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

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

++++

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stark  (7.12.13)

3.31am

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

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

Artificial air flow

Artificial heat

Hermetically sealed exoskeleton

A shield against atmospheric unpredictability

An exquisitely tuned, insomniac’s torture machine

What was ever wrong with just opening a window?

“Unsustainable lives are disconnected, fragmented lives”

Says the briefing document

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

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

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

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

Unless I go around individually turning off the wall lamps

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

Shafts of golden warmth spilling out beneath its doors,

Eerily lighting the floor

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

Thus killing all electrics in the room

Preventing my smartphone recharging

Disconnected

Fragmented

3.49 am

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

Harsh, unwelcoming whiteness

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

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

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

Late Victorian utopian vision of reconnecting man with nature

Nature figured permanently as welcoming, warming, climatically temperate

Gorgeously appealing sentimental tosh

Ruthlessly exposed by that

Stark

White

Wind

Snow

Bear

Bear?

Sitting right there

Posing for the camera, centre stage

How did he get the bear to oblige?

Oh, I see, not bear but man

Man in suit

Thin, soft, white suit

Woefully inadequate protection against the inclement environment

Feeble exoskeleton

Modularised in sections

Held away from the body by foam padding and straps

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

I’m put in mind

of a kind of satire

on Iron Man

Marvel Super Hero

Golden, modularised, metallic exoskeleton

It’s this skin we’re living in

In our dreams

Safe, invulnerable

Internally regulated

Jet boots

Hand blasters

Man as master

Macho malarkey

Robert Downey Junior

Tony

Stark

Industries

4.04am

Split screen

A mountain, cleft in two by vertical dividing line

Two images,

Two locations

side by side

Arctic

Monkey Business

Stark – white – golden

Split screen Andy Warhol superstar

Super hero

Bear in underwear

Part stripped

Wholly exposed

No Future

No Future

No Future

For You

4.12am

Zero Degree Dance

A phrase I heard the other day for the first time

Zero Degree Dance

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

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

In the illustrating photograph

In Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall

A group of semi-naked dancers are huddled together

Dribbling on the floor

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

In the picture

Just beyond the dancers

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

An unexplained pool of liquid which I can only assume

Is horse piss

The revenge of nature on art.

4.18am

In my mind

The man-bear-bear-man

Is walking across the descending side of a curved pedestrian bridge

Straddling a motorway

Noise

Fumes

Concrete curvature

Beneath the soft, white feet of the laughable bear suit

The bare feet of the dancer

Bare feet on cracked tarmac

Bare feet on gravel

Exquisitely simple, human vulnerability

To this world we built for ourselves

As somewhere else

Somewhen else

A young woman in metallic ear defenders

Battles to propel an invasive tumbleweed

With a petrol driven leaf blower

Across an indifferent urban landscape

Lonely

Futile

Sisyphean task

Vulnerable

Noisy

Polluting

Gratuitous

HSS-rented gas-guzzling hand blaster

Its minor unsustainabilities standing in for all those other major unsustainabilities

That we tolerate, enjoy, condone

Every day

In our various metal exoskeletons

Cars, trains, ear defenders, 5 star hotels

Stark

White

Milk

Alkaline

Out of the fridge

On the turn

Off

4.32 am

Still sleepless

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So what’s the fuss about? You might have felt gloomy after reading the first issue, ECOS 24 (3/4), on our extinction of experience theme. We called it: ‘The Great Outdoors – Just the tonic?’  We explored the  theme through articles about children’s loss of the outdoors experience, whether at play or in education. We also discussed the concerns about possible risks to people when going to wild places. It prompted questions about how people can appreciate nature and have any relationship with nature if experience of the outdoors, never mind anything approaching ‘wild’, is increasingly limited or even extinct? In putting together this follow up issue I have become less gloomy. Don’t get me wrong, the trends we worry about are still there. Geoff Cooper writes of Disconnected Children, but read on about the Campaign for Adventure, the Real World Learning Campaign, The Stoneleigh Project and Richard Keating’s Walking the Land, all of which show how people are working to reverse some of these trends.

Several writers have contributed short personal pieces about how they got connected to the outdoors. They were asked to say, very briefly, when and how they fell in love with the outdoors. For instance, was it childhood experience, cultural inspiration, influence of a significant person, through sport and adventure, a family tradition? They were also asked how they enjoy the outdoors now, at work and play. Our examples show that it was often several of those things in the life of a child that are remembered as connectors, prompts and inspiration.

Hearing what others say has led me to understand better why outdoors is so important to me. I am always wanting to be clearer about what I feel and think.  Being outdoors, whether ambling about for days at a time or even just sticking my head out of the window in the dark when I wake at night, brings more of that clarity. I don’t mean that being outdoors is an experience of ‘crystal clear, free as a bird, see straight through’ nothingness; quite the contrary. Being outdoors brings space and sense of place, often subtle as well as grand sights and sounds, the feel of weather and frequently an inspiring and comforting feeling of being a part of immense aliveness which makes everything feel clearer and usually better.[i]

I am particularly pleased that this issue follows the previous one on ‘Wilder Landscapes, wilder lives?’, about moving towards a wildland strategy. The ideas behind this issue and the last, are for me two parts of a whole. The last issue was about wilding of place, this one is about wilding of person. I am not a ‘wild’ person though, I cannot imagine that I would ever be called wild and I have hardly ever seen really wild places or big animals in the wild. When I did see big animals in Africa decades ago I was overwhelmed to realise how awe-inspiring and beautiful they were and could not stop talking about it. Now, if walking in the forest I saw wolves or disturbed a big cat, I would be struck with terror. Some of that reaction would be shock. I just don’t expect to meet bigger and perhaps more assertive creatures; animals, which however beautiful they are, could, in rare circumstances do me harm. That is not part of my current world. I guess I am actually more at risk from traffic when cycling up the road where I live, but would probably feel more at risk in such an encounter in the forest. Nonetheless whatever my reactions and despite any risk, I would value that experience.

I would value that experience and wanted to extend our ‘extinction of experience’ theme because I care about understanding human life within encompassing nature. This care is no more complicated than a belief that we, the human species, need to understand better how to live with the rest of nature in order to develop our potential as sentient, thinking and spiritual beings. Within that belief there are notions of respect, delight, mystery and knowing.[ii] And this belief underpins any understanding I have of sustainability and how to live with nature, in a more sustainable way, with a feather light footprint.  Duncan Mackay describes some of this as a long, slow and wiggly experience.

Building on all of this, Mathew Frith’s article develops one strand of our extinction of experience theme saying: “our policies and practices are still largely based on the assumption that the public has a good understanding of our nature; that only if we shout even louder they’ll flock to our conservation cause(s)… we need to challenge the disconnection of people from nature in ways that work from where they are…  The dominating role of television and the internet will make it imperative that we  advocate a vibrant and relevant nature that provides social benefits above and beyond those of the virtual natures that will undoubtedly evolve in society.”

So what does that suggest for all of us who want a life with real experience? And especially for those of us  who are stewards and creators of the outdoor world? How far should we challenge the policies and perceptions that lead to children and the rest of us having restricted opportunities to experience the outdoors?  And do we need to be even more creative (and perhaps more populist) in the ways we communicate to people about opportunities to experience, gain more confidence and inspiration from the wild? And I suggest that applies especially to both wild places and the wild of heart nearer to us than we might always notice.

Alison Parfitt  alisonparfitt@phonecoop.coop

Also, benefits beyond physical activity, fresh air and company described by participants in BTCVs Green Gym initiative, see evaluation by Oxford Brookes University.

[ii] Also an understanding that as part of this we need the experience of living with more complete eco-systems and with the larger animals that implies, as outlined in the wilder landscapes aspirations.

I recently had a day with friends at ARCIO (Action Research and Critical Inquiry in Organisations, Department of Management at the University of Bristol http://arcio.org/ ). The day was titled Gathering Hopeful Narratives of Sustainability. Reflecting about it since brought our network aspirations to mind. The day was described as ‘aiming to begin to generate, collate, and amplify hopeful, optimistic and inspiring stories of existing and emerging work for sustainability. Our broader aim is to challenge and move beyond current narratives of sustainability, which are dominated by a focus on technological solutions and the business case, or alternatively limited by ‘gloom and doom’ thinking and the perceived need for self-sacrifice and martyrdom amongst agents of change. A further aim is to begin to develop a research agenda, drawing on the potential of rich and innovative qualitative and action research methods to engender and support transformative work for sustainability.’

I was inspired by the possibilities of narrative (stories in any medium) to help folk think differently and cope with what is happening. For instance how stories can:
 be multi-voiced, there is no one story, there are always varieties of experience
 interweave, blur, merge future, present and past
 cope with uncertainty, be messy, complex, cope with ‘thick’ realities
 be an aid to sense making esp about relationships
 connect and gather people, create dialogue – more democracy even?
 be emergent, folk can keep re-creating them to accommodate what is need at the time

People in the room certainly seemed to be focused on ways of working and communicating beyond the usual collection of case studies where we often get emphasis on the output/outcome (‘…yes, its an impressive new Neighbourhood Centre …’) backed up by facts about funding, decisions and personnel but not necessarily much insight into how it happened, the dynamics and interplay (‘… well, I walked out when he said it was never going to fly …’). And well beyond the conventional media approach of grabbing (dramatic) bits of a story often to manipulate response. I came away with a reinforced sense of the values in and the values of story as a helpful agent in our troubled times. Writers, artists and communicators understand all this and more.

I was less happy though with the understandings of sustainability in that ARCIO room. Post Rio, years ago everyone talked about the ‘three legged stool’ of sustainability ie there had to be economic, environmental and social wins for anything to be called sustainable. It all had to work together. Now folk struggle with the essential integrated starting point of sustainability; so they can talk about environmental sustainability (a peg leg stool?) as a desirable achievement. It makes me wince, in just the same way that I winced when I saw Tim’s post of the article, via BBC business news, titled ‘Nature’s gift: The economic benefits of preserving the natural world’ . So many of the troubles the world faces seem to come from these partial (not integrated or holistic) understandings ie. sense making without looking at wider relationships/implications.

Another example is one of the stories from the ARCIO day. It was about how one group of communities from a very deprived area had overcome another group of communities, the better off NIMBYs, to get planning permission for an extraordinary project. This is for a motorway service station to be run as a social enterprise to benefit the deprived communities beside motorway, featuring local produce and exemplar sustainable design and construction. Ticks lots of boxes. I have been a keen supporter of this idea for years and tried for a different approach involving all the parties. However pleasing it is to see the deprived communities now empowered and successful, and this social justice triumph was applauded at the ARCIO event, a greater achievement would have been a win win including support from all the surrounding communities probably accomplished through a process of dialogue to understand longer term mutual benefit. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/aug/10/cotswold-green-motorway-services

I don’t use the term sustainability now that anything vaguely eco can be sustainable (three legs gone out the window etc). And I miss not having a replacement term for what we need to aim for. But more to the point I miss the sense of campaigning and working for a vision. In the past activists were motivated by a vision of what life could be like. Now the discourse comes more from places of fear about climate change, peak oil, food security, population explosion, population movements, collapse of money etc.

I know our brief is to reflect on environmental change but I suggest that we need to be aware of the whole picture, what we used to call sustainability, and entertain some vision.

I would be glad to talk about this more but will not be back until end of Jan. I am going to Cuba as a volunteer and to investigate what might happen when the blockade is lifted. Greetings, Alison

In his posting about the ‘shrink wrapped’ qualities of performance studies Steve asks what we might do to broaden the reach of our network in order to avoid getting caught in the trap that the Living Landscape conference was accused of having sprung. I agree with Steve that the conference as a whole skipped adroitly over that trap, thanks to the lively diversity of views and range of practices that were obviously in play. I wonder, though, whether the whole ‘topic’ of ‘environmental change’ can be significantly engaged without risking the self-reflexive, self-referential and even self-promoting qualities that so troubles the Times Higher Education critique of the book about Sarah Kane? This is because such change, now almost automatically, implies questions of human responsibility for the environmental ‘effects’ that seem to signal that global warming, for example, may actually be occurring. So in identifying that type of change as happening, humans are, so to speak, gazing at something of themselves. There we are, looking at ourselves as integral ghosts in the environmental ‘machine’ … or ‘organism’, should you prefer a Gaian metaphor.

[So when I looked at the eyes of the bullocks I saw them as ‘doleful’ because – even if I did not have a right to be in the field, or was not the vegetarian I once had been, or did not agree that their methane production was part of a major environmental problem – I was complicit in their fate. Of course the dolefulness was mine, but at least I think one must be aware of that syndrome. (See my response to Shrink-wrapped.)]

I am aware that such awareness runs many risks of actually disappearing up its own fundamentals, i.e. of becoming ‘self-promoting’. But on principle I refuse to give up on such risks, as self-referentiality and self-reflexivity – otherwise known as various types of ‘feedback’ – are crucial not just to academic work, but also to all sustainable ecologies. And the particular principle I have in mind is the inseparability of organisms from the Earth’s environments – and vice versa – that all network members surely know is a foundational tenet of significant ecological philosophy, analysis and action, but especially those of a radical kind.

[Hence whether in wellies, boots or barefoot I am knee, thigh or more than eyeball deep in the ‘mire’ of humanity’s Earth-bound effects, which I find both extremely hard to swallow and impossible not to sometimes admire … and, yes, the pun is intended.]

Of course Steve was absolutely right to have reminded us of the dangers of a recursive turn that can easily become too acute for its own good. But also the emphasis on the ‘self’ in the Kane review’s trinity of no-no terms can be taken as an important reminder that only in theory or through ideology can humans pretend to be abstracted from the body of global life, so to speak. Which brings me to the main point of this posting, because when the network grant was successfully secured Steve asked if I might work to facilitate debate on the key issue of how site-based theatre and performance might variously address the ‘problem of integrating the local with the global, the conceptual with the practical’, as the network statement on Research Context puts it.

So what might this statement mean in practice for our network?

Here are a few initial and tentative questions for possible consideration (or, of course, challenge?), with a view to prompting discussion:

1. How do the project’s three chosen sites already more or less approach such ‘integration’ (or other types of interaction), both through their everyday and their exceptional theatricality and performances?
2. How might our planned brief residencies at the three sites together best explore, augment but/and challenge the prospects of their ‘integration’ of local~global dynamics through theatre and performance?
3. How can the contrasting ‘iconic’ environmental qualities of the three sites be drawn into the evolution of scenarios that express and extend their global~local dynamics in ways that may become clearly relevant to other sites?

And finally, as we now must all be wary of becoming shrink-wrapped as a group, how can we best use the project’s resources – but perhaps especially the networks we all and/or each of us are a part of – to ensure that ‘significant others’ can freely contribute to addressing its objectives, should they so wish and be kind enough so to do?

]]> https://performancefootprint.co.uk/2010/09/localglobal-integrated/feed/ 1 https://performancefootprint.co.uk/2010/07/shrink-wrapped/ https://performancefootprint.co.uk/2010/07/shrink-wrapped/#comments Thu, 22 Jul 2010 09:03:50 +0000 http://performancefootprint.co.uk/?p=106 Continue reading →]]> In last week’s Times Higher Education, Christopher Innes provides a fairly damning review of a new book called “Sarah Kane in Context,” commenting that it “exposes all too revealingly some of the problems of current academic criticism: self-reflexive, self-referential, self-promoting.” I haven’t read the book so I don’t know if this is fair comment, but it stuck in my head because of a couple of recent conversations around plans for this network, in which the people I was speaking to expressed concern that we might end up going the same way. One respondent remarked that they felt last year’s “Living Landscapes” conference had become “shrink-wrapped” in a kind of self-referential performance studies discourse, and that – despite its organisers best intentions – it only rarely seemed to engage seriously with environmental questions. I don’t actually agree with this comment (I found that conference really inspiring, on several levels – not least its genuine inter-disciplinarity), but I do recognise that danger of getting locked into ever-decreasing discursive circles. And certainly the clingfilm metaphor sums up both the annoying tangly-ness and environmental obtuseness of much of what passes for critical reflection these days. Strategies for avoiding these pitfalls in our network discussions will be warmly welcomed! (Maybe some kind of buzzer…)

Members of the network will all be registered as “authors” to the site, with the ability to put up blog posts, and to initiate or respond to discussion strands. If you are not a contributor but would like to become one, please don’t hesitate to get in touch – we want the debate to be as open as possible.

Let the cogitating begin.

In the footsteps of Fountains Abbey's monks.