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.
This last week has been very much about coming out of the comfort zone of my own thinking (or co-thinking/ planning with Andrew, the producer) and expanding into the next phase. This has meant a series of meetings, some intense but always exciting for me as now our planning to take the idea out into different contexts starts to solidify.
So I have now finally met in person Laura and Harun from the inspiring Fierce Festival, who will be the presenting partners for the project in Birmingham. It was great for me to see how broad and lateral their thinking is about the potential contexts other than the festival itself, that could best serve the project over an extended period of time. And to talk in depth around the themes of the work in a way which left me buzzing and feeling like it has a will of its own to land in spaces beyond anything I could have possibly imagined after that first intervention. Key to this has been Andrew’s connections and thinking and now giving over part-custody of the well being of the work to partners.
Next up was another meeting with Jason and Duponte and Simon Allen of The Swarm, who devise and conjure some really stunning multi-platform storytelling projects. They have taken my idea for how The Book of Debts might work online, extensively cross-examined me on my aims and visions, suggested totally alternative ways of approaching it digitally and reminded me of how I used to think when I worked in this field over 15 years ago. I have gotten over identified with the physical aspects of public work, and attached to my Book- as a book- and they reminded me that what is needed is to create a compelling space, through which potential contributors to the project can safely reach the book- and reflect on the wider aspects of debt through the lens of their own personal experiences along the way. As our budget is small and we are hoping to achieve a lot digitally and they feel a resonance with the project, they will become co-producers on the digital, and I am hoping if we get touring funding that there will be a lot more cross-platform work we can do to follow on from this phase. I have given them a script for a trailer, which they will produce as a ‘first stop’ on entry to the site, and to be put out on YouTube etc. I had feedback on this from three of my ‘Circle of Investors’ (of time and attention rather than money!) who are writers /directors. Interesting to see how a few words can change the tone of a 30 second script and also how much you can communicate in such a short time. Have now given Jason and Simon the script to do with what they will and will get to feedback when it comes back in draft trailer form. Can’t wait.
Also, this week I am starting to get in some requested debt stories and feedback from some of my Circle, to be used to inform the wording and questioning process of entering the book and to stand as examples online when people first arrive at the site. I will go into more detail on this later, as already a lot of intriguing and complex questions are arising. One of the things that is clearly coming back is to drop all questions around payback, it is more powerful to leave that unspoken and to allow contributors to reflect on this themselves. By offering up the Book to be burnt we are symbolically offering instant absolution and calling into question this assumed, universal need to make good on all debts – this crushing moral obligation, despite the fact that, for example, in the financial sector – the original terms of debt agreements (some in almost invisible small-print or ridiculously esoteric language) are misleading and often illegal (see the IMF and the way it has treated developing countries over the last decade – but more on that later, with my current reading, Graeber)
Have run out of word count to finish my week, more later….
