So, now, in this present research process, I remember how much of a Pandora’s box it can be. Opening up ideas and possibilities then opens up even more ideas and possibilities. And time starts to shrink with all there is to explore. Exciting though. One of the essential mediating factors and at the heart of this project is the network of relationships around it – like a human satellite- that give me both a mirror to reflect back and a staff to take me forward (can’t resist those biblical metaphors).
Some of them are very direct and clear-cut relationships, such as working my producer Andrew Mitchelson, who has been a brilliant support since last summer and helped me shape the narrative of the project and pull together our GFA as well as just having sheer belief that this something worth taking out wide and far. I also have the extremely helpful mentoring support of Ju Row Farr at Blast Theory, who I talk with monthly and gives me perspective and lines of questioning, to help draw the lines of the path I am following. Now getting on board are Simon and Jason from The Swarm, who are going to work with us to create the digital ‘persona’ of Burning the Books, to open up the project to online audiences and to help devise a space, a map for the public to be drawn into and navigate the process of connecting with the project. There are also the galleries, venues and communities we are going to work with for this R+D period and beyond (much more on that later).
Moving outwards, I also now have a circle of interested supporters (like investors, but with attention, not money) who have agreed to gift me their perspective on the project, at least once over the next year. Some of them will be contributors to the book directly at an early stage, one-to-one through the response to a set of questions around debts /stories they are considering submitting that include feedback on what it was like to answer those questions. This will help us refine what the most sensitive and appropriate process of entering into a relationship with the book – and myself – might be, both on and offline.
One of the questions from today with Ju that came up was over the language used within the conceptual framework of the project. Am I co-opting the language of the financial sector, asking for people to categorise their debts into financial, emotional, ecological, metaphysical etc? It will be easy to allow people to submit numbers towards a final total figure of debt collected by the book, but how do we measure what we owe, if what we owe or are owed is non- monetary? Is this contingent on measuring what we give in the first place? And how could that be represented in this project, as part of a ledger of debts and credits? What language should be used for this?
Eisenstein talks of this in his book Sacred Economics, considering the relationship between money and/as measure ; ‘the immeasurable was excluded from science – ‘consign it to the flames’ Hume said- and from economics as well. Thus is has come to pass that standard of living has diverged from quality of life. The former is a quantifiable standard: the latter is not’ and yet ‘of all the things that human beings make and do for each other, it is the unquantifiable ones that contribute most to human happiness’. Discuss!
It is this place, the place of the immeasurable, which could be the most challenging aspect of this project and also the most interesting. From the feedback I have been given so far and my own reflections on this, it is much more relevant to allow space for others to consider their debts holistically, whether in the form of money and /or, objects, relationships, love, etc. It is through referencing but then transgressing the format of a list of figures on paper, with their reductionist power, which only tell one, measurable, aspect of any given story, that the power of the bigger story of the book can be released.
