I have had so many meetings and discussions about this project recently that I feel like I have been having an out of body experience! I think this is because when I began this blog, it was very much in the hibernation of winter mode and writing the backstory from a sense of stillness and reflection. As it begins to externalize, I see the challenge of keeping my own relationship to it, and feeding it from a quiet space, and balancing this with the collaborative process of pre – production and practical planning that is now taking place.
The other week, after London meetings, I went over to Portslade near Brighton to see Johanna Berger at the Blank Studios /gallery. It was a magnetic moment, as we dived straight into a conversation about debt, gift, exchange, money, alternative economies etc. They have done some very relevant work in relation to this project in the past and it is a good match to be working with them now. We began very quickly to cook up ideas not only for what form my R+D will take there but what could develop from that further in terms of a more substantial series of public interventions involving many others and focusing on the idea of scarcity and sustenance – using food as an added medium! Blank have applied to House Festival and I won’t say too much, but if they are successful, the form of what we will do will be a much bigger deal that my smaller scale interventions, which will anyway take place from late march through May. I am asking for an extension to end of May as Johanna felt strongly it would be good to hook into Brighton Festival audiences and their own track record of engaging local audiences during this period of time. It makes sense, and allows for more time for touring planning and meetings as well as the rescheduling of a talk I was due to give at LSE which was postponed due to the recent snow. It’s funny how sometimes the timeframes of projects have a life of their own, I’ve learnt to be more flexible around this, remembering that some ideas I have had (such as The Gifts) have taken 7 years to translate into a finished work in the public realm. You could say this work is a culmination of as many years in that the experiences that have promoted the enquiry date back at least that long. I just never saw it as preparation for an art project at the time, I was taken unawares!
Another encounter Brighton -side was with my friend Perse of the brilliant Feral Theatre. They have done a lot of work around performing Remembrance ceremonies for Lost Species in settings all over the country. Powerful and moving. She is one of my circle of supporters and I wanted to talk to her both about the performative aspect of the project and the enacting of public ritual and to ask her to contribute a debt story that can be classified as ecological, as it’s one of the aspects of the subject that I think is both very relevant to now and intrinsically linked to finance and power.
She raised the idea of the immeasurable, which I have mentioned before and which CE also discusses in Sacred Economics, in relation to the ecology – and questioned the rationale in applying finance-derived measures of quantity to ecological damage. Sometimes even before the damage is enacted, like carbon credits etc. – and seems to be a form of post-rationalization, a guilt-toll to enable profit to continue to take precedence over the well-being of the earth itself. This reframes debt in another context – that there is time, love, physical repair that needs to be ‘repaid’ to the commons – our collectively held and owned resources. More on this later.
It made me realize what one of the most important aims of this project is: to have a different kind of conversation around debt than the one you think you are going to have.
