A performance score to travel there and back again
One car ride from Milton Keynes to Flitwick
One tube ride from Walthamstow to Victoria
One car ride from Flitwick to Luton Airport
One bus ride from Victoria to Gatwick Airport
Two planes from the UK to Copenhagen Airport
One train and one bus from Copenhagen Airport to Stefansgade in Nørrebro
Repeat the step in reverse a day and a half later
One plane from Copenhagen Airport to Kangerlussuaq
One by-plane from Kangerlussuaq to Nuuk Airport
One taxi from Nuuk Airport to our temporary home by the sea
Repeat all of the above in reverse 12 days later
Stand facing another body
Take one photo.
Turn around. Take a second photo.
Walk 10 steps, glance back to where you came from. Take another photo.
Continue to walk in the direction you began moving, and every ten steps glance back and capture the scene.
Repeat until you have taken a pre-agreed amount of photos.
Glancing Back in Helsinki.
This post has been guest authored by Cara Davies from Tracing the Pathway
Tracing the Pathway have been visiting Sisters Hope as part of the Sisters Academy, Nuuk, Greenland, exploring with them through art and performance how we might develop more poetic modes of knowledge production and transfer.
‘Sisters Academy is a school in a world and society where the sensuous and poetic mode of being is at the center of all action and interaction. It defines the primary mode of being and is the values on which all societal institutions are building – including the school. Thus Sisters Academy is the school in what we term a sensuous society– A potential new world arising from the post-economical and ecological crisis.’ (Sisters Hope description of the Academy)
This iteration of the Academy is a laboratory for artists, whereas the first iteration took over a secondary school in Denmark and explored in a real-life situation how learning might take place sensuously. All normal classes were taught, by their normal teachers, but teachers were given the freedom to explore their classes by placing creativity and aesthetics at the centre of their concern.
For more information on Sisters Academy, visit sistersacademy.dk/
By Tracing the Pathway member Joe Dunne:
I have never known a pile of soil to be so inviting to strangers. Well, strangers might be overstating it – that term evaporates the moment anyone comes over with a curious and occasionally cautious grin. As Mads, Cara and Ash piled up the soil whilst I read our opening statements the assembled group watching us flicked their eyes over our physical invitation. Something so simple as an invitation to speak with others and to plant seeds in a shared space cannot fail to plant choices in an audience’s mind: ‘Shall I go and speak?’ ‘When should I do it?’ And perhaps most provocatively, ‘What should I say?’ This question is running through my mind as well – Don’t worry, I tell myself, I have the photographs. Yes! I brought them to Helsinki believing they would activate my pre-conceived notions of what ‘type’ of conversation ‘should’ occur in a performance context. The images weigh like anchors in my brain, artificially grounding me in a protective cocoon I have spun around my nervous presence. Why artificial? Because after a few conversations I realise I have not brought them to enhance or even activate an encounter with all of those unknown artists I now sit before; they are for me alone, for me to feel as though I am prepared, that I am doing something (that dreaded word) useful. I come to this understanding mere minutes after we have begun: A man comes to sit with me and we talk. I adopt what I hope is a welcoming tone, but it feels surprisingly tense, and not as they say ‘in a good way’. I think he’s bored, which in my unrelenting critical mind I interpret as wrong. I offer him a selection of photos – they were taken two years during our Body-Site-Encounter workshop and show writing the group had generated. I love them, but why should anyone else? Or rather, why is the way that I am presenting them relevant here? The writing describes the life of a tree, but I don’t tell him this. In fact, I don’t tell him anything, I just ask a series of questions he feels compelled to answer. After our encounter I write on a cue card ‘The Tyranny of Photography’ and place it on the soil. Perhaps I have gained something from this encounter after all: That for The Hoppy Hoppy Sparrow to work it needs a generosity of spirit from us – from me – that perhaps I am reluctant to offer. But I persevere. I see how moved others are when they plant a seed with someone.
How complex we can make meetings; how utterly frightened new people can be to us, yet how resplendent it is when these encounters with ‘strangers’ bloom.
This post has been guest authored by Joseph Dunne from Tracing the Pathway
Tracing the Pathway are four bodies, each unique and fixed, yet porous. We are one, shifting whole – an ecology dependent on its constituent parts. As a fluid mass we merge and collide with other beings we encounter along our path. New perspectives forge an itinerant-based knowledge.
This Fluid Ecology is the interrelationship between site, encounter and body, between and beyond ourselves, that might sensuously develop knowledge in many forms. This transcending process unfolds our shared, reciprocal worlds; an artistic contiguous living system.
I write this from an apartment in Greenland, a couple of days before Tracing the Pathway go to meet Sisters Hope, a Danish artist collective. We are meeting them with thanks to the generous assistance of an a-n Go and See Bursary, with the intention of sharing, exchanging, and becoming fluid. Throughout this time I will offer insights into our experiences of meeting Sisters Hope and being immersed in this wild landscape, however my posts will be interspersed with the voices of other Tracing the pathway members: Joe Dunne and Cara Davies. As part of this process we will reflect on how the a-n bursary has enabled us to grow and develop as a collective for the future. This means at times it will be pertinent to offer subjective interludes from previous manifestations of Tracing the Pathway practice; perhaps allowing the assemblage of past, present and future to pulsate more dynamically in pixel-black, or perhaps to coagulate the unsystematic subjectivity of our individual voices.
Divergent of time and context, we shall explore here how our ecology might be linear when you think of it, but not when you think back on it.
