Image courtesy of the artist.
July 2018 meeting place: The Serpentine Lido, Hyde park.
We knew the Lido would be closed by the time we met, but perhaps meeting in a place that has another purpose feels more comfortable? It also plants a seed, of a meeting in water next time?
Two of us arrive first. We sit on a bench within the Lido cafe that is still open for business, but from which we buy nothing. The third person arrives. There is a moment when the idea of our self-organised plan, of eating a picnic dinner, and having the meeting on grass, is subsumed in my mind by the superiority of the bench and the cafe food in my head.
But I manage to refrain from being lured in through a few verbal negotiations around who brought what already, and a general consensus around sticking to our original intentions is made.
We sit in a fenced off area of the park. We are the only three people in there, and appear to be in a spot that is not mean’t for bodies but for the grass only. The boundaries of the park, make us into performing bodies on a grass stage – apt to the interests I had when starting the AWG.
It turns out that having a meeting around large quantities of ants is a good challenge, and requires more attention and focus on what is being said. When the environment demands more from you, even as subtle as insects en mass, or passing publics looking over, you hang on the words of those with you, on the things you can control. But also the meeting must somehow accommodate these environmental factors. It cannot be without them. It must be let into the process of the meeting somehow. It is the meeting.
For this meeting, the first to follow the new format, Michael Whitby presents a series of computer drawings, shown to us on his laptop. Using laptops in parks also works ok it seems, but served more as an aid for talking than the primary focus. It also validated the meeting somehow for me (and others watching?). It kept it in line with the image of what a meeting should look like. We have a laptop. We. are. working.
At the end of the meeting, having cleared the picnic away and continuing to speak, we stand upright in a triangle formation. Each person equidistant to one another, we form a small space in the middle that would not have existed without our three bodies surrounding it. But the meeting had technically ended. So this conversation was in addition but seemed a suitable way to occupy the space together. A way of beginning the next meeting perhaps.
Image courtesy of the artist.
