Echoes of a Market had the soft launch on Friday.
The space looks great and I had a chat with Vicki who runs Parley about how my visual response to the recordings might manifest in the space. Having a conversation in a space about responding to that space is a really important process for me. Thoughts and ideas operate in a much more direct and visual way when I have that kind of dialogue opportunity. I’m also planning some prep work sitting in the space and making notes or scribbles in response. I’m not sure about leaving them in the space or making them for my own development yet but looking forward to being the process.
I went to the Fourth World Congress of Psychogeography at the University of Huddersfield. Before it started I had a really interesting exchange with someone who used to be a carpenter by trade and lives down the road from the Uni. He spoke about not having the opportunity for critical dialogue in his locality and everyday life where his peers and neighbours are discussing football and TV. Whilst he talks about football and TV with them, he also thrives on critical dialogue. I told him about my work and he honed in on Dwell Time and we reflected on reasons why mental health is so poor for many people at the moment. He asked if I’d done any comparative studies with other cultures such as in the east. I haven’t and only really know the World Happiness Report which I have no idea on the reliability of the data and if the measures can be consistent across the world. A very interesting exchange.
I also bumped into a artist friend who I’ve never met in real life before, Robyn Woolston, and her friend Tanya Meditzky. We discussed the conference and respective works/current projects and life in general. I mentioned in a previous post about another conference, that whilst the conference itself is interesting and inspiring, it seems the dialogue that takes place incidentally and around the edges of the thing that brings us together is the stuff of most value. The dialogue happens and is formed by the context of the conference or event and wouldn’t happen in that way or at all if it wasn’t for the mutual purpose of being there.
I took part in a Collective North live chat today about action and activism today. I met (online) some really interesting practitioners and shared ideas and concerns. This online chat group is an interesting mode of dialogue in that threads start popping up and I ended up swapping between various sub conversations with different people. It’s a form of multi-channel dialogue that couldn’t really happen in real life. I suppose in theory you could have multi-directional conversations in sequence. Taking inspiration from the first patterns in taekwondo Four Direction Punching/Blocking (Sagi Jurigi/Sagi Magki) where you punch/block in the four 90 degree directions in sequence – a performance could be where you maintain four independent/concurrent dialogues with four different people moving around on the spot facing N, E, S, W or vice versa. I sounds like a parlour game or a game the surrealists might come up with! Would there be dialogue between the dialogues? A question and answer format or more broadly a response to the utterance? What would the guidance for the participants be?
Lenny and I went to Dwell Time’s partner (Bibliotherapy) network meetings and found out loads of really relevant things that are happening (successful networking!) I was thinking in the meeting and afterwards about the nature of dialogue in collaboration (following the Compass Live Art development meeting topic of partnerships) and especially the first meeting of potential partners and collaborators. How what we do and have to offer and also what we want/need is communicated respectively. Also thinking about the liminal spaces inbetween the ‘official meeting of informal conversation and friendly chitchat getting to know these new people. At the beginning of the meeting before introductions, we had a conversation and kids going back to school and grown up kids going off to uni. A good ten minute conversation about the education system in the UK and comparison to other countries’ systems ensued. Notably how careers advice conversation go and how ridiculously early children are made to chose subjects of potentially a lifetime. This dialogue is based (or certainly was when we were receiving it) on academic achievement over interests. The options of courses that blend diverse interests was and probably still is limited and the motivation/pressure to go into a financially rewarding careers is huge. A better model would be to be enrolled in further/higher education and pick modules of interest, indefinitely, whilst contributing to society in the process with the learned skills and knowledge. I’m sure similar models must exist somewhere. And this was the dialogue before the 2 hour valuable meeting took place! Maybe every meeting should hold a space for a non-business agenda ten minute dialogue at the start!
I’ve been thinking about the visual response I’m going to be giving to the Echoes of A Market and the relevance of dialogue. The dialogues that are recorded and happen in the space, the dialogue between the existing work and the space. I’d previously mentioned to the group my dialogue/monologue prints I’d made as a potential starter for thinking about this project.
I think I’d like to build on this work and start with monoprint and ink drawings and see where that takes me.
