Burning The Books

Extracts over the next week from a dialogue with Maria Pattison, theatre practitioner and director, co-director of The Pantry, currently completing an MA in Ethical Leadership at Kings College London. I was curious to ask her about a number of themes relevant to the project; forgiveness, failure, generosity, service and servant leadership. All dialogues were recorded on a car journey back from a Pantry residency weekend we ran together in Suffolk.

On generosity and hormones

Maria:‘So, The Moral Molecule by Paul Zak, is research into how our levels of oxytocin – which is considered mainly a female hormone – rise or lower in relationship to our ability to be generous. And the feel-good factor is related to generosity, so there are lots of contexts in which scientists measure this….so what research shows is that high levels of testosterone counteract oxytocin, so when peoples oxytocin levels are low, they lose touch with being able to think in another persons shoes or being able to act generously or with compassion.

So oxytocin could be considered to be saying the main drive of a spiritual experience as well. So high levels of oxytocin mean we will be more generous in our attitudes towards people, we will give them more, we will donate more money to charity etc., and when we other hormones come into play, stress or anxiety that takes down oxytocin, so that’s what we were saying – you can’t be generous when you are really stressed because it creates a kind of conflict.

When human beings come together and they form little communities, it raises oxytocin, so that’s why places like the market, literally a marketplace, where people are coming together, they are not just coming together to buy their bread, they are actually coming together to have human interaction. So when there are societies that have these places of interaction you get a more generous and more open hearted communal society, and that’s where market forces and compassion come together, So you know we are getting to a stage in society where we are buying online and not doing that and we are not having these conversations. So what I have been thinking about is, that this research in Africa where tribal warfare is still really high, showed that if you put something into the community like an Internet café where people have to come together, then you start to bring more oxytocin into the society. So you start to create a sense of communal well-being through a tangential force. And I was thinking about this with bread, because you know one of the ways people are investing in economic growth in Africa is by setting up bread co-operatives and that’s all very well, but you will still get mainly women clustering in those places and what is needed is – because it’s the testosterone that’s the problem – communal ways of bringing people with high levels of testosterone together.

In terms of artist interventions and my own, the mere fact that people come together creates the right environment and that’s all that is necessary so what you do when you are there is almost immaterial. So that takes away for me in terms of creating workshops a whole level of anxiety because the underlying needs are being addressed in the way we are coming together (in The Pantry) the way we have the conversations…whether its cooking, art, filmmaking, drama, actually its the quality of the conversations

A: And also conversation is a practice…dialogue is a practice

M: Yes dialogue is a practice.

Negative Interest and Thrift Radiates Happiness

Thank God I read Sacred Economics when I did. Or headlines like ‘Bank Raises Spectre of Negative Interest Rates’ or todays articles on levy’s on savings deposits (mainly aimed at Dirty Money in Bad Banks, but affecting everybody) and cries of ‘Doomed’ from Cyprus and ‘Who’s next?! ‘ would have been much more confusing and bewildering than they need to be. According to Eisenstein (also described as a ‘De-Growth activist) this is just the logical unfolding of a legacy that has turned the original, sacred purpose of money (to do beautiful things with in the world for the common purpose) into it’s polar opposite and we now have a front seat in watching it unfold back into itself, as well as stepping onto the stage to play our part or be played depending on how dependent we are on the credit system at any particular time.

Why do we have lack of growth coupled with death at such a deep level?? Check his thoughts in Transition Press on some of the solutions being muted in the press and also how they are not new ideas so no need to fear so much, as solutions like this finally come into public consideration. In particular on negative interest:

Negative interest is a different kind of money system. For example, it could involve a liquidity tax or charge on reserves in the Fed or central bank system. If banks hold onto their money as they do today, their money would slowly shrink in value. So would your checking account. So it gives you an incentive to lend your money, even at zero interest. Thus, you can have money circulate without an imperative for growth…it amounts to slow-motion debt forgiveness, kind of like inflation in that it works to the benefit of debtors and against the interest of creditors. For those of us living paycheck-to-paycheck, it would have little effect except to help us to pay back debts more easily.

Looking at the comments at the bottom of this article I was interested to be reminded that:

‘Negative interest on hoarded money is wealth tax, and it is not new. For example, Islam has a 2.5 percent tax on all stagnant (hoarded) wealth’.

I am just coming out of flu and rather fuzzy headed so will now make a lateral leap back in time to the ancient era when banks were places that (at least some) people were proud to work in, as evoked by a show I was taken to see when I was in Birmingham last week updating and planning interventions for October with Laura, artistic co-director of Fierce Festival, called Thrift Radiates Happiness in the former Municipal Bank in the city centre (we want it, but whether it will be available is another matter, as everyone wants it- what a building!). There were some really playful and disarming works, including an evocative and heart warming audio piece, “Half -Crowns in their Petticoats’ by Elly Clarke interviewing former employees on site about their years of service to the bank, The Investment Project, where you ‘invested’ £2 and were given a key to a safety deposit box and escorted into the vaults to discover if your box contained a limited edition print (we both got a photograph of the vault itself by Julie Tsang, which was pretty thrilling as I loved the room and it was impossible to shoot on my IPhone).

The piece I fell most in love with (predictably, as you will see) was a table of copies of letters which track The National Debt Project by Nicole Wilson, a durational (!) work where the artist is documenting her attempts to fund the National Deficit through her found change by sending daily letters to Barack Obama….She is on day 1297. It makes for compulsive, funny and often tragic reading. That kind of trying-to-bail-yourself-out-of-a-sinking- ship-with-a teacup kind of feeling that speaks volumes about where we are globally.

Ecological debt

I’ve been interviewing some of the people who are generously giving me ‘resident’ debt stories for the website (i.e. ones which will remain there as examples to stimulate ideas for potential contributors. They will also be the first to be recited at the event in May, which we are planning for. Below is an extract from an email sent to me by Persephone Pearl (Feral Theatre) (following a meeting last month) who I wanted to ask about ecological debt, which I was clear is an important part of the project, and I was definitely influenced by Eisenstein in this; i.e, the idea that we have taken relentlessly and often unconsciously from nature, to great destruction of human and animal life and now it is time to pay back and be called to account for actions which deplete or have depleted nature purely for profit. That this is a tipping point and it is time to start to balance the scales…Feral do a lot of work around creating awareness of this with their pieces on Lost Species and Perse was the obvious person to talk to…

‘I enjoyed our meet-up in the library – it was great to see you in the flow with such an exciting project. And I was honoured you wanted to hear my thoughts on ecological debt. Lately I have been thinking about how our taken-for-granted cultural expectations determine how we perceive the world (e.g. death is bad; e.g. it’s my life & my personal realisation is the highest goal) and when we were talking … I could hear how credit and debt are assumptions like this too – exciting! In a culture where there is reciprocity with earth rather than trying to exploit it/ maximise outputs, the idea of debt is not even relevant.

The journey from the Commons to Enclosure in the 17th – 19th centuries was a big step forward in terms of the exploitation of resources & people – but I am not a historian so I can’t tell you much about that. I’m just thinking about how the concept of land ownership might be a relatively new one, which – though it’s hard to imagine what there was before – totally conditions the lens through which we perceive the world.

I have been learning about how our culture leaves us all “ontogenetically stunted” and is a product of stunted people. I have been reading & re-reading a true classic of Eco psychology, Paul Shepard’s Nature & Madness. He say – and so does Stephen Jenkinson by the way and lots of other great thinkers – that we are deprived of initiation rites and consequently of eldership and this leaves our culture juvenile, infantilised, stuck – made up of big kids. That’s what clear-cutting and over-fishing look like don’t they?

– If I can’t have it, neither can you!

– Mine, mine!

– I won’t share!

– I need it now!

Alinah, I would like to hear what you have been learning/ discovering about the difference between gratitude and indebtedness?

I’m sure you have researched usury, & the historical journey from condemning it as evil to accepting it as normal & predicating societal functions & the hallowed growth paradigm on it? The normalising of debt culture has happened in tandem with the normalising of resource over-exploitation & exploitation of poor by rich.

… I have found a good account of the extinction of the passenger pigeon written by my friend and Feral colleague Camilla Schofield for the Funeral for Lost Species. She made a memorial like a war memorial consisting of hundreds of tiny white crosses arranged in a flock formation.’

When The Book of Debts goes live at the end of March, the life of the passenger pigeon will appear as an ecological debt, owed to the species, by industrialising, expansionist 19th century USA.

Gratitude and indebtedness and the difference between them? This merits a whole post, and will follow on soon from this one.

Off to Birmngham tomorrow to meet Fierce, discuss plans, do a recce and see the extraordinary-sounding Thrift Radiates Happiness, in case you live in the area, it only runs til this Sunday..

Out of the many presentations at the The Brixton Exchange event (by Anchor and Magnet,) which I mentioned before, the one which really made an impression on me was by the artist Jeanne Van Heeswijk, check her website if you are interested in radical, playful and deeply affecting artist strategies around cultural production, public space and urban identities. A phrase from her is still in my head as it resonates with the way I have been working and particularly relevant to this current project; that (speaking in the context of public practice) the artist must ‘put at risk their own subjectivity in the public realm’ It rings true for me, this is perhaps some guarantee of authentic engagement and links to the idea of the ‘bridge’ that I have used to describe my own position in relation to audiences and those who take part in public projects I am involved in.

I am always checking myself to make sure and question where I am coming from and, sometimes this comes through others. A debt story in my own life (connected to a very close friend) came up last week, which was painful to confront and deal with. I used the act of making entry into the book to examine it amid the upset. I was trying to see what was coming up that I was finding so difficult and I have to say that in doing this – as a way of clarifying what was playing itself out on my part – it enabled a conversation to take place which in some small way moved the relationship forward. I noticed how the ‘charge’ around the debt flooded me with old feelings of inadequacy and powerlessness. I have learnt that though these feelings are inevitable given the trauma of the far more serious debts faced in the past, if I clothe them in too much drama and upset, I then revert to a place where I am unable to work towards the becoming solvent in relation to the debt. That is, I become paralysed to act in a way that will put me on the path to resilience and growth and creative action. It was a bumpy moment, and I think part of the teaching this project has for me is to remember that, though I have experience of this subject and enough distance from its core trauma to be in creative enquiry around it, it is always close at hand, to be looked at more deeply. Its rawness and discomfort are the emotional material, which the project is using to create its own alchemy. There is a potential for transformation here, for some and definitely already for me!

So, drawing on my own vulnerabilities around my experience of debt at an emotional level, seems to be opening up a channel for a clear and direct dialogue to take place with those who I am slowly approaching to take part.I will start to publish some of the conversations that I hve been having with the inital contributors to The Book of Debts, before it goes public later this month.This is a relief as it feels like other voices now need to be heard here apart from mine! We have been immersed in the website, which is a creature that is slow to craft properly but looks and feels like it will be a resilient one which can support and feed into the street interventions (and encounters in other ways) that I will begin in April/May and the Burning on May 18^th at Blank in Portslade.

On a lighter and more playful note, enjoyed immensely recording a range of book-related sounds, whisperings of debt stories (which reminds me how much there is to do around how these will be voiced for the recital) and then listening to my friend and sound designer David Thomas, mixing up a soundtrack for the trailer and website. A true sonic alchemist. Got me very excited at going live online later this month.

The other week I went to The Brixton Exchange, organized by Anchor and Magnet, a brilliant artist project which I found out about through friend, co-founder and inspiring fellow artist Barby Asante. It was an extraordinary day, a true day of exchange which began with a walking tour through Brixton (where I lived, from 1990-91) and set the scene for a debate around the hot issue of how local migrant communities are responding to rapid urban ‘regeneration’ (a term hard to agree on the definition of) and how artists can participate in this process. I have to say I have been vaguely aware of the gentrification of Brixton and of the commodification of a community, as a ‘brand’, but seeing ‘Brixton Square’, the gated community being built along Cold Harbour Lane opposite Southwyck House and hearing the debate around what this kind of development represents (economic and cultural segregation – ‘there aren’t even any black people in the brochures!’ one local piped up.) was quite sobering and I wonder what kinds of debts and credits are being played out in a context like this. On the other hand, the openness, creativity, clear engagement and rigorous thinking of A+M – borne out by the presence of local representatives from all areas of Brixton life, including the local counselor – gave me great hope as to the power of live/ social arts practice to be relevant and instrumental in providing relevant forums and tools for dialogue, change, re-imagining and resistance.

You can check their activity on their website. Brixton is one of the places within London I would very much like to take this project – watch this space.

I also went to Bristol, another city that I want to take this project to, to the In Between Time Festival. If you don’t know about this festival, it’s really worth taking a look: performances, installation and live interventions across the city, curated and produced with poetry, humanity and vision. I was only there for 24 hours with my daughter and most of the paying performances were sold out, but we sat in the dark at We See Fireworks with strangers, enchanted by voices recounting stories of live performances that had changed their lives. A memory of visiting an Artangel project, ‘H.G’ by Robert Wilson in the Clink Vaults back in 1995, which was one of the first ever genre bending installation/performance works I had ever seen, re emerged and transported me, I remember life and my idea of what art in a public space could be never quite being the same again. In the evening we watched a Fake Moon being hoisted up into the night sky and sat sipping mulled wine with friends. I like how this project is giving me permission to go explore…soon I’ll be off to Birmingham for a recce there, more on that soon.

In between this, much other work is happening: Firstly, the content and design of the website and the trailer that will introduce it and be out at the end of March. I had forgotten how long it takes to get this part of the project to a ripe stage, a lot of clear communication and detailed responses to initial designs, to ensure they really are in alignment with the spirit of the project. Secondly, I have been gathering an initial set of debts and their stories from some of my circle of supporters and started to have and record conversations around these. The real stuff! I will be posting up extracts from these on this blog soon.