Paula Kramer’s single word response to the “nature” of Cove Park resonated strongly with geographical, topological, political and climatic affordances that I for one, in such good and stimulating company, enjoyed there enormously.

Precipitous?

Yes because the land fell away from Cove with a steepness that left little between the perched accommodation Pods and Containers and the flat expanse of Loch Long, which sometimes in turn through the shifting light seemed tilted at an angle up towards us and next sloping away and downwards as if being sucked under the opposite shore and its rising mountains.

Precipitous?

Yes because the sky was one moment tumbling with clouds and sheets of light and holes through both and more, and next as still as a landscape of carefully painted brush strokes, and then slowly pulsing as one’s eye was caught by the wake of a bobbing boat then the flashing flight of a bird or a fell-side suddenly lit upright by a break in the cloud from below.

Precipitous?

Yes because just over the ridge behind was the perfect spot for harbouring safely the mega-death potential of projectiles which once armed could unleash a billion or more instants of suffering beyond all measure and just round the gently curving headland to the North was the armoury of plutonium tips that could upend the world itself if all launched off together.

Precipitous?

Yes because when the rain fell heavily the tracks, paths, culverts, channels, gullies, combes and ravines gushed with suckling strings and gurgling ropes and tumbling chains and spewed out thrashing boulders of irresistible waterways as the tilted land became a soft sponge of moraine squelching underfoot and slipping away across the downhill granite in a gathering rush to be engulfed in Loch Forevermore.

Precipitate presentations?

In retrospect the diversity of the network members’ presentations for me was a singular rich response to Cove Park’s fabulous environmental energies and wayward signifying dynamics, even in the fact that there was no group presenting but all was done by individuals finding their own ways into engaging its powers, whether Sally Mackey’s touchingly cool remediation of the wasteful path light gradually coming into its own at dusk, or Phil Smith’s carnival verbal storyboard of a wildly travelling performance party driven haywire by little white figures from an architect’s model of a centre, or Alison Parfitt’s deepening personal meditation on the dimensions of death and hope that even as she stuck her paper submarine to the window glass could have been lurking under the sheen of the loch’s surface, or Tim Nunn’s backdoor outdoor audio concert of out-of-place sounds as if birds and crickets and dripping waters were escaping from the kitchen into windy wet air being the actual source of the blown-about and amplified plip plop resonance all around us, or Helen Nicholson’s anxiously driven effortful find a grip on or escape from the rampant big wild in the widow beyond her via computer screen and mobile phone and left-behind boxes of cereals that she gobbled down so substituting passion for the landscape of excess outside, or Dee Heddon’s to and fro ritual splashing along the flooded path of a living Pod huddling her trusty owl but scared that all and everything could so easily fall apart and best to gather and present some tiny fragments of things around and under threat to raise our hopes which she did she did, or Paula Kramer’s upside-down embrace of the deep green massive low-lying horizontal tree bough with back legs feet ankles toes and an ever-so-slow slow moving refraction of its ageless pulse as if life could be and for sure became drawn from it to sustain a deep joy for just being what it was going to be forever, or Steve Bottom’s widow-framed arts-as-landscape Ship Container reading as white-box gallery critique thankfully left behind for rain-swept bridge over over-gushing streams which like a delicate downhill heron he picked his way below us across becoming witty survivalist despite bullshit art-worlds and pathetic DiY garden nature-facsimiles, or David Harradine also riffing on Container-gallery ironies of in-yer-face separation framing of big outdoors scenes but trumping that back on itself appearing kitted out in sparse undies on the horizon’s lip gesticulating and speaking we can’t hear what till he struggles through freezing pond to our side where the pane filters speech ‘I need you to feel what I …’.

This panorama of presentations did not directly reflect the rackety beauty of the rapid climate shifts that made the Cove Park scenery seem wilder than it was, having been raked by human history over and over in so many ways. None of them took up a position of sustained and deliberate – quasi-scientific? – distancing of that immediate environment, though each and every one shifted and sifted it through various presentational perspectives, from miniaturisation to abstraction, from contemplation to immersion, from commentary to storytelling of various kinds and mix-and-matches in between … but all directly embodied and embedded it in various ways. This made sure that all together they refracted the environment, as they were taking it in (embodying it) and turning it over and around (angling it) and measuring it by varied degrees (embedding its qualities).

Baz wrote the above more-or-less high-speed stream-of-consciousness style – or at least fast-writing style – to see what that might reveal (if anything!) of patterns or networks or lights flickering in the dark like stars, and of any shared refractive angles on Cove Park’s actual movement of environment change enduring from our visit’s brief duration. But particularly for what one might make of this notion of shared refractions though Steve’s keywords on a thematic carry-over from Fountains Abbey, of SCALE AND SUBJECTIVITY, and his more immediate perception of an emphasis on TEMPORAL LAYERING for Cove Park. Might such a reflective retro-refraction give access to what might become from “reflecting on environmental change through site-based performance” that cannot be arrived at in any other way?

4.00AM 24 March 2011

All the presentations had performers and spectators, but relationally very differently positioned by each of them. All renovated their placing on/in the “site”, “landscape”, “environment” – of course it was no one thing – by responding with creativity to its fabulously diverse affordances.

Steve turned bridge into grandstand for a traverse of dangerous territory accomplished delicately well. Dee transformed a path that was a shallow pond into a pensive figuring of past and future survivals. Alison switched a glass window into murky loch to expose the flimsiness of its deadly cargo of looming threats. Paula massaged a low-lying tree into becoming a mossy alcove of knowing tentative tenderness. Sally transformed a wasteful daylight lamp into a beacon for saving the oncoming dusk. Phil took a model in a glass cage to wittingly scatter it across the slopes as seed for coming enjoys. Helen ransacked a room of leftovers and pulsing digital channels to reveal auguries of munchy hope. Tim turned a backdoor into a sounding board for elsewhere echoes of past lives still to come. David transfixed a picture-frame into a screen that filtered through whispers of un-ignorable needs. Baz turned a bombsite into a runway for…

Nothing was destroyed for good, one guesses. Deep respect was offered to temporally, temporarily borrowed niches. Even through their darkest angles, and however cautiously or recklessly, the performed events seemed to refract hard-won, un-pathological hopes.

These site-based “reflections” on the climate changes that had shaped Cove Park through past performances carefully introduced multiple SUBJECTIVITIES into a wondrous range of environmental SCALES, from microscopic miniature (moss strand on a tree-trunk) to magnifying gargantuan (nuclear warheads round the headland). Perhaps exposing new angles on potential niches for future sustainable lives, human and otherwise. Hence TEMPORAL LAYERING was integral to them all, not just in the archaeological sense of unearthing what’s past or in the geological sense of laying down materials to come but also in the (forgive the testy triplet neologism) “performalogical” sense of time travelling to-and-fro in evolved and evolving temporality. Was this a shuttling kind of refraction across and between climate change histories that cannot be achieved in any other way except by means of performances designed as such?

In the angle of critical engagement

Then – just as much embodied and embedded in Cove Park as the presenters described and discussed above – there was Wallace Heim and Tony Jackson and JD Dewsbury coming from yet other perspectives of reflection and refraction on climate change and site-based performance. Wallace asks: ‘Can sites learn?’; Tony asks: “How might children learn from sites?”; JD asks: “…how this space rewires thought and thinking [and] impacts on people’s practices?”.

A few further brief re-refracted reflections will have to serve as one‘s groats-worth attempt at reflexivity in regarding these profound queries.

Wallace’s question, as the young people my children would say, is a wicked one. It needs first to be dodged for emergent answers to have any hope of survival. So; are you sitting comfortably?

Learning by (human) definition depends on repetition or recycling; that is to say, on some form of memory, i.e. on “perceptible” responses to what has manifestly happened in the past. Water seems to have shown signs of this quality at both Fountains Abbey and Cove Park. When the Abbey river flooded (if one’s memory serves the story right) it tried to return to the course it ran before the monks – or their minions – dug its current route. And it seemed the Abbey’s minders were at least a little surprised by that. Nothing quite so striking a difference (but perhaps because one’s perspective of perception was somehow unprepared to serve it right) appeared on the loch-side slopes when the rain poured down heavily for three or more hours, as the water generally seemed to follow its former courses. But on the recently (re-?) surfaced paths leading down to the bridge it cut steep sided runnels that soon dried out but could possibly eventually become new streams if left unattended. Perhaps this was water “taking account ” of the “site’s” affordances; the “site” responding with – what? – “flexibility” to its flows? From these perspectives, the feedback between water and earth regarding old and new courses may be said to produce a quality possibly akin to memory, so it might start to become plausible to say that: “sites learn”. Somewhat dampish philosophical images, of course, but for one this reflection primarily relates to Wallace’s “differences that makes a difference” and Gregory Bateson’s impressively dry discussions of “deutero-learning” and his guiding idea of an “ecology of mind”, an idea of Earth as a becoming-refractive – “thoughtful”? – thing.

Is there any way in which this kind of relational analysis and theory could lead to a halfway plausible case for the “site” of Cove Park “learning” anything at all from our set of small performative responses? Another dodge to “save” time: a brief thought experiment. Consider that the World War Two concrete foundations for bomb/armaments stores at Cove Park are the positive to its waters’ negative; that is to say, energy relatively fixed rather than fluid in time. Still there were signs, if one “paid” attention, that their surfaces had been weathered a little by rain and wind and gritty dusts during several decades – maybe as much as half-a-century? – of frequent repetitions. Of course it’s ridiculous to compare that process to our performed presentations, which at most went through one-and-a-half or maximum three rounds perhaps! But in the speculative account above through a textual description of them being seen repeated just once, emerging half-automatically through an experimental/improvisational sequence of writing practices, potentially there seems to have been more repetitions of a different kind to the simply numerical; which – just possibly – together eventually could in principle create a difference that makes a larger difference (analogous, maybe, to the Fountain’s flood or Cove Parks converging streams gradually making a river!). For example: All of them made a material difference, however infinitesimal, to the “site” of a kind akin to the rain and the streams; a negative, a relatively very light-touch change to its TEMPORAL LAYERING. Then if one considerers their immaterially negative imprint, in comparison to the materially positive aspects of the “site”, to be in the network of SUBJECTIVITIES more or less shared between repeated different performances, perhaps their “impact” (to use the current jargon) in relation to the various SCALES of matters of concern (thanks Wallace) circulating at Cove Park could take on a different order of significance. However – yet more ridiculousness – that would entail treating human SUBJECTIVITY (and possibly by extension the sentience of all organisms, at least) as potentially having a durability, and sustainability, similar to the order – but decidedly not the qualities – of concrete. And how PRECIPITATE is that?

Set alongside this reflection, Wallace’s implication that the (precipitate?) learning in systems can be “toxic” is profound. Could this be the case even as such learning operates through “invention and improvisation”? Does this suggest the possibility of a toxic creativity that is beneficial? Did the presentations at Cove Park achieve something as paradoxical as that?

And what further implications might this have for the learning of young people that wonderfully preoccupies Tony, who echoes Paula’s “precipitous” by noting that “Perched as we were, everything seemed to point to the loch, even when it was out of view.”? An insight that could just as well be referring to the grand narrative of global warming and its unknown effects; another angle which, to make a little mental leap in these post-postmodern times, might partly explain the network’s emergent focus on the particular, personal, elemental-detailed responses to “site” as method for grappling with, among other matters of concern, the more extreme general frighteners of environmental change. Tony links well established approaches of educational theatre to “site-specific” projects and the innovative TIE programme “Whose land is it anyway?” His account of its focus on human cultures’ claims on nature notes a primarily discursive response (Brechtian debate, indeed), which made me wonder what cognate question would stimulate a complementary affective engagement at Cove Park: perhaps, what land is it anyway?

A peninsular with a history of intra- and inter-cultural colonisation, a rough 200 meter-high granite claw angled toward Glasgow by submarine-infested Loch Long, a steep-sided and precipitous place where flora and fauna cling like limpets on a submerged, but still-slippery, children’s slide. Add a geologist, a climatologist and an ecologist to the network’s environmentalist, archaeologist, engineer, geographers, historians, educators, artists, performance-as-researchers, etc., plus, say 150 young people and their tutors in campsite residence for three or four days and we’d be in business for a seriously funny affective/creative – i.e. inventive and improvisatory – investigation of how particular, personal, elemental encounters with the Cove’s slopes could be source for sustainable survival in the future. Expensive, yes; but possibly only around 0.00082% the price of a Trident class submarine. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/sep/23/gordon-brown-disarmament-push)

But in what sense could such a project become “toxic”?

As I hauled myself up to the Nissan hut workshop from the Pods in the Saturday afternoon downpour to make my flimsy wooden cut out submarine I was amazed at how much the water everywhere seemed determined to slide the clinging-on plants, top soils, stony tracks and the rest down into the loch. And, in response, by their fabulous tenacity in trying to stay put. JD’s pointing out that the peninsula is a granite outcrop with a thin layer of other stuff on top reminded me that the Avon Gorge in Bristol reveals a similar structure, but its core material is Carboniferous limestone with Dolomitic conglomerates, often used as a concrete aggregate.

The Downs that border the Gorge were the imaginary “site” for the post-global-warming survivalist biome of Green Shade, a durational pre-construction performance installation created in the Wickham Theatre at Bristol University in 2004.

The event included a reiterated “Toxic Drizzle Dance”, a comical falling-down-dead ritual meant to cheer up the “survivors” – and their visitor-spectators – when the pressure to keep going got especially tough. Its environment was intended as a creative antidote to doomsday scenarios, using the toxin of calamity-for-humanity ecological determinism against its potential affects/effects.

That project’s methods overall would likely not be appropriate for a youth-oriented workshop at Cove Park, except perhaps in the attention they paid to the particular, personal and elemental qualities of an imaginary human-made biome based on the “real” ones in Cornwall and the Arizona Desert.

Green Shade – Filtration Survivors full swing air cleansing (Photo: Mark Simmons)

But it was, one hopes, creatively toxic – in the sense that an antidote is toxic – to the current general prospect of global warming as probably the worst and possibly the most insistent aspect of climate change: a newish grand narrative of our times that’s still in need of elemental deconstruction, perhaps?

In any event, to “reflect on environmental change though site-based performance” via toxic creativity in light of the Cove Park network experience implies one must probably return repeatedly to first principles (however defined) of some sort or another. Which for this current writer is what JD’s query brightly and hopefully pitched the network towards: “…how this space rewires thought and thinking [and] impacts on people’s practices?” And why? Because one crucial creative problem decidedly not solved by the event of Green Shade was how to plausibly include spoken human languages in its practised thought experiment. This was not just an effect closely related to Alison’s witty injunction: “…climate change is too hard. Let’s talk about something else.” It is also, perhaps, that discourse as language, a.k.a. reflective thought, treated as a first principle of human identity is a foundational aspect of both modernist and, in some of its forms, poststructuralist subjectivities. From this perspective, Steve’s reading of Bonta and Protevi on Deleuze and Guattari was – this one who is writing/written dares to think – both timely and salutary for the network’s next move. The two theorists who refused to be only two, possibly as a result of that “…do not deny that human subjects can initiate novel and creative action in the world. However, they refuse to mystify this creativity as something essentially human and therefore non-natural. For them, the creativity of consistencies is not only natural, but also extends far beyond the human realm.” (Bonta/Protevi)  So then, if creative toxicity is provisionally taken as a first principle emerging from the Fountains Abbey~Cove Park sequence, where might that take network members from there? From this further perspective, as a “global city” – culturally, politically, economically, environmentally and so forth – London could well provide the network, as current media fashion has it (pace Sabastian Junger), with its perfect storm.

Post-script

Mindful of the several calls on the blog post-Cove Park to focus on the detail of an environment before (if ever?) trying to draw out more generalising observations in response to it I wondered how something of this might be put into practice through writing: about the “site” called Cove Park and its “performances”, about the overt performances that the weekend network group played out in it, whether through localized presentations, descriptions of imaginary located events, or ideas/concepts that reflect more general and/or abstract qualities of where those performances, presentations, descriptions and reflections took place and/or what they pointed towards. So the contribution above worked to use different styles of writing practice to explore various perspectives on what may have happened in that sequence to further the emergent focus of the network’s work, i.e.

• quickly drafted one sentence paragraphs of six lines then subjected to one minutes  worth of editing
• quasi-stream-of-consciousness writing from memories of the presentations in an order evolved as they came to mind
• carefully crafted one sentence commentaries on what the presentations might signify relationally done at moderate speed but then largely un-amended
• more measured-pace ruminative writings on critical perspectives suggested by three  network members who did not make scenario-based presentations, towards the end increasingly edited and rewritten up to two or three times for clarity
• and so on …

but always aiming to let the results of the initial section inform the next, and that the next and so on till the end. The methods and their order were not planned in advance, but emerged through the doing of the writing practices exercise as a whole. The aim was to work from the particulars of the “site” and the group’s responses to it, through increasing attempts toward generalisation: evolving from the “local” to the (potentially) “global”, perhaps. Of course I make no claims in any way to privilege what the result might signify; it’s just one of myriad possible, always fallible, versions of the events of the weekend. But I hope that as a semi-structured method of consciously using varied but linked writing practices to reflect on the creative practical and analytical theoretical practices at Cove Park it might be of passing interest in light of the earlier comments on that network event.

Steve very kindly asked if I would put up the notes from my talk on Friday 11th February at the Glasgow Symposium. They seem dated now by the experiences of the Saturday and Sunday at Cove Park, but I’m happy to have them here, as long as they are taken as informal; notes for speaking; as only somewhat philosophical; as an over-simplified and ridiculously vast sweep of ideas which have been consolidated from many – unnamed, unacknowledged – sources. They were meant in the spirit of offering ideas or problems from philosophy that might be taken on a week-end visit to a site, by an interdisciplinary group looking at environmentalism, learning, environmental change and developing site-based work.

So here goes, a mix of sentences and not-sentences, with the bits I cut out as I went along. With thanks, too to Steve, for the connection to Deleuze and Geophilosophy.

(And apropos of nothing, here’s a photo from the Fountains Abbey weekend that I rather like, as Mike touches Alan’s light…)

Background – rough guide to two facets of ecological philosophy:

Western philosophy has considered nature, in relation to the human, to god and to science, to politics, to ideas about reality since the Greeks. In the last hundred years or so, those ontological strands can be found in the process philosophy and relational theories – of, for example, Whitehead, Bergson through Naess, Deleuze, Guattari, Latour, Massumi, Elizabeth Grosz, and many others. These are familiar strands, and are at work across many disciplines.

There’s also been, in the last 30 years, a move to re-examine the conventional categories of philosophy and to consider how ‘nature’ and how environmental change forces them to reconsider how they are done and the concepts they engage with, the arguments they make. This is happening in aesthetics, ethics, politics, philosophy of science, phenomenology. Like we discussed last time  – with the questions of what aesthetic appreciation of a landscape means – what do you include and how do you make a judgment about it. This is also changing, for some, where philosophy is done; as applied philosophy – for example – people working directly in situations of environmental conflict, as ‘philosophers in the field’.

I’m offering some ideas broadly based within relational and process philosophies, and calling on some of the detail of environmental ethics and aesthetics.

When thinking about what to take along when visiting a site:

Some things already work very well –

Phenomenology and performance have already adapted to each other in devising the practices for approaching a place or site, by sensing it, moving in it, responding to it, by spending time with it, inhabiting it, perceiving the flows between the human subject and the other-than-human world.

From other directions – approaches from human historical or mythic or celebratory aspects – has been very productive. Adding scientific information or environmentalist perspectives or actions – are other ways that have been tried. A desire to make possible an ethical experience of place, or animal or element are others.

Too, artists work directly with the land, in remediation projects, and in social organisation in areas where issues of environmental justice are critical.

But I think what is missing, often, when putting together ecology and performance or ecology and art  – is ‘nature’, or a  more direct investigation or grappling with the difficulties of nature – human relations. And I’m not going to define ‘nature’ – but leave it in all its possibilities. There are exceptions of course – like works that involve the animal and human. But I think there are regions of nature-human relations that are not often explored in performance.

There is a bifurcation between theatre practices and nature – one is what humans do, and the other is something else. And yes – one can add knowledge about and experience of nature to performance practices. The frictions of environmental change can be presented and chewed over – while still being in the habit of separating nature and the human. What I’m trying to get to are patterns of thought and experience that do not replicate the bifurcation; or at least are attempts at not doing so. Whether these are overtly expressed in performance, or are influences, or are embedded in new forms of practice.

Or are just ideas to take along and see what happens.

This is in the spirit of Alfred North Whitehead, for whom abstractions were like lures – one develops them in response to a problem, and they lure one’s attention towards something that matters – they give a vector, a direction to experience.

And the four things are:

– the composition of nature-human relations;

– whether the other-than-human and the material have agency;

– the representation of matters of concern;

– and the question of whether ‘sites’ or places can learn.

starting with  –  nature-human relations

Of course, nature and the human are relational, or are part of a network of actors or actants, or are mutually co-dependent, tightly coupled in co-evolution, or are internally coherent, or are together collectives or societies, or are configured as part of a self-organising system, or are part of a complex of emergent properties – the languages of relationality are familiar.

Reality can be thought of as the mediating, assembling, gathering of diverse matters and complex and entangled entities being made and unmade.

But the juicy questions are what kinds of relations are these, how are they composed or configured, how are they experienced in collectives, and as individual entities. In the network analogy, where are the knots, conflicts, sags and over what kinds of timescales.

At the meso-level, of living beings, entities and elements, one can diagram relations like an extended food chain of dependence and influence. It is relational in the sharing of spaces, nutrients, and wastes.

And it is all relational with concepts, histories, institutions, power, the whole apparatus of human society.

At this level, one can somehow assemble elements within some boundary or scale, and analyse, even negotiate or change, the assemblage of relations.

But there’s also relationality expressed more intimately in terms of human perceptions. That is, that there is not a world out there, measurable by science but devoid of qualities to which the human subject adds sense perceptions –  the redness of a tomato, the scent of jasmine, the heat of a stone in the sun. Instead, what is there is the relation between the sensing human and world – the redness of a tomato, the scent of jasmine, the heat of a stone in the sun. And from this, the habits of considering the human as a single, autonomous, separate entity, even at the level of consciousness, break down. That separation that allows one to draw or mark the connections is a device. The accustomed considerations are temporary manifestations.

There are many ways to refer to relationality. Getting in there, into relational thinking – is very difficult to sustain and express. For example –  a problematic example –  to see oneself always in respect of another. Or to not see one’s hand as identifiable segments, but as the relations between the parts. Another familiar example is whether one sees the tree as an entity or as the patterns of 200 years of wind, soil and rain, given shape through the tendencies and the tact of the oak.

I’m starting with this large subject as a way of offering basic questions to ask when visiting a site: what relates me to this? what is the composition of the relations that can be perceived? where, at what scale?

whether the other-than human and the material have agency

The next questions are to do with whether the other-than-human and the material have agency – the ability to act, to move, to alter a surrounding world.

There’s a long tradition – in philosophy – of vitalists and organicists finding that something of life inheres in all things. Currently, questions about whether the material – the non-human, the not-animal or other life form  –  has agency or is in some way animate, are generating ideas and polemics. I want to think here – very briefly – only about agency.

One way to consider this is whether entities other than the human could be sources of action. Can they be things that do things, things that alter the course of events? They might act as quasi-agents or forces with trajectories or propensities seemingly of their own. This may or may not mean that they are animate or alive, but even if they are not, does that mean they are merely instruments awaiting human or animal intervention?

Things like – elements, metals, weather patterns, waste matter, waves, electricity, instruments, fabricated artefacts and commodities, granite and slate.

Another way to look at it is not that the things in themselves have these capacities – they don’t have agency in the way it is conceived of for humans, but that within the network of associations or the assemblage, there is the capacity for things to act or do things. There is a relational field, within which, matter influences the actions of other entities, and affects the course of human actions.

I’m presenting this – not to argue whether it is correct or not – but because these are enticing questions.

There’s interesting critical work in theatre and performance studies on materialities – developing from theatre’s special associations with the inanimate. What’s interesting here is the intersection of performance-making and ‘natural’ environments and the material.

The agency of matter is wonderfully descriptive, and evocative for experimenting with – and not to be explained away. How does one see – for example – nuclear material not as a resource or commodity or weapon – but as having agency, even in its state of reserved potential.

More philosophically, what forms of action and commitment are implied by this? What are the nodes of conflict, where are the vortices of power or the aggregates of care? To what or where do humans then ascribe ethical significance?

Again to refer to Whitehead – he saw human agency and material agency as entwined, and asked the question of how to capture that entwining, and how to intervene in what he called  –  the dance of agency.

representation of matters of concern

I want to switch to a different use of the word matter.

Whitehead recognised what he called matters of concern – in the flux and process of reality, there are matters that have more effect, that are somehow ‘close’. Human experience has variations in it – it isn’t smooth, and those variations matter. Again in Whitehead’s words – ‘Have a care – here is something that matters.’

Bruno Latour also uses the phrase ‘matters of concern’ in a different way – but to indicate similarly that some things are differentiated out of the flatness of a network; the ‘network’ doesn’t account for all of human experience.  Some things matter, they deserve care and protection. Matters of concern evoke emotions, and may call upon us to act, to do something.

Environmentalism has been one of the ways in which matters of concern about environmental conditions and change have been recognised, and represented. [It’s one of the themes of the week-end – why it’s included here.]

I want to talk here no so much from philosophy, but from experience watching 15 years of environmentalism and performance, and from some experience with activist – artists.

We’ve had 50 or 100 years of environmentalism, depending on where you start – and its history is varied and diverse, as are the contexts in which it happens, the forms which it takes, and the critiques of it.

I’m taking environmentalism to mean groups or individuals who in some way act in the interest of ‘nature’ –  generally other-than-human living beings and the ecological niches, corridors, territories, habitats which are necessary for the continuance of life. Those actions may be specific to a geographic place, or within human social organisation. Actions have a purpose – to protect, conserve, value the environment or nature, to speak for it or in defence of it, in ways informed by social and political conditions, science, intuition, and activist ideologies.

It has been motivating and has had an educative force, across many publics – and been uncomfortable, successful for some, ineffective for others; it’s been a source of meaning, and of highly imaginative and intuitive performative strategies.

As rich as it is, I want to argue gently – not strongly –  against starting with environmentalism as the – or as a main source for indicating of matters of concern, or as a guide as to how those concerns could be represented.

Firstly – rather like with the presentation of results from science, there is a tacit black box to environmentalist actions –  the public is shown the results. The actions follow already chewed over thinking and analysis, and packs up a lot of undisclosed assumptions and purposes, I think even when those actions are long term and based on discourse or negotiation.  Viewing an action or intervention  as ‘the expression of an issue’ – can leave deeper questions of understanding and knowledge behind.

The second area is to do with privilege. For many environmental organisations, the development of issues and methods proceeds in different ways and with very different motivations to that of academia or of performance-making. For some, this is the chosen way of operating. But for some, it is because they do not have access to the knowledge that academia or institutional science provides – or do so only on an ad hoc, advisory basis. Some global corporate environmental organisations have access to this. But many don’t.

We – this group – is based in academia, in the humanities – although not composed entirely of academics. And I would argue that the epistemological privilege of academia be used better – there are to hand more sources of information, knowledge, methodologies, and funding for looking into matters of concern than many environmentalist groups could ever dream of. It is a privilege that could be exploited.

The third area is a warning against falling into a deficit model of communication. This is when the ‘information’ is data or facts – but can also be when the subject matter is about feelings and the motivations for actions. The assumption here is that if one can just make the public feel what they should feel, value what they should value, the desired changes will follow. It doesn’t work, or it doesn’t work predictably, and what does or often can happen is that the range of emotions and motivations becomes shrill and narrow. Environmentalism in the arts seems to bring this tendency out – the current example is the excruciatingly bad Greenland at the National.

Having said all that, environmentalist issues may point the way to matters of concern – but so may many other directions of enquiry, and so may experience of a place or site. And these matters of concern involve representation – in ways not defined only by environmentalism. How can nature-human relations be represented aesthetically and politically. The dilemmas of representation are not going away.

can, how sites learn

The last of these sets of questions is the most speculative – and it’s about learning.

If you go along with the ideas that reality is relational, that agency is not only within single individuals, but is, in some way, dispersed through the field of relations, and that there are matters of concern, motivational nodes within those fields – then one might start to ask questions about change, about how change comes about – in the relational field of human and other-than-human, in environments.

There are many ways into this.

Process philosophies look at change as being continual. There are theories of events as modes of change. Change is explained, too, by theories of evolution, of improvised or random variations occurring over time, and adaptation. And then, too, ideas about human interventions, politically, scientifically, in and with environments, which go some way to explaining both the problematic conditions that have been caused by those interventions and actions taken to remedy them. Change – for the human – can happen through trial-and-error, experimentation, haptic experience, revelation.

But what I’m curious about is learning.

This is not just about how human education could alter perceptions, change values, affect behavioural and political change – as important as these things are. Or how an artistic intervention can make a change in the environmental dynamics of a site. Or about the encompassing arc of evolution.

It’s also about whether, if agency is dispersed, then why not learning? Is it possible that learning is not only within human and animate capabilities, or even in a tightly coupled co-evolution of organism and environment?

Can a site, or a place, learn? Or do something that approximates what we think of as learning – not just a back-and-forth response and adaptation – but invention and improvisation at the level of the relational field?

Which I suppose means – can there be surprises in the nature-human relation?

If it is possible, then it’s probably happening, but has been invisible to – or not widely articulated by – human theory.

And what has been being learned, is toxic.

So I have a normative, optimistic, idealistic subtext here. There is an impetus to learning that feels like agency – it’s not merely variation and response. There are differences that make a difference.

There is a lure to this idea which is not just trying to change perspective or perception, but to find a juncture, a point to intervene in what seems like closed or self-replicating systems of toxicity. To learn in another way.

If it’s possible, what difference would it make, to one’s perceptions of nature, and of oneself? to how one intervenes in an environment? to how one might know or inhabit a place? to the urgency of environmental change?

At last, a few moments to jot down some rather rushed reflections on the Cove Park event. I won’t try to compete with the impressively articulate, often poetic, musings of previous bloggers, but simply want to pick up on a few things that struck me that haven’t yet had much airing. Apart from some of the talks on Friday in Glasgow, we didn’t really get round to talking much about learning and young people (in the plenary sessions at least). And nor was that the primary emphasis in the presentations we saw. I don’t have a problem with that – there was plenty else at the site and in the range of presentations that provided us with some remarkable and powerful intellectual and emotional stimuli; and indirectly many of those presentations were of course learning experiences in the widest sense. But I’m glad both Steve and Helen have brought ‘learning’ explicitly back into the frame in their recent blogs. At Cove, I kept finding my own thoughts turning to the challenge of trying to interpret the site a) with a potential audience of ‘young learners’ in mind, and b) in some way building on some of the information we were given about the history of the area by Richard on Saturday morning. Just to clear the decks quickly about what I mean by ‘learning’: I’m not confining myself to curriculum-driven learning, even less to the traditional positivist (or behaviourist) models of learning that prioritise the one-way transmission of a thing called ‘knowledge’. Interestingly, it has often been cultural organisations outside the formal education sector (museums, heritage sites, and perhaps theatres above all) that have been able to pioneer ways of putting the learner at the centre of the experience, engaging with and contributing to informal and lifelong learning and ensuring that learners (and visitors) are not just ‘targeted’ but considered participants in the process. They’ve drawn especially on constructivist and social learning theories (as discussed on Friday in Glasgow), emphasising the ways in which we all learn by making connections and building on pre-existing ‘knowledges’ – theories strongly influenced by Freire, Kolb, Dewey, Vygotsky, Gardner et al. If learners do indeed construct knowledge in an individual and personalised fashion, then the design of any kind of educational programme needs to keep in play all the cognitive, emotional and social dimensions, and to recognise that personal engagement is crucial. The use of drama as a means of engaging potential learners has not surprisingly therefore been embraced by many (but by no means all) ‘learning officers’ in museums, heritage sites, etc – it can be an invaluable tool in providing varied and stimulating ‘ways in’ to the subject matter being addressed.

So, where am I going with this? To take just one example from the Cove weekend, Sally’s fascinating experiment with autobiography, time-lapse photography and intertwined moments of ‘being there’ and ‘being elsewhere’ was clearly a rich experience not only for her but (in necessarily different ways) for the rest of us who stumbled across it and later shared the presentation. It was memorable, distinctive and gently provocative – and, in constructivist terms, as much a learning experience as any of the more formal offerings on Friday and Saturday morning. Maybe the extent of very personal, autobiographical themes in Sunday’s presentations was a useful reminder to us to widen the ways in which we think about learning – to value the particular and the personal as a way of reaching and grappling with the broader themes of environmental change – or, as Helen and Steve are suggesting, to pay attention to the detail before we can hope to move on to the general. How then might all that feed into the devising of programmes that use drama to promote thinking about environmental change in specific locations?

At the risk of stating the blindingly obvious, Cove was such a different site from Fountains! Fountains was awesome in its towering, crumbling edifices and the sheer scale and audacity with which the architecture was imposed upon, and yet later became part of, the landscape. It was powerfully evocative of one particular notion of civilisation developed to a crescendo of form – and yet… subject to constant revision as the small but significant architectural alterations in the stonework reminded us and in constant flux as ‘nature’ (in the shape of the river) refused to be totally thrown off course, returning with a vengeance in the recent floods. Cove Park makes no grand pretensions to being a ‘heritage site’, other than offering us extraordinary vistas of the surrounding landscape from our perch half way up the hillside. The architecture is decidedly subservient to the landscape, everything about the buildings conveying (to me at least) a sense of impermanence and provisionality – even the might of 20^th century concrete. (Fountains is not of course completely permanent, though its makers may well have hoped it would be…) The buildings aren’t trying to make an impressive mark on the landscape, they had to fit in and around the geology as best they could.

Perched as we were, everything seemed to point to the loch, even when it was out of view. The walk down to the shoreline was for me a compelling experience. Not only was there the gravitational pull and a curiosity to see close up what lay beneath us, but an added curiosity triggered by Richard’s presentation on Saturday morning – which I found both illuminating and usefully frustrating.

I was intrigued by the historical overview, and especially the incredible social shifts and swerves over the past few centuries as the Loch became exploited for such different purposes. But we saw the changes mostly through the lens of the history of the Dukes of Argyll. The obvious next step is to wonder what that history looked and felt like from the points of view of the ‘others’ – the farmers, the people who built the houses, hotels and the jetties, the navigators ancient and modern. So I was drawn to the shore line and to wondering about the ways the relationship between loch and land had changed over time. A number of potential projects spring to mind – all of which would require massive local research to flesh out the bones and to investigate local relevance and interest. (Which is why in the time available I copped out of doing a presentation on the Sunday.) One would be (unsurprisingly) some kind of participatory theatre-in-education event, on site at Cove and/or close to the shore. The purpose would be to use drama to explore the social impact of just one of those historical shifts – focusing in on, eg, the moment when tourists started to come for their days out from Glasgow; or indeed when the tourism began to die and jobs and life styles died with it. Of course such shifts are never concentrated into one neatly dramatizable moment and no doubt some ‘poetic licence’ might be necessary, justifiable if participants are provided with facts and resources to investigate the events further. Above all, the idea would be to find dramatic ways of engaging students with aspects of their own local history, offering alternative insights and viewpoints (and alternative voices) on that history, dipping in to the kinds of debates and anxieties and celebrations that must have taken place at times of great change, and provoking questions and reflections on the use(s) human beings have made of the land/loch at one specific point in time – and its potential relevance to the present. Just who were the people who worked for Argyll? What were their attitudes to him, to the land he owned and on which they toiled, and how did they cope with – or try to resist or indeed try to exploit – the changes thrust upon them? Depending on age group and much else, the level of role play might range from full-scale ‘immersion’ through to forum theatre.

Alternatively, one might devise a much more site-specific programme wholly based in the Cove Park territory, such as a much adapted version of a piece created some years ago for the National Trust in the Peak District, ‘Whose land is it anyway?’. In this interactive programme school students in small groups took on roles as investigative journalists invited to attend a meeting to decide the future of a piece of countryside being sold ostensibly for the benefit of the rural community; of course all was not quite as it seemed and as the day progressed and as the students encountered different stake-holders at different parts of the site, the complexity and clash of interests became increasingly apparent. Things culminate in a Caucasian Chalk Circle-like debate about who should own the land and a decision is taken – which may or may not coincide with the students’ own views. When originally devised, it successfully got kids thinking not merely about land ownership and how come who owned what, but more importantly about usage of the land, exploitation vs sustainability, and the possibility of thinking creatively about its future use: how best to respect what has been inherited, understand the rich diversity of its ecology and the changes it’s suffered/sustained, and plan for future change… How do you make claims for the best, most productive or most sustainable let alone fairest use of the land, and whose interests are being served at every juncture when decisions are made or avoided? One can easily imagine, I think, how this could be adapted to Cove Park, and how questions about past, present and future ownership have impacted, and will impact, upon the land in the future. One of the challenges would then be to couple the issue-driven and history-driven scenarios with that attention to detail discussed earlier – to those details of how life was/is/could be lived in particular circumstances which can offer rich, provocative connections with our own lives and at the same time pose the troubling questions. We still have much to learn from Brecht I think.

What, then, to add? Has anyone else had blog-daunt, as I have?

But still … . This offering is highly selective and misses out much. (I am wistful for not mentioning owls/women, tree-dances, nissen hut action, ladles by beds, confluences of river-streams and addressed haggises.) The first part toys with something that’s been niggling away about hosting. The second part is a partial archive of ‘my bit’ and follows themes already started in these blogs. At Cove Park, I opted to focus on the small, to attend to a detail. Both Steve and Helen have articulated, beautifully, something of this move from the abstract to the very particular, to attentiveness and detail. I’m in that area too.

1
In working with Dee Heddon on the middle-if-North weekend of this network, I found myself in a curious role of partial hosting. I raised this at the weekend, some may remember, and it’s stayed with me in musing about the Glascove event, scoring my thinking.

Daniel Watt talks of a ‘philoxenist’ host as ‘one who loves strangers – or loves hospitality and hosting’ (2006: 26). I wouldn’t say I love strangers but I relish hosting (and do rather like strangers if I’m hosting them…). Helping create the event with Dee – inviting speakers, designing the focus and activities, chatting about fish’n’chip suppers, planning breakfast and lunch, cooking – was all a delight. I enjoyed, too certain moments: in seeing folk settled and exchanging ideas at the far end of the main room before Saturday’s dinner; watching people adapt quickly to Cove Park (getting the wood-burner to fire; Helen on excellent kitchen-work!). Like Dee, I was put out when there appeared to be criticism of the site. There was an investment in the site that was, I admit, host-like.

This was a faux-hosting though. Dee was welcoming me as co-organiser, generously, but it was her patch, if anybody’s. And Cove Park is a mighty fickle place to try to host anyway. It is, more, a ‘xenodochium’, a term Watt uses playfully when he asks, ‘aren’t all homes more like the xenodochium (a house of reception for strangers and pilgrims: a hostel, guest-house, esp. in a monastery): a chance refuge, a place for passing through?’ (26) This might well be an appropriate description for Cove Park: a welcoming environment that had qualities of a chance refuge or a temporary ‘hostel’ – that needed little hosting. We were in a place that was self-referentially for visitors (a ‘conversation park’ for passers-by) who used the place and left their cereals with egalitarian ease. We (Dee and I) were not the mistresses of that site; we did not own it or control it, which Derrida claimed as intrinsic to hospitality, of course. Yet I felt hostly. It was a curious, not unpleasant feeling, and it impacted on my response to the purpose of the weekend: reflecting on environmental change…

I had worried – as Steve says too – about whether we were engaging fully enough in matters of environmental change in our work and hoped this would emerge more fulsomely on our middle plateau. It was, I think now, part of the philoxenist tendency. A love of hosting an event for the facilitation of new ideas? A desire to help create a positive and constructive space for practical thought? A sense of responsibility for the focus of the network? There is caution and nervousness attached to creating an event – not least in asking eminent colleagues to create performance work on wet Scottish hillsides – but that, too, is a hostly response of course.

What was most interesting was to recognise that in being however equivocal a host, I went through a process of ‘giving away’. Derrida suggests noone can be altruistic enough to be truly hospitable; you can’t give away all that you own to your ‘guests’. What happened at the Glascove event for me was perhaps a form of fraudulent ‘giving away’ – fraudulent because I actually had little to give. Instead, perhaps, I passed on psychological responsibilities – paradoxically, a form of ‘un-hosting’? A result of the psychological ‘passing over’ was a savouring and delight in the new turns taken in our reflections on environmental change and no more concerns about the extent to which we were ‘meeting objectives’. The work meandered and wandered, finding its own practical ruminations. This was initiated at the Friday symposium, with its eclectic speakers, and extended through the weekend. So, with thanks to Dee and Steve, my co-hosting allowed me to feel wrapped (although not shrink-wrapped) into the weekend; the subsequent un-hosting or ‘giving away’ offered a form of liberation for experiment and an acceptance of ‘slow pedagogies’ or, maybe, ‘accruing attentions’? It was evident too in my own choices. Rather than concerns with the large-scale (which I had anticipated), I engaged with the small, perfectly satisfied with a homunculus of environmental concerns. (It was, too, additional fraudulent philoxenism as, together with a resident light-with-agency, I played host in a space a couple of metres square to passing visitors.)

Just musings.

2. The work: Living with Environmental Change.

The Upper Case:
• ‘Living with Environmental Change is a partnership of 22 major UK public sector funders and users of environmental research, including the research councils and central government departments. The 10-year programme aims to optimise the coherence and effectiveness of UK environmental research funding and ensure government, business and society have the foresight, knowledge and tools to mitigate, adapt to and capitalise on environmental change.’ (http://www.lwec.org.uk)
• Living with Environmental Change is the politics of inconvenient truths-and-lies and Planet Stupid (see David’s link to Guardian article).
• Living with Environmental Change is hearing of recent nuclear waste at Faslane and Coulport.
• Living with Environmental Change is a worry of not knowing how to Live with Environmental Change or how to communicate it or how to encourage the learning of it…

the lower case:
• living with environmental change is watching a mother change her environment happily leaving behind her life-belongings in moving to a home. (On the train to London, David Harradine tells of a colleague’s great-aunt who lived globally. By way of a house, flat and room, she spent her last two months in one chair.)
• living with environmental change is noticing a light in the day (or Dee’s not-yet-a-light) and tutting wryly.
• living with environmental change is feeling I should be supporting a mother in Monmouth and not dwelling so richly in the Scottish environment.
• living with environmental change is turning away from large scale space and the nuclear and Scottish grandeur to attend to detail – and surprising myself by doing so.

I chose to attend to the small, then, to comment on a fragment of energy waste amidst the overwhelming size of issue that we were grappling with at Glascove (the immense task of communicating, with effect and integrity, matters of environmental change through site-specific performance … the global and local complexity of living with nuclear warheads and their stealthy carriers …). Every five to ten minutes over a two hour period, I photographed a light that had been left on during the day, remaining in the space to experience ‘the Wastetime’ until dusk came. Whilst waiting I wrote, alternating between my mother’s environmental change (on one side of recycled tablecloth) and ‘things I had tried to learn’ about current environmental issues (on the other). A conversation between guilts, perhaps.

Light [click here to see the sequence of path light images]

1. An Introduction

In our original conception of our network our intention was to migrate north, as some of the animal and bird species are predicted to do in response to climate change. We would have kicked off the network in London, then moved on to Yorkshire, and finally arrived in Scotland.

In the event, more quotidian factors intervened, making it impossible for us to be in Scotland in the summer. Well, that’s not wholly true. It would have been possible to be in Scotland in summer, but not possible to be at our chosen site – Cove Park. Cove Park, an artist’s retreat about an hour from Glasgow on the Rosneath Peninsula, is filled with artists in the summer. In the winter months, it is available for hire. Cove Park is perched high above the shores of Loch Long, looking over to the mountains of the Cowal Peninsula, the Stronchullin Hill and Creachan Mor. The landscape windows of Cove Park frame a picture-postcard concept of ‘Scotland’.  According to one website, the name of the Rosneath Peninsula derives from the Gaelic ‘Rosneimhidh’, meaning ‘a sanctuary’.

Taut Wires

Just out of eyesight of Cove Park is Coulport – home to Royal Navy’s Trident Missiles. And on the other side of the hill lies Faslane. The topography of this land makes it prime site for naval operations – narrow loch mouths performing as natural defence barriers.

It was not just the rich contradictions of Cove Park that proposed it as an ideal site for our network though. Those picture windows do frame an iconic landscape. It is pleasurable to sit and watch the picture change second by second, as rain tips down in sheets, as rays of sun puncture white clouds and glance of the still loch, as the hills disappear in mist and then reappear in their majestic glory. And Cove Park has its own layers of history; a 50 acre site that was used as an ammunition store during WWII (one Nissen hut remains intact, but the concrete foundations of others punctuate the landscape); then it was a conservation park; and now it is an artists’ retreat that still has a place for the resident Highland cows, sheep and ducks.

A witty sign in the main building of Cove Park, made by some Glasgow School of Art students, offers a further clue to the fit between our network and this site: ‘Conversation Park’. On the in-side of those large picture windows, a large table, and behind this large table a large wood burning stove, and behind this large wood burning stove, a large kitchen. Cove park is a place that holds conversation; a cove for conversation.

2. Initiating

As the co-organisers of this leg, Sally Mackey and I wanted to start out in Glasgow and invite others into the network, as well as open the network out to others. One of our shared interests – or questions – concerns communication. How can site-based art ‘communicate’ environmentalism, or questions relating to climate crisis? How might it engage with different audiences, children and adults? To address this very large issue of ‘communication’, we deliberately invited a diverse range of speakers: geographer Chris Philo, artistic director of nva Angus Farquhar, environmental educationalist Alan Reid, artistic director of Fevered Sleep David Harradine, and network member Wallace Heim.

The 3 hour ‘symposium’ proved richer than Sally or I could have imagined: thoughtful, challenging, contradictory and generative.  It is impossible to do those 3 hours justice here and I offer here only fleeting insights that will communicate or not (and any mis-hearings or mis-representations are wholly my own):

AF: – How you make the work is as important as why

– Don’t pretend, as an artist, that you are doing more than raising ideas of best practice

– You cannot beat people into changing their behaviour; you can prompt an act of inspiration. Making work to raise issues that leads to more complex debates (not offering solutions).

– The movement of the work becomes an issue – how do you transport people to the work (and the work itself is always perambulatory); there were contradictions in form and content.

– Confronting issues of land ownership – who owns the land?

– Distance between national and local ownership

– The environmental agencies are self-protecting – serving to cover their own backs rather than protect the environment

– Audience responses cannot be controlled

– Creating a piece in a managed forest plantation created a type of value for it – works have been left there

– The work is the iceberg – there’s more going on beneath the surface

– an idea can usefully outlive the action

– So often the roots of what we have are born out of the radical (e.g. shared bikes in cities)

CP:

– rational outlines begin to flicker

– the child’s world – magical realism – the factual real and the imaginary imaginary

– inattentive musings – inattention

– the child’s habitual, repeating writing of her everyday story in her jotter is like an idle daydream, an environmental reverie

– the child as social actor is the dominant model in children’s geography

– how do/can researcher’s access children’s worlds?

– does the process, the method, of accessing it change it?

– problematic of the representationalist agenda – that words are a window on the internal world

– but the words provided by children can often be very banal (academics expect everyone to be mini-academics)

– necessity of finding different methods for disclosing thoughts worlds and life worlds (children’s thoughts, values, hopes and fears)

– The problem of asking children to do things is that you control/prompt the research data

– the poetics of childhood lies in inattention

– delicate reveries

– how to access the inattentive as a researcher?

– archives of children’s reveries

DH:

– investment of time and effort into place

– problem of translating exterior into a performance-based event inside

– rain evidencing moss

– room full of fog, room full of sky, room full of heat and light

– and moss (damp)

– visual archive of environmental change (pictures of same site taken daily over many years)

– attentive to the landscape

– prompting people to look again, look askance at where they live

– generic landscapes rather than specific ones (e.g. the forest)

– The Forest – 5-8 year olds; taking inner city kids to Epping Forest. Learning about the forest from the kids, as they learnt to play in it, to be in it. The kids spoke of the forest as a mythical place, rather than one they might encounter.

– The questions they asked included ‘Will we get back home?’ ‘Do you know where the path is?’

AR:

– “Nobody ever rioted for austerity”

– Debate becomes monologue (‘we’ve got the knowledge, we’ve just got to get people to act on it’

– proposition of only being able to act in one way

– Is there a plurality possible to the knowledges?

– when is social learning conservative and when is it transformative?

– social learning towards a sustainable future

– learning as social practice – situative perspective

– “climate change is an ethical issue because it involves the distribution of resource”

– slow pedagogies

– critical pedagogies of place

– place-based learning as rooted in empathic experience (Chet Bowers)

– residents or dwellers in a place/space

– the technics of education

– An Inuit child talking to his father about the trip’s his father would take him on: “I didn’t realise it was ‘educational’”

– Pedagogies of terror

– What is the learning which goes on here? Are there other ways of doing this?

WH:

– relational philosophies

– what drops off in art and ecology is ‘nature’

– separation of nature and human

– vortexes of power and aggregates of care

– The sensing human and the world

– What relates me to this?

– Agency – sources of action

– The non-human are quasi-agents, not merely instruments

– matter influences the action of things

– materialities of environment

– human agency and material agency = the dance of agency

– Have a care. Here is something that matters.

– Don’t put environmentalism on stage

– Dilemmas of representation are not going away

– How change happens

– Change can happen through trial and error

– Can a site learn? Not just an adaptation but an improvisatory process- surprise, negotiation, novelty

– The site as a field of learning as well as a relational field

– Is what is being learned toxic?

– The capabilities of the environment

– Can they/we learn to survive?

– How do I relate to this site? How does this site relate to me?

– If you find conflict and dissent interesting, then empathy is less interesting.

3. The site.

The brief: create a piece at Cove Park that picks up on threads from Fountains Abbey, or from Friday’s symposium. This can be a piece that you perform at Cove, might perform at Cove, or might perform somewhere else.

We tour the site, we walk the site, we watch the site, we find places:

Steve: The Bridge

Tim: Relocating the sounds from Fountains Abbey to here

Paula: Water

David: The cube in which he is staying

Me: The Bird Hide

Alison: The sound of the site

Sally: The outside lights that are on during the day time

JD: The place as a retreat; how this space rewires thought and thinking; how this space impacts on people’s practices

Wallace: materials as agency; smell of sewage

Phil: Tree and Model of Site in main space

Baz: The old bomb store; the fact that underneath the building in which we sit is a rubbish dump

Helen: What I’ve brought and what I’m going to leave and what I’m going to take away; inside/outside

Someone mentions – is it Wallace – that it is already interesting to note the different places people have chosen.

Someone mentions – is it Tim – that we are different here. That how we move, how we are, is different here.

Someone mentions – is it Phil – that we are policed here.

I am surprised to discover that I feel protective of here, that this is my retreat, that the site feels overwhelmed with people and busyness and critiques and I wonder, worry, how I will be and it will be when I return again, in the future, these events now written over my previous experiences of this site.

The Bird Box

4. Site-based performance.

The Bird Hide

Start on the path outside the two pods. Walk up the gravel path that leads to Taransay. Pick up the plastic Owl that perches on the wooden railing outside Taransay. Hold the Owl close. Walk back down the gravel path, that becomes, at about half way point, more like a stream. At the end of the path, turn around and walk back. Repeat a number of times. Enjoy the sound of the gravel underfoot, followed by the swish of the water that is now submerging the path.

After at least three journeys, begin to drop bits of broken white crockery onto the path – like bits of crockery discovered down on the beach. Drop a shard of crockery each time you walk towards Taransay. Drop 5 bits in total.

Once you have dropped the final piece, walk on to the decking and lie down on it, still holding Owl. Look through the taut wires that run between the posts. You and Owl. Look at the people looking at you. You and Owl. Look through each of the wires – each gap offers a different viewpoint, a different perspective, a different way of framing, seeing the view. Look for the birds. You and Owl.

Return to the lowest gap, You and Owl:

I spy

Then the next gap, You and Owl:

I am spying

Then the final gap, You and Owl:

I am spied

Return to the lowest gap, You and Owl:

I spy – water, reeds, moss, mud

Move up to  the next gap, You and Owl:

I spy – paddle steamers, day trippers, Queen Victoria

Move up to the next gap, You and Owl:

I spy – submarines. Duck. Hide. Duck hide.

Move up above the railing entirely, look up towards the sky, You and Owl:

I spy – a small, wooden bird box, attached to a tree. A small, wooden bird box, attached to a tree.

Place Owl on the wooden railing, and put woolly hat on her head. Wait – then pull hat down over Owl’s eyes.

Once upon a time there were steps leading down

Once upon a time there was a wooden floor

Once upon a time there were four wooden walls

Once upon a time there was blue tarpaulin sheeting

Once upon a time there was a grass roof

Once upon a time there was an inside and an outside

Once upon a time there were no steps leading down

Once upon a time there was no wooden floor

Once upon a time there were no wooden walls

Once upon a time there was no blue tarpaulin sheeting

Once upon a time there was no grass roof

Once upon a time there was no inside or outside

Once upon a time there were steps leading down

Once upon a time there was a wooden floor

Once upon a time there were four wooden walls

Once upon a time there was blue tarpaulin sheeting

Once upon a time there was a grass roof

Once upon a time there was an inside and an outside

Once upon a time there were no steps leading down

Once upon a time there was no wooden floor

Once upon a time there were no wooden walls

Once upon a time there was no blue tarpaulin sheeting

Once upon a time there was no grass roof

Once upon a time there was no inside or outside

Once upon a time there were steps leading down

Once upon a time there was a wooden floor

Once upon a time there were four wooden walls

Once upon a time there was blue tarpaulin sheeting

Once upon a time there was a grass roof

Once upon a time there was an inside and an outside

Once upon a time there were no steps leading down

Once upon a time there was no wooden floor

Once upon a time there were no wooden walls

Once upon a time there was no blue tarpaulin sheeting

Once upon a time there was no grass roof

Once upon a time there was no inside or outside

Repeat as often as feels right. Then stop. Take a small piece of blue tarpaulin sheeting from coat packet. Then a small piece of wooden floor. Then a small piece of wooden wall. Then a small piece of grass roof. Then a small twig. Place all in a heap. Place in the centre of the heap a tiny model of a woman.

Remove the hat from Owl and put it on Your head. Turn Owl to look down on miniature scene. Pick up steaming drink – served in a white china mug – and walk towards the pod: the pod with the steps leading up, the wooden floor, the wooden walls, the blue tarpaulin sheeting, the grass roof, the inside and outside…

The Bird Hide

5. Some Reflections

Sally captured beautifully the sheer waste of a light that burns during daytime. As dusk and then night descend, the energy that is being used becomes palpable, tangible, but so too is the purpose of the light revealed. A light is only a light when it is dark, when something needs to be lit. A light in daytime disappears; it is functionless, its energy wasted.

Alison: Being and being about rather than being about environmental change. That’s something to take on board, something to think about, something to aspire to? A way of being and being about.

Phil: A place of ‘nothingness’ seems, nevertheless, to generate a place of ‘fullness’, an exuberant, mad, magnificent performance of speed, action, repetition, myth, unfolding; Owl Women, Eternal Tree, Boy and Girl, Men in White Suits Running With White Suitcases,  a Communal Dinner That I Follow Hungrily As It Slides Down The Hill, cycle by cycle. This is an encounter with the place; what an encounter this is with this place, nothing transformed into invaluable.

Baz: Father playing son playing father, sideways look at a life lived foolishly, foolhardily, to do something. Hurrah for that life, for that youthful sprint and hurdle jump and all those hurdles held precariously and overcome or not, and it doesn’t matter, and hurrah for the skills and craft and creativity and speaking into the wind and rain, the fruit of labour perched atop a broken gate, a submarine and atop it another smaller submarine signalling through the wind and rain too, but not as loudly, not as lively, not as alive as you.

Tim: Pitter patter rain on hood, birds, echoes, stone masonry, simultaneous placing, emplacing, layering, transporting, time travel, but my feet remain rooted here, to this spot, my eyes to these sites, ears and mind and eyes and feet topsy turvy. Rain, pitter patter, crickets, summer, seasonal disorder? Climate change? Crickets in winter? Crickets but no more summers?

Steve: White cubes, landscape windows, perspectives, clean edges. Reframing the torrid burn as a landscaped garden feature – a way to render that landscaping, any landscaping, an act of nonsense. Water feature? Agency of the burns – improvising, negotiating? You trying to speak over it, your paper getting wet, sodden, us getting wet, sodden, ears cocked, listening intently, to the burn’s roar, to your nearly eclipsed, strained voice, to the two stories, the two pitches, the two rhythms, water/voice bursting its banks/landscaping its banks. Then you negotiating the water as it negotiates its environment, we look down, seeing but not hearing, watching your efforts, jumping the streams, counting the tributaries.

Steve

Paula: Tree not tree, becoming tree, tree becoming, becoming me, becoming tree. Who is holding who – up, in place? Who is growing? What is tree teaching? What is tree learning? How did tree/me grow (here)? Limbs, moss, green, shapes, spaces, light, movement, flow, balance, root, roots, rooting.

Helen: Consumption, greed, rushing, stuffing. The sheer quantity of things left over was startling – but left in the hope that it is not wasted. Yet it is wasted. Yet it is reused, at least, here. Cove Park’s Food Reserve. In case of a food shortage, nuclear attack, things running low, running out? When we leave something, who do we imagine will use it? Do we ever imagine it not being used? What to do with all this stuff? Risk not bringing it in the first place? A cereal moratorium. A cereal mausoleum. Testimony to things left over, left behind, left.

David: Silence – not quite – please breathe more quietly, stop rustling your water proof jacket. It’s difficult to command silence in a room of 12 people, standing close together. My glasses have steamed up. Then, startling figure breaking up the still landscape, but uncannily, no noise, no sound, just the movement, disconnected from us by the pane of glass between there and here. He gestures, gesticulates, speaks, communicates – what? We can’t hear. Closer, closer, braving freezing pond to reach us – to have his voice reach us. The distance between there and here, though, is significant, takes persistence, effort, focus. We did not move. We waited till he came close enough for us to hear him. Till his voice came into view, broke through this barrier. I know that swallows fly straight into this sheet of glass.

when I am exploring Cove Park I find some appealing spaces – space under the pods, the (eternal) tree, the model under perspex in the main building, the hidden rubbish dump, the whole sight as a viewpoint, the nissen hut (with tales of explosives and its 2WW graffiti cartoon Hitler face) – but I can’t find anything in a single place, just as at Fountains Abbey I’m struck by the site as a machine, that it is working to some ‘end’, it is a producer… narratives seem to stream through the site like drovers herding missiles and tourists around a now ghostly resort, steamers full of rubbish, surveillance tugs chugging far off, the geological fault all the way to Wallace’s home and my workplace… the nineteenth century ghosts walking to see the Adam and Eve trees, carpet factory owners, distillery owners, steel factory owners… come here to carry on owning… and producing … I want to see those ghosts spaces… the empty resorts… the empty proms…

I notice the fallen owl, complementing the watchful one  (wisdom, Minerva) … imagine them aboard the 2WW bus with its blacked out windows… information, looking, surveillance, careless eyes…

the derelict castle  that was blown up.. the fragments… a caravan park in the ruins… in the spectre… the caravans in the spectre…

precariousness… but I can’t find it, the unstable materials, yes, the geological faultline that hasn’t shifted for aeons, the building upon a buried rubbish heap… a Zone… a space where the detritus of an alien picnic has infected the ground…

the social table… hovering above the buried waste..

I dreamed the performance, but I forgot the dream  – erosion – struggling now… the rock split… talking to try and make sense – not working… a figure running with cases full of spaces, full of rubbish and waste… fleeing the effects of accidents…

out of horrible uncertainty, on this strange site… unable to fit it to expectations of a lochside… raised up… too high… brain too misty, too forest-like in the mind … dead, dread floors… nothing moves… almost silent … dark green shadow

holding on desperately to the theoretical and abstract and generic ideas shared by others… the only things I am able to get a grip upon… losing grip of self and confidence… bouncing between giving in and over-imposing…

The Scenario

there are two cycles to the performance – one performed tightly and quickly, though it slows down – the second happening around the fringes of the first cycle…

the event occurs over a day

First Cycle: audience/participants arrive by van (in say 5 groups, up to 10 people per groups) – perhaps collected from viewing point above Faslane Base) – as their van pulls in a ‘white man’ (white face, white clothes, white hands) like the white figure in the model pulls up in a car and gets out, grabbing suitcases and runs past the main building and along the top path/road, followed by the audience van…

they get as far as the gate (which the white man vaults/climbs – the van stops and the audience are let out to follow the white man

at the nissen hut there is the sound of hammering and the lights are on… through a crack in the door hinge the audience can glimpse amateur technologists trying to attach a prosthesis to an animal-machine hybrid that thrashes and struggles

audience follow the path to where it drops down to the cubes and pods

in the cubes, on the balconies over the water, sit three visionaries designing sustainable societies for the tiny rock in the water

the audience is met by an owl woman (closer to the pods another owl woman lies face down in the grass) – a girl and a boy stand hand in hand under The Eternal Tree – the owl woman speaks of the horrors of the industrial and post-industrial world, of destruction of natural environments, of the pollution and omnipresence of manipulative images and of the purity of nature, of the innocence of children, of the co-operation and non-violence of animals, of the wonder and beauty of life without history, of the wisdom of trees – she calls to the girl and boy, and asks them leading questions, attempting to have them repeat her point of view, but they are obtuse, they say: “we know all this”

the white man emerges from the pods – still carrying the suitcases – speaks with desperation – something terrible has happened – tells the owl woman and the children to come with him, they must get to the car, helps the fallen owl woman to her feet…

the first owl woman and the man argue – they blame each other for compromises, for not doing enough, for selfishness, for complicity in the catastrophe, the man tells the owl woman that there is no time left, they fight over the suitcases… the owl woman gets hold of one of the suitcases, accusing the man of trying to steal something… the man frantically tries to persuade the owl woman not to open it… failing, panicked, the drags the second owl woman away, up the path…

the owl woman opens the suitcase and there is a blinding light from inside the case, extra lights flood the space, illuminating the children and the tree – electr-rock music – son et lumiere – nearby a bush bursts into flames…

the owl woman is blinded by the light and falls into the grass in the same place and position as the second owl woman had lain

a ‘Stalker’ guide emerges from the bird hide and beckons the audience away from the pods, past the second set of cubes and down to the down-sloping right hand path. the Stalker explains that they are taking the audience to the Zone – a magical place where the pollution and rubbish of mysterious nineteenth century visitors (or possibly a previous, Neolithic society) – no one knows quite who or what – has created a terrain in which everyone can find an answer to their questions and meet their needs…

‘Stalker’ leads the audience to the metal gates, ushering them through the small gap to the roadside, then locks the small gate and disappears off into the trees…

a 1940s bus draws up and picks up the audience – its windows are blacked out – the driver explains that the audience will now be driven to the Zone, but that they must not look out through the blacked out windows, that the Zone is always in danger of being exploited by enemies and sinister powers, that it would be disastrous for them if they knew too much, that they are in danger…

the bus drives the audience down the road towards the loch, but then turns right up the steep road and then right again into the Cove Park site and the cycle begins again… as they get of the bus in the car park a  car pulls up and out jumps a white man with suitcases and runs past the main building and along the top path, the audience follow on foot, through the gate, down towards the nissen hut…

and so on… over a day the audience might repeat this cycle 5 or 6 times, each time the cycle will take longer, each time the experience will be less theatrical than the previous cycle

more and more the audience will be drawn off to actions and processes adjacent to the cycle…so, during the second or third cycle, the audience will join a feast round the table in the main building – here there are various models on the table of a future Cove Park and the problems of Cove park – its place in the military industrial complex, its energy profligacy,  its hidden histories, its natural sheen over a landfill site – are discussed… as well as the merits and problems of the different models of the future… the discussion includes the local sourcing of materials, and when suppliers arrive with refreshments they are encouraged to join in the discussion… in the middle of the day this feast sets off along the route of the cycle and the various circulating audiences are encouraged to help carry the table, models, food, drink, etc. a short way along the route each time they pass, joining in the discussion at stopping points…

throughout the day nissen hut activity continues unchanged, the  technologies struggling to attach more and more the prostheses to the struggling hybrid

the audience visits the individual visionaries in the cubes to examine their plans

the owl women/children/white man sequence might become more melodramatic, or maybe less and less theatrical…

the Stalker/s lead the audiences off the path, to adjacent spaces – to find abandoned pipes, piles of building wood rotting, etc. – occasionally the owl woman’s voice can be heard speaking of the purity of nature, but she is never seen in the woods

eventually the moving feast and table enter the Zone (for the area around the down-sloping path IS the Zone, not the way to it) and the discussion moves on to how solutions for the site can answer the needs of the people around the table, meet their needs…

when the feast and table reach the metal gates the cycle is broken – all the audiences assemble there, the large metal gates are unlocked and opened and the old bus pulls up – the table and feast is loaded aboard and then the audience process with the bus down to the loch side… where the table and feast is reassembled at the large broken granite boulder that frames the weapons establishment at Coulport and makes a V that mirrors the inverted V of the mountains.

They feast.

fuzziness

increasingly spill into the site

tangential, adjacent

patterns of patterns

from apocalyptic instability to de-territorialising, de-composing, re-composing instability

the learning inanimate

the independent brain

nothingness

increasingly the audience carry the suitcase

the necessary dynamic of hypocrisy (proceeding by principles despite individual, empirical contradictions) – what does that look like?  (confession of individual indiscretions followed by forgiveness unhelpfully dis-arms everyone)

adjacent city (city as rubbish tip)

what is environmentalism’s Tahrir Square?

mobile table – tight associations – cells – spiralling organisation (but in what environmental space?)

base ethics on pleasure

(I was happy with nothing – so rather than a grandiose scheme I intended to propose that I chose nothing – but then, of course, that would mean I would leave a tantalising space, even more grandiose… trembling, ridiculous… uncomfortable… stayed up in the darkness, got up before the dawn and worked for another couple of hours – I was trying… at the end – would have been better to get everyone to watch film of the Bike-Bloc – activism… there’s nothing ‘better’ here… but I don’t leave it hovering between the options…

in my notebook there are some notes towards a paper…

we miss one train, but catch up at a connection…

+ + + +

[notes from the Friday symposium:]

art of living – what’s the point of making performance around these “issues” if they are not connected to larger ‘art of living’ (ie. an extended journey or social construction) – while avoiding the dangers of “milieu”

spectacular performance in the mountains… but no account of the journey there… painting with light, imposing a chiaroscuro over the rocks

the White Bikes – revolutionary capitalism

artist – depicting what is not

hackneyed forms of immersion – romantic-sublime, son et lumiere, Blackpool Illuminations, rock concerts

inattention – postmodernism’s distracted involvement – paying attention to not paying attention – intense attractiveness – “heightened” awareness and (exaggerated) behaviour… AGAINST “attending to play” (hyperawareness and tending) – these places don’t care about us – the significance of indifference

the significance of duration

specificity is not immobility, but about a particularity of attention (in relation to generic space)

what would really scary would be if there was “climate stasis”.

the enforcing monologue – “the world is going to end, you must do this”

the problem of apocalypse is that it is gratifying, it delivers such fabulous playgrounds – and it fits perfecting into a set of entertainment relations (disaster, credits, forget)

real-irreal

model – ‘the emergency services’…. model individuals who speak of climate change – geeks, garden sheds… undynamic, head roles…

what about death, why this wish for species immortality? (see Hans Jonas) why does it have to go on?

I am interested in the idea of attentiveness as a way of suggesting the kind of affective engagement with things – human, non-human, imagined, material – that disrupts the orderliness of the world and invites learning to become intimate. In reflecting on learning and environmental change, I am interested in how to bridge the gap between what we do now, domestically and in the everyday, and how we might imagine (re-imagine?) the future. For me, this is not about constructing or absorbing dystopic narratives – what Alan Reid described as an education of terror – in which we might position ourselves (or children) as either anti-heroes or saviours, but in the quiet moments of attentiveness in which we make one choice rather than another. It is this attention to the intimacy of domestic details and the opportunity to work creatively in the vernacular spaces of everyday life that has the potential for what Lefebvre calls the ‘politics of small achievements’. Perhaps this is what Bachelard in means in The Poetics of Space when he talks of attending to the ‘dynamic virtues of miniature thinking’ which he sees both as ‘beyond logic’ and as a stimulus for ‘profound values’ (1994, pp. 150-151).

Dee's red mug

I am reminded of the images we saw from Fevered Sleep’s Weather Factory – the moss in the bathroom, the mist hovering inside the house and the excess of pendant lights – each of which held a fragmented world in domestic miniature. Steve mentioned smallness in his blog, and it was interesting that Sally’s light, Dee’s miniature installation and Paula’s kinaesthetic connection with the movement of trees, in different ways, condensed complex thought into theatrical image. Theatre, performance, the relational aesthetic of the arts can insist on this kind of attentiveness, and I think it is the affect of attentiveness that has the potential to re-order thought and change environments. When Jane Bennett refers to the ‘self-criticism of conceptualization, a sensory attentiveness to the qualitative singularity of the object, the exercise of an unrealistic imagination, and the courage of a clown’ (2010, p. 15) she is actually talking about the pedagogy of Adorno’s negative dialectics, but there is something in that sensory attentiveness that seems to me to link art, subjectivity and learning in ways that might just create the conditions for thinking through environmental change.

Layers of rock on a wall

What I am plugging away at is finding a way to bridge the pedagogical gap between the apocalyptic imagery of disaster movies and just carrying on as we are. I am suggesting that this is about the affect of scale. It is also about time, and I am drawn to Alan Reid’s idea of a slow pedagogy in which the cumulative layering of one miniature moment on top of another reshapes the everyday and inspires new practices. What is the role of the arts all this? I am not sure that Giroux’s model of critical pedagogy (the one that was at the bottom of Alan’s grid) quite does it. Sure, it focuses on practices, activity, critical engagement, dialogue and all those other progressive education virtues, but in the process it assumes an Ideal Speech Situation that is not always as ‘empowering’ as its rhetoric claims. Elizabeth Ellsworth was heavily criticised in the 1980s for saying exactly that, and her response is instructive for debates about the pedagogy of climate change. She advocates a pedagogy of place that is constructed spatially and dynamically, through ‘a complex moving web of inter-relationalities’ (2005, p. 24). It is attentive to the movement of bodies, to memory, forgetting, sound, smell, taste – it  marks the limits of me and you (or self and other) and offers encounters with an outside in ways that prompt thinking about the ‘unthought’. Ellsworth uses Winnicott’s idea of transitional space to theorise this approach to learning – and although I am not sure that her emphasis on Winnicott’s anxious projections quite does it for me, it offers one way to start questioning the relational aesthetics of artistic engagement and its contribution to learning and knowing. I am searching for a vocabulary to witness moments of witnessing – attending to the aesthetic doubleness in which affect becomes visible and understood, at least temporarily.

Cove Park reminded me to be attentive to the aesthetic vulnerability of learning, its intimacy and messiness. It was interesting that many people chose to work alone but also beside people (in Eve Sedgwick’s sense) – my own interest in layering as Steve rightly picked up was amplified by conversations with JD on Saturday and the imagery of cereal boxes was inspired by Fevered Sleep’s dramatisation of accumulation in On Ageing. I am sure that other people’s work was were similarly non-linear, associative and layered. This form of learning may have something to do with what Nigel Thrift calls ‘third order knowledge’ – it involves both attention and inattention, when past selves and future selves are not conceived as binaries but layered, embodied, responsive, in relation and in dynamic unity.

Layers of Fluff on sea

World War II Nissen Hut at Cove Park

For the symposium event on environmental performance and education at Glasgow University on Friday afternoon (Feb 11th), Dee Heddon and Sally Mackey had assembled a fascinatingly eclectic range of speakers — but in differing ways this notion of attentiveness connected each of the talks. This train of thought emerged, particularly, from Chris Philo’s presentation, which began with the provocative question, “how can we retrieve the life worlds of children?” Geographers, he argued, have too often tended to treat children as mini-adults, or even mini-academics, and have attempted to research children’s experiences of space and place (both actual and imaginary) through the conventional tools of interview, questionnaire, focus groups. But what if these methods simply distort their own findings, by imposing inappropriate frames on children’s responses? Can one, instead, seek to cultivate an attentiveness to children’s characteristic mode of inattention? Young children are often easily distracted, focusing on things in fits and bursts, prone to slipping into private reverie – and these qualities are evident in their game-playing, picture-painting and story-writing. Can resources such as these be used as research tools?

David Harradine’s presentation about the work of his company, Fevered Sleep, bore little direct connection to Chris Philo’s talk, but this notion of attentiveness to the indirect or seemingly peripheral was just as apparent — whether in his discussion of Fevered Sleep’s An Infinite Line: Brighton (a piece responding to the intangible qualities of environmental light in Brighton – which prompted a gallery-based performance involving a live horse!), or in his account of working with children to develop The Forest, a movement-based piece for 5- to 8-year-olds. Most of the children that the company took on a day-trip to an actual forest, as part of their research, had never even been to one before: instead, they associated forests with myths and fairy stories rather than personal experience: “Where’s grandma’s cottage?” My mind flicked back to a Natural England report I read about recently, which noted that only 10% of today’s children play in woodlands, heaths or countryside, compared to 40% of adults when we were younger. (For further info on this issue see www.childrenandnature.org/research) There’s a basic, experiential disconnect here that surely needs to be addressed if discussion of the natural environment, and our location within it, as part of it (rather than distanced consumers of it), is to have any real meaning for children – and indeed adults.

These thoughts were reinforced in the talk by Alan Reid, editor of the journal Environmental Education Research, who emphasised the futility of abstracted, scare-mongering approaches to climate change education. Subjecting children to “an hour of pedagogic terrorism before going into Double French” is unlikely to achieve anything worthwhile or lasting for the child, Reid proposed – so instead of the monologue / lecture approach in discussing these issues, strategies are needed for encouraging active, experiential learning and dialogic exchange. What’s the point of talking to children about the environment or the natural world if they have no meaningful reference points for what’s being talked about? (Does our penchant for apocalypse narratives stem from the fact that we do have pop-cultural reference points for those?) Learning begins with experience, so perhaps – Reid noted – what we need is “slow pedagogy” rather than “quick fix.”

Following the afternoon symposium (there were two other speakers – Angus Farquhar and Wallace Heim – of whom more later), network members enjoyed an informal meal while viewing and discussing a selection of short videos. The screening of an edited version of the recent feature documentary The Age of Stupid seemed to sum up the problems Reid had outlined. Here was a patchwork of “real life” stories intended to galvanise viewers into taking action on climate change — and indeed, Tim Nunn informed us, the film has been successfully used as a tool among campaign groups to re-energise supporters and activists. And yet the framing of the film, from the point of view of the late Pete Postlethwait, who plays a survivor of the global-warming apocalypse – sifting through his archive of footage from the early 21st century, when “something could still have been done” – seems simply to reinforce the very problems it purports to be concerned with. Postlethwait is a passive viewer, sitting in an implausible tower in the clouds, cut off from the world below and engaging with it by gloomily flicking (with the weary finger of one raised on i-Touch technology) through video files. As Phil Smith remarked, a safe tower and a good telly might seem to some like a decent trade-off for global warming. Where are the viewers of this film sited but in a non-place of abstracted viewing, with the outside world rendered in distanced miniature? (Paul Virilio has things to say about this.)

Alison Parfitt and her outline submarine

In the discussion after the screenings, Alison Parfitt memorably proposed that “climate change is too hard. Let’s talk about something else.” A seasoned environmental campaigner, Alison was not – of course – proposing avoidance of the issues. But as she later put it in her performed presentation to the group on the Sunday morning at Cove Park, we may need to think less about “environmental change” and more about changing ourselves: about being in, being with, being part of our environment in order to reassess our cultural priorities.

And that, to me, is what our weekend came primarily to be about — not in any hippy-dippy “back to nature” way, but in the sense of playfully and critically inhabiting our surroundings.

Looking back at the major discussion headings I identified in the “Looking Back, Looking Forward” posting about our Fountains Abbey meeting, the thread of SCALE AND SUBJECTIVITY became most significant at Cove Park. An artist’s retreat is, after all, a place “to be” (as opposed to “visit” in the tourist sense experienced at Fountains Abbey), and it was this question of contemplative subjectivity in relation to the landscape that was foregrounded by our discussions and in the concluding performance presentations. There is a sense in which the site seems constructed to privilege a kind of visual ownership of the expansive scenery outside: picture windows in the main house and in the various accommodation pods frame the loch and facing mountains for meditative consumption, but keep it at a comfortable distance, contained within a frame. There’s a connection here to the landscape painting tradition, by which aristocrats learned to view their domains aesthetically (and let’s not forget that there’s a certain privilege in being here at all – artists are invited to reside here for periods of time thanks to funding bursaries; we were here thanks to the generosity of the AHRC).  But an attentiveness to the site itself, rather than the views it affords, forces a different kind of consciousness – of human vulnerability, and  dependence on the physical surroundings – a kind of smallness, perhaps, rather than godlike overview.

Becoming Tree

I’ve written about this already in my “Precarious” posting of a couple of days ago, in which I described aspects of my own performance presentation. But close-up attentiveness was even more apparent in, for example, the extra-ordinary movement presentation offered by Paula Kramer – “Being / Not Being a Tree.” Having led us to a particular tree on site (one among many, so easy to overlook), her performance involved physically attuning herself to its particularities. First she lay face first on the ground beneath the trunk, as if breathing in rhythm with the soil; then she blended in with the trunk’s horizontality (actually lifting it fractionally, for a moment, on her back); then in handstand she reached up with exploring feet to echo the vertical branches extending from the trunk. All this accompanied by the sound of the rushing water plunging past in the stream standing between Paula and her observers. There was something both technically confident and strangely humble about this piece.

"Are you feeling what I'm feeling?"

Much the same was true of David Harradine’s offering – in which he assembled us in his bedroom cube, looking out of the picture window at the view. David told us that he wanted us to feel what he had felt in this space the previous night, contemplating the darkness and silence – and so he left us with the instruction to observe absolute silence. Looking out of the picture window, we then saw David walking across the view – half-naked in vest, pants and walking boots (giggles were politely suppressed, to observe the silence instruction). David turned to walk towards us, and spoke to us – inaudible through the plate glass – before walking into the near-freezing pool up to waist-height. His sudden baptism flipped that comment about “feeling” on its head: instead of referring to self-contained contemplation, it was suddenly about “feeling” the body’s vulnerability to the raw elements (which included, that Sunday morning, a sharp wind and pissing drizzle).

A different kind of perceptual shift – a genuinely disorientating one – was provided by Tim Nunn’s experiments with projecting sounds recorded in other times/places out onto the open surroundings of the hillside. We’re accustomed to hearing incongruous sounds on headphones as we navigate cities on a daily basis, but to hear – for example – chirpy birdsong and a thick haze of chirping crickets (recorded last summer on Islay) blending in with the environmental sound that cold, rainy morning was quite unsettling in its “wrongness.” As simple and profound a statement as one could wish for about human intervention in, and distortion of, the ecological order of things.

Sally's slides, in the Cove Park hall.

The presentations by Sally Mackey and Helen Nicholson asked us to focus our attention on easily overlooked aspects of the human geography at Cove Park. Sally showed us a series of photographs, taken at hourly intervals on the Satur- day evening, of a single guide light on the way down to the accommodations, which had been left switched on, pointlessly, in the daylight. The contrast between the first image, in which it was barely apparent that the lamp was even lit, and the last, in which it blared illumination out onto the surroundings, spoke volumes.

Helen, too, drew our focus to everyday wastage. Her performance, involving mainly silent movement in and out of the domestic space of her accommodation pod, focused on the archeology of unfinished breakfast cereal boxes found in the main kitchen — left behind by previous visitors in the hope they’ll be eaten by new arrivals, though of course they never are. Selecting those boxes which were conclusively past their use-by dates, Helen performed a small ritual of abjection by forcing herself to eat a slopping bowlful of Shreddies and Cheerios. In a place like this, with people coming and going all the time, our acculturated relunctance to eat perfectly good food left behind by strangers results in a kind of domestic silt. A curious parallel, perhaps, with J.D. Dewsbury’s point about the land we were standing on being essentially the silt left behind by a melting glacier.

This thread of SCALE AND SUBJECTIVITY, then, connecting us from the vastness of mountains and loch to the seeming insignificance of way-lamps and breakfast cereals, was accompanied in pieces like Helen’s by a sense of the TEMPORAL LAYERS of the site. This was another of the key discussion threads identified at Fountains, though it was less prominent here at Cove because the history of human habitation on this dreich hillside is that much shorter and less pronounced — the retreat site has been in occupied use for only about a century, mainly as a military installation. (Julian Forrester, the site’s director, showed us a small cartoon of Hitler, etched on the inside of a corrugated iron Nissen Hut by American servicemen during WWII.) Connecting with the uncomfortably close presence of the Faslane and Coulport nuclear submarine bases, the site’s martial history was reflected on through autobiographical presentations by Baz Kershaw and Alison Parfitt. Alison spoke of protesting at Faslane in 2006, of being arrested and held – asked herself why she even put herself in these situations. A simple line drawing, blu-tacked to the meeting hall’s window, superimposed the image of a submarine on the loch’s waters outside – making the invisible visible.

Baz and his industrial detritus

Baz then took us just outside the meeting hall, to the platform site of what was apparently once a U.S. military armaments store. We watched his tragi-comic performance from the ‘wrong’ side of the fence that marks this space off, clutching onto its wires to prevent ourselves slipping down a wet, muddy incline into a ditch. Baz’s concern was with slipping and tipping points: he moved (ran!) about the site, performing labour by hastily erecting structures from scrap metal and wood, which would then inevitably collapse – sooner or later – by chance as well as design. The spoken narrative itself described the strangely arbitrary circumstances of Baz’s own life story: but for certain military command decisions made on his behalf when he was a teenager, Baz proposed, he might easily have ended up remaining for life in the navy, rather than working in factories and, ultimately, in universities. Perhaps he himself might have been one of the submarine pilots, down below in the loch. The piece closed with Baz’s tipping-over revelation (a tiny coup de theatre) of a small wooden submarine construction he had fashioned in the Cove Park workshop (a surviving Nissen hut, also formerly a weapons store). Personal histories of navy, industry, and performance suddenly cohered in a wry visual gesture. In making and taking command of his own little sub, and then ‘sinking’ it by letting go of its supporting structure, Baz seemed to enact a small act of repair – an insistence on our individual agency to effect change, even in the face of seemingly implacable forces of ‘fate’.

Dee Heddon’s piece, too, presented us with a strange, provocative and humorous reflection on the conjunction of temporality and subjectivity. Appropriating as her “central character” one of the plaster owls that sit, gnome-like, as way-markers near the accommodations, Dee voiced the perspective of a quietly observing owl — or perhaps generations of the same owl family — watching over the Cove Park site. The circularity of her recitation about stuff (materials, people) being here and not being here seemed to place the human presence on this site into a much longer temporal perspective. Once there was just the hillside. One day there may just be the hillside. The owls will keep watch. Deftly playing with scale, Dee created a ramshackle, miniaturised approximation of one the accommodation pods (blue sheeting base, wooden walls, grassy roof), as if to emphasise the smallness, fragility and passing-ness of this human habitation when viewed from, as it were, nature’s point of view.

At the foot of the owl

Dee’s presentation connected back to (was perhaps inspired by?) Wallace Heim’s remarks in her closing presentation at the Friday symposium. In looking at a site, she had asked, can we ask whether the site itself is capable of learning? Can we ask what kind of agency nature has? Wallace’s reflections, inspired by A.N. Whitehead’s process philosophy, offered a crucial corrective to our acculturated tendency to see “the material landscape [as] mute and passive, a lack without force” (J. Wylie, Landscape, p.99). A weekend spent at Cove Park – with its constant and audible flow of water downhill, its shifting cloud patterns and changing visibility – served as a salutary reminder that the (non-human) environment is neither mute nor passive, and is constantly involved in its own ongoing processes of change. We are a part of this system, not simply its operators (there’s a terrible arrogance embedded in some of the language around “human-generated climate change”).

As if chiming in with Wallace’s points, I stumbled this week over these words in Bonta and Protevi’s book Deleuze and Geophilosophy: “the findings of complexity theory show that at critical thresholds some physical and biological systems can be said to ‘sense’ the differences in their environment that trigger self-organising processes. [. . . so yes, a site can learn. . .]  Deleuze and Guattari do not deny that human subjects can initiate novel and creative action in the world. However, they refuse to mystify this creativity as something essentially human and therefore non-natural. For them, the creativity of consistencies is not only natural, but also extends far beyond the human realm.” (pp.4-5)

If we’re serious about examining “environmental change,” we need to bear in mind the complexity of that idea — we need to practice an art of being within the environment, of becoming attuned to its processes of change and our part within them. A “slow pedagogy” of “site-based performance.” That’s not to rule out, also, the importance of taking swift action at times: I suspect that our third meeting, in London (with a planned focus on activist performance such as PLATFORM’s), will remind us of that. But if we consider these three network meetings – in Deleuzian terms – as three related but distinct “plateaus,” each with its own plane of consistency, then the lessons of this weekend can be seen to stand as a vital counterpoint to those of the others.

Simone Weil once proposed that “culture is the formation of attention.” Presumably hers would not be a culture constructed in binary opposition to “nature.” (But what would nature be the formation of?)

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P.S. The one performance I haven’t discussed here is Phil Smith’s – a spoken summary (characteristically mind-bending) of an imagined walking performance, circulating around and around Cove Park. I’ll let his piece speak for itself through the text that he’s shortly going to post.