platform. And the overt, self-conscious theatricality thereby introduced also contrasted intriguingly with the concrete reality of the everyday London spaces we were moving through… (as opposed to the entirely fantastical, faked up sets used by Punchdrunk). Oil City pulled and pushed at the participant’s sense of what was “real” and what was “fictional”, in a way that the entirely hermetic Drowned Man never could.

This push-pull effect was also weirdly appropriate in relation to the issues being addressed by the “story”. My strongest memories of Oil City – as I finally write these reflections several months late – are of a kind of febrile confusion… a confusion that seemed to complement quite aptly the clearly very murky realities of Big Oil’s dealings with governments, lawyers, and community advocates. While I remember little of the fine detail recounted to us by the (fictive) characters, I did gain a clear and present sense that conversations being held, decisions being made, right here in the (real) City of London, were having very serious impacts in faraway Canadian territories…

Here is that same male actor I mentioned, playing the executive he had warned us about, at a cafe in the station complex… In this particular scene, the rules of the theatrical ‘game’ have suddenly changed: instead of being addressed and implicated as participants within the events themselves (“I need your help with this…”), we were suddenly treated as invisible flies on the wall – or rather invisible bums on the other seats around this table – as an off-the-record conversation occurred between these two execs.

This invisible audience premise is fundamental to Punchdrunk’s aesthetic, but again, they use it less interestingly…  In The Drowned Man, we all wear masks, we are clearly delineated from the non-masked performers, and we never cross the line from viewing to interacting… In effect, the masks operate just as would a proscenium arch or a film camera, separating us from those who are ‘acting’, even though we are mixed in among them. The categorical distinction between ‘stage’ and ‘auditorium’ is thus maintained and actively policed (as I discovered on a couple of occasions when stewards prevented me crossing parts of the performing spaces they did not want me to). By contrast, Oil City again creates a productive kind of blurring… Take a look at this shot below, for example, taken just before our man on the left – in the picture above – arrived for his meeting…

As we sat waiting for the scene to begin, all the other scenes at other tables formed part of our mise en scene, creating a strangely blurred sense that all those other people you can see were also actors, and that they too might be involved in shady dealings of some sort… And who knows, maybe some of them were! The show induced a weirdly unsettling, weirdly exciting kind of paranoia for participant spectators (and I know it wasn’t just me that felt this, because the people I was travelling with made the same point!).

And here we are, again in hot pursuit of the woman in black, like the Private Eyes that the show had cast us as. The spaces and landscape around us changes, but the pursuit keeps up… And where Punchdrunk had spent who knows how much (some of it public money) to facilitate our movement between artificial spaces, Platform simply used what was already available to them for free… The City becomes a strangely heightened, theatrical space (which it already is, of course, in many respects!), and everyone in it becomes part of the intrigue… Looking back now, I find myself wondering how much more extraordinary Oil City might have been if it had even a decent-sized fraction of The Drowned Man‘s budget to throw around — if they had a cast anywhere close to the same size so that you really never were sure who was an actor and who was just a bystander… Equally, what might happen if the audience numbers could be scaled up, to bring many more people into the conversation…?

Here is our First Nations activist, leading us into the looming maw of a public space underneath one of the financial buildings — where (in the shot below) she finally confronts yet another character played by our male actor with documents that he is suitably alarmed to realise have come into her possession…

He wheels round to confront us, the spectators, uttering a stream of convenient denials and excuses… It’s the kind of performance we’ve seen all too often from politicians and others who have been caught with their hands in the till, or their trousers round their ankles… Of course in this instance we know full well it’s just an actor, playing a part, who will shortly melt back into the London crowd as this largely invisible, ephemeral performance disappears into memory… But we also know that there is a reality to the artifice here – that things somewhat like the things that we’ve witnessed have happened, perhaps are happening right now, in the very spaces we’ve been moving through…

What I’m talking about here, I guess, is reality. The best theatre is utterly real precisely by virtue of its explicit artifice. Oil City achieved this, with very limited resources, in a way that The Drowned Man (with all its money, hype and glamour) signally failed to. If only we could arrange for a reallocation of funding… But then this is also the point of Oil City, in terms of its content: we need to ask questions about where the money is going, and why, and to whose benefit.

What interests me here is specifically the conjunction of (that which is called) activism and (that which is called) art in Liberate Tate’s practice. Their approach suggests a certain frustration and/or boredom with conventional protest methods (placards, marches, etc.), and a determination to combat the Tate with its own tools – those of contemporary art. The implication (which Tate a Tate made explicit) is that these activists are seeking to act as (or to spur on) the “awakening conscience” of Tate – but that in order to be persuasive they need to demonstrate an understanding of Tate’s own business which is equal (or ethically superior?) to that of the institution itself.

I have every sympathy for this laudable approach, but as a critic I’m also very interested in the fact that – and the ways in which – art and activism are different things. Activism is and must be predicated on the assumption that specific interventions can have a material, causal impact on political realities (“because we have manifested protest or dissent about a particular issue, you are compelled or constrained to act differently…”). Conversely, art might be defined as an activity that stands aside from the everyday causal chain – indeed is explicitly “framed” as separate from it (since it is the framing and naming that makes it definable as art). Though it might well prompt thought and reflection in the viewer/reader/spectator, we cannot predict precisely what kind of response an individual will have to an artwork, let alone what “real world action” the individual might be prompted to take – though this is not to say that such action will not occur. (I am making some pretty big generalisations here, obviously, but bear with me… For more detailed consideration of these propositions about art, see Jacques Ranciere’s essay “The Paradoxes of Political Art”, which I am drawing from here, albeit fast and loose…)

Now, art might usefully be in cahoots with activism, insofar that its role is often to affect or challenge our habituated perceptions of the world around us — to oblige us to look at things from an alternative angle or perspective. Alterered perception might very well be a necessary pre-requisite if an individual is to be prompted to take action on a particular issue (“I’d never thought of it like that before… hmm… this has consequences for me…”). But the paradox is that art itself does not and cannot prompt specific action — where activism precisely seeks to.

As I write this, I’m conscious that – considered in the abstract – these statements may seem to be creating a problem where there maybe wasn’t one to start with. But let me be more specific, and turn to some particulars of Liberate Tate’s art-activist practice as it has developed over the last few years. The group’s first action, License to Spill (June 2010) is the one that reads most readily as an activist gesture:

This action took place shortly after the catastrophe of BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and occurred at the threshold of Tate Britain — just as, inside the building, a party was being held to mark the 20th anniversary of BP’s sponsorship of Tate Galleries. In this context, even without explanatory text, the image and the statement could hardly be clearer: pouring a messy, oil-like substance all over the place from cans labelled with the unmistakeable BP logo, Liberate Tate were “bringing the spill home” and confronting Tate with the implications of their too-cosy relationship with BP.

The action was tailored to attract press attention, which it certainly did, thanks to the boldness and clarity of the image. But I would argue that, precisely because it reads so clearly and unambiguously as “activist protest”, License to Spill might be tricky to classify as “art” in any richer, perception-affecting sense.  It says, in effect, “we are angry about this” (justifiably so!), and in that respect it is close kin to the protest placard.

But skip forward a couple of years, and Liberate Tate’s actions seem to tend increasingly toward the “artistic” end of the dichotomous spectrum I’ve been proposing. Indeed, quite unlike the mess on the steps of Tate Britain, the Tate a Tate audio tours (made in collaboration with Platform and Art Not Oil) are invisible to the general public. In order to experience them, one needs to make the quite conscious decision to seek out the relevant website, download the content, and take oneself to the Tate Galleries to experience the recordings in situ. It’s difficult to imagine that anyone other than those already in sympathy with the creators’ aims and concerns would go to all this trouble (unless, perhaps, they were assigned as reviewers, or sent by their teachers?). In effect, then, Tate a Tate was largely designed to preach to the choir, and as such has an extremely limited impact in terms of “activism” per se.

One should not, of course, underestimate the value of preaching to the converted: it happens in church every week, and its function is to build and consolidate a sense of shared identity and commitment. One should be careful, however, not to merely keep repeating the same messages that one’s congregation has heard before. For me, the audio-tour of Tate Modern felt too obvious and too familiar in its statements about oil sponsorship of the arts – and its various pronouncements bore only a rather tendentious relationship to the paintings it invited participants to look at. As such, it was (again, for me) far less affecting and memorable than the tour of Tate Britain, with its creative conceit of imagining the whole building as a “Panaudicon” (because the Panopticon of Millbank Penitentiary once stood on this site), and of looking through paintings to hear things that are removed in time and space from the immediate surroundings of the gallery, but are being (re)connected to it. As I explained in some detail in the previous blog post, my perceptions and perspectives were challenged and altered by this experience. This was art doing its work, in supportive relation to (an already assumed sympathy with) activism.

Which brings me to The Gift – an action I have huge admiration for, and which fascinates me in part because its relationship to the art/activism dichotomy is so awkwardly blurred. On the face of it, this has all the trappings of an activist intervention: a group of like-minded protesters descend on Tate Modern at a prearranged time and force their way into the Turbine Hall to “deliver” a “gift” that the gallery has decidedly not asked for. Unlike License to Spill‘s molasses, however, the delivery itself — a decommissioned wind turbine arm — bears no clear visual or symbolic connection to the issue being protested (i.e. oil sponsorship of the arts). Of course, the links are there as soon as one stops to think about it for oneself — i.e. an implied support for renewable energy sources over the continuing extraction of fossil fuels; an alternative kind of “gift” to the moneys solicited from BP. There is also a linguistic pun at work here (a wind turbine arm for the turbine hall of a former power station), and of course a referencing of a whole history of objets trouves that have been reframed as modern / contemporary art – from Duchamp’s urinal on down. The windmill arm, like the urinal, is an everyday object which is conventionally valued only for its uses, but which, when de- and re-contextualised within the frame of art, becomes manifestly useless. Instead, attention is invited to its particular form, colour, contours – as an unlikely sculptural object. Liberate Tate, playing the art game to the hilt, even presented the gallery with the legal papers required to submit an artwork to the national collections: the turbine blade, these papers proposed, should be newly defined as both an art object in its own right and as documentation of a performance action (i.e. the thing delivered stands in as evidence of its delivery). Tate was thus legally compelled to consider whether or not the item should be accepted for its collections. Eventually they declined it, although the smarter move would probably have been to accept it (the institution would thereby have  absorbed and accommodated protest against itself into its own narrative – but perhaps that would also have been to give too much recognition to the issue being protested?).

From an artistic point of view, I find all this fascinating – and it’s almost tailor-made for seminar discussion with students (I’ve used these videos in class on two or three occasions already). But the question of definition remains: is this indeed an activist gesture, if the thing being protested about remains obscure or unclear without supporting explanation? Had I been an innocent bystander at Tate Modern that day, unfamiliar with Liberate Tate’s objectives, I would have seen a group of (mostly white) young people forcing their way past a phalanx of security guards (many of them people of colour), in order to bring in and assemble a large white object in three component parts. I could probably be forgiven for not even realising that the large white object was a wind turbine blade, unless someone told me — and I could certainly be forgiven for not realising that this strange event had anything to do with oil.

The videos themselves illustrate the issue with great clarity. In the first, the event is framed in a way that very much emphasises the aesthetic dimensions of the event and object. There is even a stirring musical score – apparently performed live on Millennium Bridge during the approach, as well as being used non-diegetically to overlay the video edit.  Here, no explanation for the event is offered until close to the end of the film, at which point a voice-over connects the action with the Damien Hirst exhibition that was then taking place in Tate Modern’s pay-per-view galleries. It is suggested (not unreasonably) that the values of art having become confused with the value of money. In this context, we are therefore invited to read the arrival of the wind turbine as being – quite literally and pointedly – art for art’s sake  (i.e. art should be valued in terms of its invention and ingenuity rather than by its price tag). No mention is made of oil at any point in the film: the issue simply does not feature.

In the second video, right from the first caption, a much clearer connection is made between the delivery of the blade and the stated activist objectives of Liberate Tate. The form of the video, placed on an internet “news” site, is that of a documentary: as such, it eschews the consciously aestheticized form of the first video in favour of appearing to offer a relatively unmediated window into the planning of, and motives behind, the performance. Indeed, we hear the event’s orchestrator, Tim (no last name is given, in keeping with the group’s general preference for anonymity),  explaining that The Gift has been conceived as a self-conscious alternative to “holding a placard up”: despite appreciating the value of such traditional activist methods, he feels unsatisfied and creatively unfulfilled by them. It’s worth noting, however, that the placard at least has the advantage of being explicit about what is being protested. The further one moves across this putative spectrum between that which is clearly activism and that which is clearly art, the more open to personal interpretation one’s gestures become.

I would argue that, as a performative gesture, The Gift remains radically ambiguous in its meaning and intentions unless it is clearly underlined by supplementary, explanatory text (as this second video does). There is of course a distinguished artistic pedigree for the art object or performance standing in crucial juxtaposition to a title or verbal statement (one thinks, for example, of conceptual art works such as Michael Craig-Martin’s An Oak Tree – which without its textual component is simply a glass of water). But if we’re proposing that the action needs to be read in relation to a statement, then we’re again underlining the status of this work in relation to a genealogy of conceptual/performance art. Is it also, categorically speaking, an activist gesture? Or might we might argue that The Gift borrows and performs the combative trappings of a protest action, but ultimately treats them artistically, in terms of mimetic quotation (just as it also quotes/invokes interventions in the history of art by Duchamp et al) ?

To put this another way… Might it not be the case that some readers/spectators (perhaps those more drawn to the first video than the second) might find the explanation about oil sponsorship entirely redundant to an appreciation of the gesture itself? Potentially, such a spectator might feel that the quality of intrigue that characterises the unadorned gesture has in some way been spoiled by the supplementary explanation of it (rather like a good joke being spoiled by a poor punchline.)

So what exactly makes this an activist gesture? License to Spill succeeded in those terms through the visceral and timely clarity of its statement about oil: its demand on Tate was crystal clear. Conversely, the Tate Britain end of Tate a Tate succeeded as an aesthetic, perceptual experience by importing reflections on the history of oil exploitation into the pristine cleanliness of the gallery. Yet whether in terms of art or activism, The Gift is not clearly “about” oil at all – unless one is told that it is. It is, more obviously, an artistic gesture that cleverly invokes a history of iconoclastic artistic gestures. So it is surely a moot point whether or not it succeeds in Tim’s stated aim of asking Tate to “have a little think” about its relationship with BP.  In purely causal terms, what Tate’s representatives actually had to think about was what it would mean to accept (and to provide storage for) a wind turbine blade, as part of their art holdings. And there is, I would venture, an important difference between the question of sustaining a sponsorship deal, and the question of dealing with an unsolicited gift. It’s even possible that the latter might distract attention from the former: in having to deal, unwillingly, with the awkward material object, Tate might actually be less inclined to deal thoughtfully with the more indirect, reflective questions (around alternative energy sources and alternative sponsorship strategies) that The Gift also purported to be asking.

I would underline here my own sense that The Gift was a rich and intriguing performance action. My reflections on the questions it throws up, however, have led me towards a sharper sense of the tricky questions that artist-activists such as Liberate Tate have to process. One needs to be very clear about what the particular objectives of any given gesture might be – whether political and/or aesthetic – because, again, activism and art are not the same thing, though they may well prove complementary. Without such clarity, one risks making category errors and, perhaps, assuming a certain causal efficacy where only open readership pertains. Jacques Ranciere makes a similar point in terms that seem particularly pertinent to The Gift (even if they may not ultimately apply):

“In ‘activist’ art nowadays a clear trend has emerged that relies on the reality of occupying an exhibition space as a way of proving the real effects of the social order.  [Such gestures characteristically draw] on the combined effects of the self-evidence of sculptural presence, action in the ‘real world’ and rhetorical demonstration. But it may well be that . . . the more [art] professes to be engaging in a form of social intervention, the more it anticipates and mimics its own effect. Art thus risks becoming a parody of its alleged efficacy.” (Jacques Ranciere, “The Paradoxes of Political Art”)

If anything, the number of different perspectives being presented demonstrated the lack of existing cohesion or agreement about what “ecological performance making” would even mean: for some, it’s about finding low-carbon solutions for traditional theatre practice (cue much discussion of LEDs as against tungsten bulbs), for some it’s about art as activism, for some its about using performance to cultivate a renewed attentiveness to the non-human environment, and so on… It’s a testament to Lisa and Tanja’s care and organisational skills that all these perspectives were brought together in one room for one day, so let’s hope the symposium prompts further productive discussion and collaboration.

At this moment in time, however, this gathering felt very marginal to the concerns of both theatre/performance studies at large, and indeed to the study of environment/ecology. In introducing the opening panel, as chair, Baz very generously described Wallace, Dee, Carl Lavery and myself as the “illumanati” of this emergent area of concern, but I felt strongly that the accolade was undeserved. Leaving aside the fact that it’s Baz himself, if anyone, who has earned it, there’s the more important point that we are not a secret society and we are certainly not the keepers of any special knowledge… Each one of us is simply scratching around the edges of something — Wallace from a primarily philosophical perspective, Dee as a walker and forest enthusiast, Carl as (it seems to me) a classical avant-gardist, and myself as someone with a vaguely Boy Scout-ish urge to do something useful by wandering up and down rivers.  And all of this pales into infinitesimal insignificance, though, when one considers the wider challenges that Baz also alluded to in his opening remarks.

This is, he observed, both a hot and a cool moment. A hot moment because the planet is still warming and the urgency to do something radical about the situation – on a concerted, global scale – is more pressing than ever. And a cool moment because — after a few years of felt concern, around and about the COP15 summit of 2009? — the whole topic of climate change has “cooled off” in the media and the public consciousness. There seems to be more of a determination than ever to bury heads in the sand, to deny the scientific consensus — as evidenced recently by the press coverage of the latest IPCC report (UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), which spilled much ink over the report’s mention of a recent, unexpected slow-down in the rate of warming, but which merrily obscured the fact that climate scientists are more convinced than ever of the underlying trend — i.e. that human activity is driving potentially catastrophic changes in the climate.

For those of us working in higher education, these issues are given particular piquancy by a new report from Platform that points out the degree of collusion between British universities and the fossil fuel multinationals whose objective is to keep drilling for oil in ever-more-dangerous and sensitive environments. The report, Knowledge and Power, tells me for example that my own employer, the University of Manchester, last year took £64 million from BP in order to finance a new research centre — one explicitly directed to “help [BP’s] search for oil in deeper and more challenging environments.” This unholy alliance of BP and UoM, says the PR blurb, “enables BP to access the University’s world-class executive education, high-quality research facilities and its undergraduate talent pool” (quoted p.16).  And yet at the same time, the University has the gall to be inviting staff to join “green impact teams” to ensure more sustainable energy use in its buildings… One suspects, in this context, that “green impact” translates merely as “cost saving”, given that the institution’s commitment to saving the planet is, to say the least, equivocal.

I am angry about this. Actually. Seriously fucking angry. And not least with myself for not bothering to research my employer’s dirty fingerprints before now. Question is, now what?

Of course, in the cultural sector, there have been very active campaigns running now for some time to get BP and Shell sponsorship out of the arts. The most prominent such activism in the last few years has been Liberate Tate‘s interventions (often in collaboration with Platform) at London’s Tate Galleries. But if I needed further evidence of the “cooling climate” for such protest, it was provided by a visit — the day after the Central symposium — to Tate Britain. My intention was to once again tour the gallery with my iPod listening to Tate a Tate, the site-specific audio work created by Platform, Liberate Tate and Art Not Oil…

This work had quite an impact on me when I first experienced it in the spring of 2012, shortly after the tours were released online… The aesthetic dimensions of it intrigued me – a guerrilla audio guide providing alterative readings of the works in Tate Britain and Tate Modern, and linked by a musical protest song mash-up for listening to on the Tate Boat that links them. (In fact, I realised this year that I subconsciously lifted this walk-boat-walk structure for the Multi-Story Water performances we made in Shipley…) Admittedly I wasn’t that taken with the Tate Modern tour, which seemed to me to have little intrinsically to do with the building or its displays: instead, it simply directed you at certain pictures and then used various lateral connections to launch into diatribes which — though informative — lacked the conceptual or sensory allure of the best contemporary art, and thus somehow “fell short” of the site it had specified for itself. But the Tate Britain tour was, for me, far more compelling… more layered in its audio textures, more striking in its ideas.

Beginning in the front foyer of the building, and then guiding the listener to lock him or herself into a basement toilet cubicle, the tour begins with a history of the site itself — as what was once swampy, riverside marshland. Drained in the late 18th Century, it provided the site for Millbank Penitentiary — England’s first, large-scale modern prison, and still the only one to be built explicitly along the guidelines mapped out by Jeremy Bentham in his writings on the Panopticon (latterly beloved of Foucauldians the world over). Taking this fascinating titbit as its conceptual hinge, the soundwork then proposes that the listener is in the centre of a new “Panaudicon”. By locking down one’s spatial co-ordinates, one can extend one’s hearing range for thousands of miles in different directions from this central point. Guided to the Clore Gallery, housing the Tate’s unmatchable collection of Turner paintings, one is invited to sit down in front of this canvas…

Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage – Italy exhibited 1832 by Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775-1851

… and to listen carefully as sounds come directly through it, magnified by the Panaudicon from their spatial source across the globe and, indeed, back in time. Thus, looking at the mysterious, single-tree landscape of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, we hear the haunting sounds of whales being hunted near to extinction for the oil their bodies contain. This brutal trade finally ended, we are informed, not because of any conservationist concern for the species, but simply because it became uneconomic. A new, more profitable source of oil had been identified… Turning through 90 degrees on the gallery bench, we are invited to look through this painting, towards a different point on the globe, the Caspian Sea…

Sir Brooke Boothby 1781 by Joseph Wright of Derby 1734-1797

Looking at — and listening through — this particularly smug-looking portrait of a wealthy 18th Century gentleman, reclining in a forested glade, we hear of the first, filthy, dangerous attempts to drill for fossil fuel oil. The juxtaposition of sound and image, at this moment on the tour in particular, haunted me for months after first experiencing it. But returning to Tate Britain this weekend, I discovered that the experience was unrecoverable. I had been expecting some changes to the “hang” in the gallery, and that the tour might therefore be tricky to negotiate some 18 months on from its inception. What I had not expected was to discover that the entire recording was redundant. Leaving aside the installation work going on in the central rotunda (which was masked off, making the various audio instructions to move through it difficult to negotiate…), there was the stark fact that every single painting referenced by the guide was not only absent from its anticipated spot… it was nowhere to be seen in the gallery at all. I hunted high and low for Childe Harold and Sir Brooke Boothby — all to no avail.

Holman Hunt, The Awakening Conscience (1853)

The audio guide concludes with a tour de force encounter with this painting, Holman Hunt’s The Awakening Conscience. Here, the sound effects of a glorious, birdsong-filled garden outside the window (the window into which the painting’s viewer is ostensibly peering) brought the canvas’s colours to life with an eerie, supra-natural vividness when I first encountered it. Something phenomenological happened for me, that I can’t quite articulate, even as the voice-over adopted the classic tone of an art critic — offering a disquisition on the content of the image, while also inviting metaphorial reflection on the theme of conscience… Just as the woman, stunned by the natural beauty of the garden outside, arises from the lap of the leering gentleman — apparently resisting the temptation to sin — so art (proposes the recording) needs to be the conscience of society, not merely a whore to corporate interests. (OK, the gender politics here are a little fuzzy, but leaving that aside…)  As the narration concludes, the birdsong continues for a sustained period, so that you are left uncertain when to pull away from the painting (“is it over now?”), held by the stare of the protagonist and the light in the garden…

Again, though, none of this was repeatable this weekend. The painting was not in its designated spot — nor indeed anywhere to be seen. Now, of course, this might all be perfectly innocent. The Tate’s permanent collection is enormous, far too extensive to all be on dislay at any given moment, and they do have a policy to periodically alter what is hung and what is stored away. But just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you, and there was something about the fact that the audio tour’s potential effects had been so systematically destroyed — every painting referenced being so mysteriously absent — that persuaded me that something quite deliberate had occurred here. Tate has been well aware of Liberate Tate’s activities, after all (they’ve been discussed at board meetings) … and it wouldn’t have been hard for the gallery’s curators to listen to the recording and take the necessary action to destroy any potential impact it had as an artwork. The audio tour’s ambition to be a “permanent installation” has proved sadly temporary. The gallery’s conscience, rather than being awakened, has been decisely smothered.

More than that, though… For those of us who see conspiracies everywhere, it’s difficult to avoid the fact that, directly adjacent to the room that once housed Childe Harold and Sir Brooke Boothby, there’s currently an exhibition of Constable paintings titled “Nature and Nostalgia”. An exhibition prominently sponsored — you guessed it — by BP (a corporation who can afford to be nostalgic about nature, since they clearly don’t care much about its present or future). On this half-term weekend, moreover, BP’s interest in time has been manifested thus…

The Time Loop allows families to tour the gallery as if on a Doctor-Who-ish time travel journey, making unexpected connections between different periods…. (just as the audio tour had…?). As a consequence, the BP name and logo are dotted all over the building, linking different exhibits. It is difficult to imagine Tate having been quite so unashamedly celebratory of its links with the oil giant last year, or the year before… Deepwater Horizon, it would seeem, has faded from the public memory like a bad smell, wafted away by artistic air freshener.

And meanwhile, in Tate Britain’s temporary exhibition galleries, the current major exhibition is this:

I asked a docent what the exhibition was about. She told me that it was about the way that art has been vandalised over the centuries… but how sometimes the fact of the art having been vandalised makes it more memorable and more important.

There’s an irony here that I can’t quite put my finger on.

+++++++++

November 26th update to the above:

Unsurprisingly, Liberate Tate themselves have clearly had their eye on the developments within Tate Modern, re-BP’s sponsorship of the newly unveiled exhibits… They entered the gallery with characteristic brassiness very shortly after the re-opening, to perform Parts Per Million, a simple but rather brilliant intervention – which is also sobering and scary in its implications. See Youtube link below:

I recall that the process of making these bottles (wedging sloes into the small bottle necks, pouring in gin) was accompanied by music and much general merriment. I also remember feeling vaguely worried – as organiser of this event – that our funders, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, might not deem this an appropriately scholarly use of our time. This was an understandable anxiety, perhaps, but looking back it was also completely misplaced: much of the success of the network (if success it was, let’s not be too self-congratulatory) was built on a sense of camaraderie and openness that relied precisely on moments like this. There’s an ecology in this, of course – the connectivity of the social and physical alongside (and as vital stimulants to) the intellectual and artistic.

3 years on, that first meeting seems a long time ago. We met subsequently at Cove Park in Scotland, at Kings College in London, and some of us then also convened for an additional meeting in Bristol… The last paved the way for Multi-Story Water (officially “Before the Flood”), the year-long follow-on project in collaboration with members of another AHRC Researching Environmental Change network, which developed site-specific performance work in collaboration with community members in flood-threatened areas of Bristol and Bradford. That ran in 2012 (during which we also published an edition of Performance Research arising from the network proceedings), and in 2013 we got a bit of additional funding to do further Multi-Story follow-up activities, which we’re still in the process of reporting on.

And then just two days ago, October 15th 2013, I was in Swindon (lovely Swindon) as part of a team being interviewed by AHRC high command to see if we merit a large grant award to pursue a 3 year, interdisciplinary consortium project on “Hydro-Citizenship”… in many ways this follows on directly from Multi-Story Water, which follows on directly from the network. So yes, a lot got started this day 3 years ago. And it’s finally time to drink the gin, I think…

OK, so I was a bit apprehensive about this… thought I might poison myself with rotten fruit. But I am delighted to report that, just as Sue said it would, this concoction has certainly improved with age! … Some people drank theirs pretty much straight away, and it tasted like neat gin with a hint of fruit. Three years on, though, it’s rich and full and fruity and really rather gorgeous.

Cheers!

Not particularly at risk: homes in Eastville

On Friday 16th September, seven members of the performance footprint network group (about half of us) reconvened in Bristol for a one-day workshop, using up a bit of the left-over grant funding… The idea was to follow the provocation that Michael Guthrie had given us on the last afternoon of our London meeting. As Community and Stakeholder Relations Manager for the Environment Agency, he had asked us to think about how the network’s deliberations on site and environment might be applied to making work targeted at particular communities at risk from flooding. The Bristol meeting (the EA are based there, nationally) was thus an opportunity to scope out a particular site, recommended to us by the EA, with a view to (possibly) applying for further funding to make something in that location or a site like it… The selection criteria were that the area/community be typical of those the EA often has difficulty in communicating flood-risk information to: urban areas, where the people are perhaps somewhat more disconnected from the ‘natural’ environment than those in more rural areas, and where there is little to no living memory of previous flooding in the area (flood histories often being the key drivers in present action towards future resilience measures).

Eastville was the area chosen for us by the EA – but we had little idea of what to expect when we got there. We knew that we were looking at the River Frome, and that the EA’s Flood Management Plan had identified quite a narrow stretch of land in Eastville as being at risk. So the afternoon before the official meeting, five of us – Phil, Wallace, Paula, Alison and myself – set off on a kind of blind reconnaisance mission, as ignorant tourists trying to assess the lie of the land (and the water). In my mind, I think, I was expecting to find some typical Bristol homes like the ones pictured above – except that these ones are some way uphill from the river (and their doors further uphill from the road). It turned out that what we were really looking at was this:

The River Frome, canalised with concrete and sheet piling, in near-stagnant slow-flow, directly underneath the monumental curve (and considerably faster flow) of the M32 motorway. Very little ‘natural’ about this particular environment, and hardly surprising if people living in the area feel a ‘disconnect’ from the river, given that it is fenced off like this:

This last image shows the heavily protected entrance to the Environment Agency’s sluice gates, just downstream of the motorway under-flow section. And it is for the run-up to the sluices that the river is so heavily canalised. It’s here that the Frome goes underground, entering the culverts that lead it into central Bristol and its intersection with the Floating Harbour section of the River Avon. It’s also here (we learned the next day) that a five-mile long interceptor tunnel begins… a huge metal pipe designed as an overflow outlet when the river is in flood, which takes excess water rushing straight off to the Avon Gorge and bypassing the city entirely. So the city itself is relatively safe from the risk of the Frome flooding, but the Eastville area – the run-up to the sluices – is not.

So who exactly is at risk? Well, most obviously, this stretch of homes backing onto the river directly in between the motorway under-flow and the sluices:

You’ll notice in this image how these homes have masked themselves off from this frankly not-very-attractive stretch of water with bushes and trees and the ends of their small gardens. You’ll also, no doubt, have noticed IKEA. The other side of the river is dominated by a retail park that includes the Swedish giant and a Tesco superstore, and then acres of car parking in the flood plain itself… and also a city of Bristol glass recycling depot. So to be fair, the planners seem to have fairly thoroughly removed at-risk housing from the area (in the interests of disposable retail sheds?), leaving this one truncated street to its own devices. On one side of them, the river, on the other, the motorway – with concrete pillars generously painted in pastel colours to make this concrete wasteland look like more of a social area… (which apparently it is, for the homeless…)

And then, just on the other side of the motorway, you reach some more in the way of joined-up housing… which, to judge from ‘Bangladesh House’ and the flood-plain mosque, is home (in particular) to a Bangladeshi community – whom I imagine have very particular cultural associations of their own with the idea of flood risk.

Here we’re seeing the mosque from underneath the motorway… Our reccy next took us to the right, along the road in the foreground of this picture. Here the signs of Bristol’s famous streetwise creativity became evident in patches of guerilla gardening…

… and in the (not terribly inspired) graffiti along “Frome Lane”, part of a footpath that tracks at ground level, as closely as it can, the underground journey of the Frome  once it has gone into its culvert:

I have to confess that as we headed back to our hotel that evening, following our Eastville derive, I felt inexplicably depressed. Maybe it just felt like a bit of a bad joke – having been sent by the EA to a rather grim patch of Bristol which they themselves had been instrumental in making grim. After all, one of the functions of the sluice gates is to collect and skim off rubbish from the river, before it goes underground:Yet given this open display of urban ugliness, its hardly surprising that the river section underneath the motorway also gets clogged up with trash – as if this is a general, neglected, dumping ground for whatever… an old mattress in this instance…

So yes, I was pretty depressed by the scene… And yet also curiously attracted to it – to the sweeping monumentality of the motorway architecture, for one thing (which more than one of us connected back to Fountains Abbey, and its own canalisation of the River Skell), and to the jumbled, disjointed nature of the housing and retail landscape. Like a set of historical contradictions waiting to be unravelled and explored.

I think the x-factor that made all of us that much more enthusiastic about the site, though, the next morning, was Melvin Wood. Melvin is one of the EA’s technical specialists, invited by Michael Guthrie to speak to us because of his knowledge of the Eastville sluices and the hard engineering in that area For one thing, Melvin explained the interceptor system to us, and helped us understand just how necessary the river’s canalisation is, prior to going underground at the sluices (this was a point also corroborated by Jeff Neal, one of J.D. Dewsbury’s hydrologist colleagues at Bristol University’s Geographical Sciences department). More than that, though, Melvin has an infectious enthusiasm for the concrete engineering itself – explaining, for example, the structural reasons for the cross-struts supporting the sheet-piled riverbanks. He very much confirmed our paradoxical sense that there is a beauty, as well as ugliness, in this artificial landscape. Baz Kershaw later memorably summed the location up as “richly desperate.”

Melvin Wood explains the Eastville sluice gates

Another key element in our re-visit to the site on the Friday (when Baz and Helen Nicholson rejoined the five pre-visitors – along with Melvin, Michael, and their colleague Louise from the EA, and our other guests Jeff Neal, Alison Crowther from Streets Alive, and Lindsey McEwen from Gloucestershire University and the AHRC ‘Flood Histories’ network) was our accidental meeting with some older residents just upstream of Tesco’s. Here, the river is more recognisably a river – with swans a-swimming and even, we were informed (though did not see it), a local kingfisher. Here, a row of houses backs onto the river in a manner altogether more ‘at home’ with it:

Indeed, we learned from the couple we came across (and spoke with for quite some time), the homeowners on this stretch of the river are responsible as owners for their half of the river as it passes their homes. They were very proud of this fact, and had long memories of at-times difficult relationships with the Environment Agency and other bodies, over river management issues, flood-risk designation, and so forth. They also remembered the 1968 floods – the last time the Frome seriously over-reached its banks – when the waters apparently rose higher than the level of the raised car-parking space visible to the right of the picture above. There was, in short, none of the urban disconnect with the river which we had found only yards away on the other side of the Tesco roundabout. I think many of us became intrigued with the possibility of using performance methods to engage and connect up the fragmented elements of the residential community between here and the sluices. What kind of conversation might arise around people’s associations with all that forsaken concrete, for instance? (Despite the pastoral idyll of their back gardens, the upstream residents confessed that traffic and noise pollution in the area has risen exponentially over the last few decades.)

The rest of Friday’s meeting was spent back at Bristol Uni, as guests of the Cabot Institute (the geographers’ sustainability and resilience research arm – alas, having set this link up, J.D. was unable to join us on the day because of a family situation). We had further input presentations from hydrologist Guy Schumann (showing us satellite imaging of the Eastville area), from Alison Crowther (outlining the work Streets Alive and other grassroots organisations have doing in engaging communities with issues such as flood risk, responsible transport use, etc.), and from Lindsey McEwen (outlining her own research, through her AHRC network and other initiatives, into flood memory narratives in affected communities). Helen Nicholson also provided us with some compelling thoughts around developing performance work in community contexts. All of this made for a fascinating set of interventions, and sparked much debate around the issues arising and the Eastville site itself. (Much of the discussion was recorded, and I plan to put edited transcriptions on this site in due course.)

What we collectively came to at the end of the day was a sense that Eastville would be a compelling place to work and develop engaged, site-specific performance. It’s a location that, despite the relatively small number of homes at direct risk of flooding, does seem to epitomise the problems of spatial and community fragmentation, and disconnect from the ‘environment’, which are apparent in so many other urban locations. As such, it could indeed operate as a fascinating test case or case study in developing performance methodologies that seek to involve and inspire local residents towards a renewed sense of their immediate landscape, and indeed waterscape (‘a watery sense of place’, to borrow Lindsey McEwen’s phrase). It’s likely that such renewed connectivity would be a pre-requisite in any drive to encourage practical action around flood awareness. And beyond the EA’s core concern with flood, of course, there are wider ramifications in terms of future uncertainties about climate change and the potential increased likelihood of severe weather events. Can performance offer a way to engage with future uncertainty in a playful, constructive way? (we’re back here, of course, to the core concerns of the network itself)

There are of course a huge number of ‘buts’ involved in the thought of pursuing a project in Eastville… Not least of which is the fact that so few of us are based in or near Bristol. To develop something meaningful here would take time, commitment, ingenuity, research, great connections, and people on the ground. But the possibilities are there…

Dance for us, Paula.

No doubt I’ll be blogging about the outcomes next week, but this entry is to reflect on another element of follow-up to our London meeting in May… Last week I visited the offices of PLATFORM (who have apparently just dropped the capital letters and are now just Platform), to conduct an in-depth interview with James Marriott and Mel Evans, who presented their walk and talk to us in May. This conversation will be transcribed and either posted on this site or used in the forthcoming edition of Performance Research arising from the network project.

Oddly enough, it took me a while to find the offices. Platform are based, quite literally, underneath the approach to Tower Bridge – appropriately perhaps, like subversives burrowing into the foundations of the establishment… They’re just on the South side of the river, but technically still on land that’s part of the City of London, which is of course one of their main focuses of research and creative response. But their offices are so tucked away that I just couldn’t see the entrance at first despite the perfectly good directions. Apparently this is a common experience. I ended up calling Mel on her mobile, and she said she was looking right at me. I turned around and there she was, literally just across the road, standing in the doorway that I couldn’t see for looking. I suggested that they should rename themselves Platform 9 and 3/4.

Platform do make you look differently at the city, of course. Following a fascinating conversation with James and Mel, I set out to experience their 2007 audio walk and while london burns – which I’d been reading about in a couple of journal articles circulated by Helen Nicholson. Like the guided walk we experienced in May, this piece uses the City as its site and subject – and indeed covers some of the same ground that we did in May, both physically (Threadneedle Street and the 1 Poultry building) and thematically (and while london burns also focuses on BP’s influence, though it predates the Deepwater Horizon disaster). Even so, even as I felt myself criss-crossing the path we had walked collectively a few months ago, this was a very different walk and very different experience.

A large part of this difference lies in the formal distinctions between the two walks. In May, we were led on a ‘live’ guided tour by James and Mel, which observed the traditional structure for such events — walking between locations, stopping, talking, moving on. In between the presented sections of narrative, our engagement with the city streets was very much our own. By contrast, and while london burns is a continuous experience – billed as ‘operatic’ because of the interwoven musical soundtrack, but for me the analogy was more ‘cinematic’… The sounds and voices being heard only in my head as I moved through the city imposed a kind of screen or frame over what I was seeing — dramatising it and at times even melodramatising it (quite deliberately, it seems: the operatic form was chosen by Platform because of the ‘overheated’ subject matter of global warming). With instructional voices giving me particular directions to “Look up” or “Look through this window”, I felt as if my field of vision was operating as a kind of movie camera, twisting and dollying to find very particularly composed views. Early on in the piece, one is encouraged to walk around and around the circular entrance-way to the Bank tube station – an experience which, accompanied by music and apocalyptic predictions about +2 degrees global temperature rises this century – generates a sense of whirling, cinematic vertigo (until one then stops, abruptly, next to a cooling vent that blasts hellish hot air from underground up into your face… ‘stand as close as you dare’, invites the voice). Conversely, across the street from the Swiss Re building, for example (a.k.a. the Gherkin), I was encouraged to take a meditative moment of time-out, step under an unassuming copse of trees and – once again – “look up”. The sudden juxtaposition of Norman Foster’s uber-slick architecture with this simple canopy of leaves spoke volumes about the priorities of this place, the lack of green space visible elsewhere in the city…

The defamiliarising effect of the internal voice/narration, layered over the city and drawing curious attention to it, operated in a very different way to the much cooler, matter-of-fact ‘art tour’ narration in May. Indeed, this form combined with the narrative’s subject matter to create a weird sense of looking at London in the past rather than the present. A disillusioned city trader speaks melancholically of anticipated disaster – part personal (his partner has left him), part economic (this 2007 piece eerily anticipates the financial crash of the following year) and part environmental (catastrophic climate change is anticipated as imminent). The effect as I listened was to create a sense of looking back at London in a period (now!) of blind and blithe confidence about its own assumed continuation … back from a desperately less optimistic future… That effect is accentuated further by the periodic references to and sights of London’s historical past – at the outset we see the remains of the Roman temple of Mithras (now preserved amidst a building site); at the climax we climb to the peak of the Monument to the Great Fire of London, down Pudding Lane… Empires have fallen here before, we are reminded; disaster has struck and wiped out the present… This present is not forever.

This is powerful stuff, and all the more so because the piece exhorts us to take action so that the disaster might NOT happen. The listener is implicated as part of this place, and I imagine that it is particularly powerful if one actually works in the City, like the narrating trader character. The ideal audience member seems to be just such a trader — and as Financial Times review coverage of the piece suggests, this is a piece that has reached at least some of the financial community. Just as the May walk found its pivotal moment when we, as (mostly) academics, were implicated in the oil narrative in being reminded that our USS pensions depend on BP stock, so and while london burns seems to hinge around the moment when, circling the base of the Gherkin, the listener is invited to look into the glass cafe windows… to see those sitting within, but also to catch one’s own reflection.

What are those people in there doing to avert disaster? And how similar are those people in there to this person uncomfortably reflected? The City of London is a pumping engine of the global capital machine, a driver of climate change. How might it reassess its priorities? Platform are interested not only in pointing fingers at others, but at asking questions of those on the inside… As James put it in our interview, their role is in part to engage bankers and businessmen in conversation… to invite them away from their circular conference tables and invite them to look out of the window at what is happening outside….

The slight problem for and while london burns is that, four years on from being uploaded to the internet, it has not quite kept up with what is happening outside…

The rate of continuing change in the City, of buildings coming down and new ones going up, means that the smooth progression of Platform’s planned journey becomes – at times – entirely non-navigable. You have to abandon the printed-off map and instructions, pause the recording, and walk around whole blocks until you can get yourself back to where the piece wants you to be. That’s one problem.

The other one is our old friend apocalypse. The piece anticipates, seemingly quite confidently, that an irredeemable ‘tipping point’ towards runaway global warming will occur at some time in the next five years. But counting forward from 2007, that window will expire very soon, and there’s no irrefutable signs just yet of catastrophe. (Nor should we want there to be!) There’s a danger, as network discussions have reflected on in the past, that very urgent and serious concerns about climate change can be undermined by the tendency to warn darkly of things that don’t then happen on schedule. Of course, it may well be that we have passed a tipping point, and we just can’t quite see the effects yet (cheery thought). But equally, there might be reason, sometimes, to revise down the apocalyptic predictions. and while london burns reaches its conclusion as we step downhill towards the river, and are invited to imagine the floodwaters from the Thames rising around us (before climbing the Monument to reach virtual safety). The estimates for the flood line are based on Environment Agency estimates, the narration tells us. But if I recall correctly what our EA friend Michael Guthrie told me recently, the EA reappraised its expectations for the Thames Barrier only a year or two ago, and they are confident that it will actually survive for longer, and hold back more water, than previously estimated. If London is at threat from flooding, Michael suggested, it will be more because of groundwater (the underground tributary rivers coming up into the streets) than because the Thames bursts its banks. But that is not the narrative that and while london burns confidently informs us of… And that contradiction might allow sceptics to write the piece off as hysterical nonsense, when in fact its fundamental concerns are as pressing as they ever were. It IS a dangerous, suicidal nonsense for some in the City to be driving global emissions while others are charged with preparing to mop up the mess. The question is how to reflect on this contradiction, and encourage action on it, without falling into the trap of romanticised doom-mongering… a danger that this piece does flirt with it at times, for all its evident strengths and continuing relevance.

All of which brings us back to the Environment Agency, and flood threat, and Friday.

Watch this space.

The City from the top of the Monument, 7th September 2011.

Alan Read introduces PLATFORM’s James Marriott and Mel Evans

So here I am, weeks after the fact, finally finding the headspace to reflect on the discussions at our final network meeting in May. (See my previous ‘Part 1’ posting for commentary on performances that weekend.) To be fair, there was a lot to absorb those two days, and it took a lot of mental unpacking — but here are some reflections that also take in, en passant,  certain thoughts and experiences that have occurred since.

1. Local Power

The opposition of local/global  is one that plagues discussions of environment/ecology. It was also the driving construct behind this network project in this first place: i.e. the thought that we might somehow use the specifics of particular localities (sites) as a means of ‘reflecting’ on global questions of environmental change. At our first two meetings, I think, we struggled at times to get our heads around this task: it’s one thing to look at what’s immediately around us, and even to make performances within it, but quite another to meaningfully connect that with some abstracted ‘bigger picture’. At Cove Park, of course, the presence of nuclear submarines in the waters around us clearly had a ‘global’ dimension. Yet few us knew what to ‘do’ with that information, perhaps not least because the Cold War-era provenance of such weapons systems makes them feel (dangerously) obsolescent rather than intrinsically related to current questions about environmental and climatic change (nuclear power, after all, is now considered by some as part of the solution!).

In London, however, the sense of local and global being intrinsically inter-connected became much more palpably apparent. As Doreen Massey writes, with profound simplicity, in World City:

“Actions in one place affect other places. Places are not only the recipients of the effects of global forces, they are – in such places as London most certainly – the origin and propagator of them too, and this raises the question of responsibility, and specifically a responsibility beyond place. . . . [Thus we] need to build a ‘local’ politics that thinks beyond the local. What is developed here is an argument against localism but for a politics of place.” (p.15)

Too often, I think, site-specific performances function as a kind of ‘localism’ in the sense Doreen uses it here: parochially self-enclosed, and with little sense of a bigger picture. In this respect, the walking performance led by PLATFORM around the City of London provided a powerful counter-example: we were looking at local places, particularities of street layout and architecture, while listening periodically to a story about BP’s impacts in the Gulf of Mexico… PLATFORM’s subsequent discussion at Kings College, around the “Carbon Web”, further underlined this connectivity — as they mapped out the way that BP and Shell have tendrils reaching into every branch of the (London-based) British establishment (government, judiciary, media, cultural organisations, etc.) …. Doreen Massey’s subsequent reflections on PLATFORM’s presentations, and on her own research into London as world city, also contributed powerfully a sense of the immediate locality around us in London being the seat and nexus of corporate and institutional power vectors that really do stretch around the world. We can’t cop out and pretend that London simply ‘reflects’ these global dynamics: things said and done in London actively shape these dynamics (through performativity as much as material decisions – statements of confidence in credit ratings, etc.). Or put another way, those dynamics do not exist in some abstract, disembodied state regardless of individual or collective human intervention… As Doreen reminded us repeatedly (and we need to keep being reminded), the global ‘market’ is too often treated as a set of untouchable natural laws rather than a human invention which can be regulated and modified if we want it to be.

Who is ‘we’? That’s the crucial question, of course, because even when we appreciate that the local is productive of the global, it’s still tempting to assume that such productivity is somehow the property of somebody else. ‘Them’, not ‘us’. And to some extent, it must be said, we fell into that habit during our London meeting – of regarding the power-holders as being, well OK, proximate to us physically, but still another species of person. It would be easy enough (if not really fair on PLATFORM) to draw such an interpretation from our walk around the City: ‘who are all those people inside those glass skyscrapers?’  Similarly, one could misread it into Doreen’s discussion of the things she loves about London – of London as a very progressive city, socially speaking. There is her/our London (the London of multicultural diversity) and there is ‘their’ London (the London of multinational capitalism), and it’s all too tempting to see these as somehow being layered over each other but still quite separate – like different plateaus or ‘planes of consistency’.

It must be said that this sense of separateness is one that the barons of the City are themselves doing their utmost to entrench. In World City, Doreen deftly analyses the financial sector’s performative endeavours to paint themselves as a special case, the economy’s ‘golden goose’, and thus as an exception to the normal rules ‘on the ground’ — arguments that our politicians have for too long been entirely willing to embrace (just as they have, we are reminded this week, been entirely too willing to embrace certain media powers such as the Murdoch empire). I was struck forcefully by this, a couple of weeks after the Kings College event, when I was back in London for a round of REF panel meetings that were held out in Docklands, at a corporate conference venue at South Quays. Looking out from the cafeteria terrace, all I could see was water (the old docks), blue sky, and glass… the interchangeable glass boxes housing financial corporations that have sprung up on all sides of this liquid space. Straight ahead of me was the new Fitch building – so much bigger and more uncompromising than the company’s former home, the relatively human-scale location we had visited on the PLATFORM walk… The whole area felt like it was trying to rebuild itself as some entirely non-local non-place, supremely without identifying characteristics, a great glass mother-ship of Kapital, descended from above onto East London… ‘We are not you! We are other, and your mortal rules do not apply…’

And yet… What was I doing there myself? I was there to help determine assessment criteria for the Research Excellence Framework. To many in academia, that exercise feels like an imposition by ‘them’ on ‘us’. Of course, as a panellist, I don’t see myself as ‘them’: I’m helping to represent ‘us’ in a peer review process. But no doubt to some, I am complicit in a suspect process – I have become one of them. My point being that none of us ever thinks about ourselves as one of them. The other week I attended a seminar on ‘ethics in banking’ organised by the ethics specialists at Leeds University, which was led by two bankers in pin-striped trousers. Very nice men, it seemed – very approachable, very frank about their sector’s shortcomings – and very clear that people working in the financial sector don’t regard themselves as villains or gangsters, but as honest folk making an honest living. Yes, the financial rewards may have skewed their frames of judgement, but to some extent isn’ t that true of us all? The most striking element of the analysis at that seminar was in fact that banks tend to have so many different layers of corporate governance that one committee will simply pass on a crucial decision to another committee, and so on. So when the bubble burst in 2008, it was at least partly because nobody was taking responsibility for – well – taking responsibility.

I’m digressing slightly, but I may also have found my way back to Doreen:

“Conceptually, it is important to realise that the global is as much locally produced as vice versa, that an imaginary of big binaries of us and them (often aligned with local and global) is both politically disabling and exonerating of our own (and our own local place’s) implication, and that the very fact of specificity (that places vary) both opens up the space for debate and enjoins us to invent.” (World City, p.10)

Places vary. Sites are specific. But that variation and specificity is also about how we choose to do our looking. (In what ways do we choose to exonerate ourselves before we open our eyes in the morning?) The striking contrast in tone between the two walks we did that weekend in London (PLATFORM’s large-scale, impersonal, corporate landscape; Phil Smith’s friendly, potted-green, lived-in streets just off the Strand) underlined for me very clearly the sense that place is a product of how you look at it. And looking with a sense of responsibility is perhaps one of the hardest things to do. When we look at our places, not theirs, what should we be seeing that – most of the time – we don’t? (I’m thinking here, for example, of PLATFORM’s reminder that the USS pension scheme – and thus my own retirement income – is heavily reliant on oil investments.)

And so how exactly, re-Doreen’s words, are we (1) to apprehend our own implicatedness in these things, and (2) “enjoined to invent”? That is, how might performance provide a (politically enabling) tool or process to help with that process of seeing?

Something PLATFORM’s Mel Evans said at one point during our discussions stuck in my memory. She could take responsibility for her own bit of the world, she joked – by riding her bike and by eating vegan food, keeping down her personal carbon footprint – but in the big scheme of things such personal gestures make very little difference. There’s little point in getting sanctimonious about them. That’s why, for her, working and campaigning with PLATFORM is a way to take personal responsibility beyond her own immediate square of earth. To apprehend the global within the local.

Thanks Mel. But what can the rest of us do? Can we “fight the power”?

“Yes we can!” (thanks Barack)

Yes, maybe we can. Because we have more power – we, us, me, you – than we think we do.

On the subject of which…

2. Local Knowledge

On the second day of our London meeting, the network group was presented with a very particular kind of challenge by Michael Guthrie – Community and Stakeholder Relations Manager with the Environment Agency. Having given us an outline of the EA and its work, particularly with respect to flood risk and prevention (likely to become an ever-more-significant issue in the UK if climate change projections are accurate), Michael challenged us – working in small, breakout discussion groups – to come up with ways in which site-based performance might be used to engage urban communities, who haven’t flooded in the past, with the question of flood risk and the need to take adaptive / preventative measures.

I had scheduled this intervention and discussion to take place on our last afternoon, because I wondered if we could – collectively – try to summarise our network’s thinking over the 3 sessions in pursuit of a particular, concrete question. (Rather than just talking in general abstractions.) What I hadn’t quite anticipated – although I probably should have – was the extent to which Michael’s intervention from the outside would prove controversial. Some in the room felt quite strongly that an avowedly instrumentalist question of this sort, coming from a representative of a fundamentally instrumentalist Agency, needed to be questioned or even resisted. We were restaging in miniature, perhaps, the 2008 skirmish during which the UK government’s former Chief Scientific Advisor, Sir David King, accused arts and humanities academics of “shirking the climate change fight”, of  “staying in their disciplinary ‘comfort zones’ and failing to engage with scientists on the problem of climate change” (THE, 24 Jan 2008). Yet as UEA’s ‘Professor of Climate Change’ Mike Hulme rightly notes, “this engagement must work both ways. It needs to be acknowledged that the role of arts and humanities is not simply to translate scientific knowledge into public meaning, as though science is the only source of primary knowledge” (Nature Climate Change, Vol. 1, July 2011).

Michael Guthrie, it turns out, is a performance-minded scientist, working ‘both ways’: he later confessed to having deliberately worded his challenge to us in quite a blunt, expecting way, because this was representative of a ‘typical’ Environment Agency approach. He wanted to ‘play that part’ to see how we’d react to it – and sure enough, some of us didn’t react very warmly. But from Michael’s point of view, this game strategy was important as a way for him to think through, personally, a question the EA itself is having to review – that is, how it addresses other groups and communities…

Traditionally, the EA has operated – like many other government agencies – in an essentially top-down manner: it brings its expertise to bear on a particular problem or locality, and then imposes its solutions. That approach is now becoming less feasible because of the sheer scale of government cut-backs following the recent financial crisis: the EA, with many thousands fewer staff, nationally, needs to engage more directly with communities to get things done ‘on the ground’. In a sense, this reality falls neatly into line with David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ voluntarism agenda, but Michael was at pains to stress that this move was in line with what the EA itself had been concluding anyway… That the application of top-down measures has real limitations. ‘Expert knowledge’ is one thing, but when working with and in particular sites/communities, it needs to be married with ‘local knowledge’ in order to get things done effectively. There is never a ‘one size fits all’ solution, even to generic problems like flood risk. Since local people usually know a great deal more about their localities than external agencies do, that knowledge can (and should) significantly inform the EA’s own assumptions about what needs ‘doing’ on the ground… and by having both an input in dicsussions and a role in realising what then happens, local people are also able to take ownership (if you’ll excuse the BS phrase) of decisions being made about where they live.

That’s the ideal scenario – but the problem, as Michael explained to us, is that local communities are often mistrustful of the kind of governmental authority represented by a body like the EA. Moreover, his experience is that people don’t necessarily respond ‘logically’ when presented with rational, scientific arguments about action that might need to be taken to obviate risk. (That much is evident on the global scale, when it comes to climate change scenarios!) So other strategies for engagement – perhaps creative, affective ones – are also necessary, and that is not at all where EA expertise lies. Hence Michael’s challenge to us…

I wonder if we too, as a group of (mostly) theatre and performance academics, were responding to Michael like a ‘local community’, mistrustful of the kinds of ‘authority’ that he represented (as a scientist and EA representative). Did he pose a bit of a threat, even, to our ‘local customs’? Did we assume that he was imposing something on us, and thus somewhat miss the fact that he was appealing to us for help, for a two-way dialogue… We had knowledges that could be valuable to him, just as he had knowledge that we could make use of on our own terms.

I’m slightly over-stating the case here, of course: the small group discussions we had were constructive ones, and have opened up the possibility of a follow-up meeting in September, in Bristol, to further the possibilities of working with the EA towards developing a model for site- and community-based performance engagements. (As Dee pointedly remarked in the break-out group I was part of, ‘Let’s just imagine that we want to be doing what Michael’s asking…’ That proved a deft way to circumvent a lot of potential arguments, in order that we could, indeed, use our imaginations…)

But it does strike me, on reflection, that there are important, broader questions underlying our various constructive misfires that afternoon. To take the case of ‘climate change’ itself, for example, there is an ‘authorised’ or ‘common sense’ discourse at work in most discussions around the subject that this is a scientific issue to do with measurable physical factors and complex projection models… and therefore one that most non-scientists either (a) lack the expertise to engage in, and/or (b) feel intimidated by because the real experts are somewhere over there – them, not us. And yet, as the afore-mentioned Mike Hulme stresses in his book Why We Disagree About Climate Change (CUP, 2009), climate change is now every bit as much a cultural idea as it is a set of physical measurements. (Too often – as we’ve noted before – that idea is drawn in crude terms, like a Hollywood disaster movie…) It is, moreover, only at the level of culture (discourse, politics, imagination) that societies will be able to address the global challenges that climate change presents. Cultural analysis and engagement is, in fact, entirely beyond the skill set of most scientists – which is why Hulme, despite being one of the single most respected experts on climate change on the planet, decided to undertake a part-time MA in History at UEA, in order to start to think through these cultural dimensions of the question.

To return to my point earlier in this posting: we all of us have more power than we think we do, and part of that power lies in the kinds of knowledge that we possess. It’s all too easy, living inside the bubble of one particular set of disciplinary reference points, to assume that our own ‘expert knowledge’ is really just ‘local knowledge’ (i.e. of little use or interest to anyone but ourselves, or those curious outsiders who might wander onto our ‘patch’). But as Michael Guthrie reminded us (and Mike Hulme, in a sense, confirms), local knowledge is a form of expert knowledge — and it can prove invaluable to other ‘experts’, who inevitably know less than we do about, for example, strategies for public performance.

On 14th June, I attended a day seminar at the Royal Geographic Society titled ‘Narrating Environmental Change’, in which Steve Daniels and the AHRC had drawn together the Principal Investigators from all the 2010-11 ‘environmental change’ networks – for a kind of meta-networking event. Mike Hulme was a guest speaker, invited to draw the threads together at the end of the day, and he did this by interlinking a number of points flagged up in the various network summaries that had been collated in a booklet for the day’s participants (to read my summary of our network, go to ‘Summary’ under ‘Network’ on the toolbar above).  It was striking to me, perhaps because I’m habitually paranoid that I never do anything of ‘substance’, that Hulme singled out as noteworthy various key points arising from our network — especially our resistance to apocalyptic ‘disaster movie’ narratives of climate change, and our insistence instead on ‘lived experience’ (and live performance as a mode by which to reflect on it). Performance people have an important contribution to make, if we can avoid ‘shrinkwrapping’ ourselves within our own frames of reference (alas, that was very much my experience of May’s PSi conference Utrecht, but that’s another story again…).

Perhaps I’m rambling again, but I want to close this posting by referring to two elements of our London network event that I haven’t mentioned yet. One was J.D. Dewsbury’s paper “Material Impositions and Immanent Inhabitations” — a complex meditation on (if you will) ‘lived experience’ in particular sites. J.D. drew on physical examples from each of the network’s three event locations to explore how material conditions impose demands on human behaviour within those sites, but also how those conditions are themselves the consequence of past inhabitation, and indeed of human habit. This is a fairly crass summary, from leaky memory, and I’m hoping J.D. will be making the paper available for us to read again, carefully – either on this site or in a prospective journal edition arising from the network. But my concern here is the closeness of J.D.’s geographic/theoretical eye in looking at details such as seating arrangements (whether in the USS building or in the ruins of Fountains Abbey). This was an attentiveness to the miniature that paradoxically rendered the possibility of expansive thinking… thinking which J.D. invited us all to participate in by beautifully structuring his presentation to incorporate periods of open discussion. His approach seems to me, with hindsight, exemplary of this notion of sharing ‘local knowledge’ (in both the spatial and disciplinary sense) in a way that facilitates constructive exchange beyond the confines of that locality.

In a similar, but also very different way, David Williams’s presentation the previous day – in his performance paper Plumbbob – struck me as a demonstration of ‘local knowledge’ rendered as ‘expert’ knowledge. David’s allusive text explored the particularities not of a geographic site but of a temporal moment — that of the week of his birth in 1958 (was it?). A copy of Time magazine from that week was used as a source of extraordinary, juxtaposed visuals that complemented David’s reflections — 1950s advertising imagery and celebrity smiles jumbled up against images of Nevada H-Bomb tests and the soldiers asked to stand in visual proximity of the test site.  This strangely potent mix of cultural memories, further enhanced by David’s occasional fragments of song, suggested a kind of affective temporal geography, a deep mapping of a passing moment whose implications continue to ripple out towards us over 50 years later.  In what ways, David seemed to be asking, are we shaped by the moments into which we are born? What forms of toxicity – whether cultural or actual – do we ingest with the air around us? And how might a re-examination of these forces that shape us prove necessary to our future survival?

Rigorous attentiveness to place and time – a sensitivity to affect as well as logic –

Yes we can.

Closing conversation on Friday 20th May, Anatomy Museum.