On 6 and 7 November the Engage national conference was held in Brighton around the Brighton Photo Biennial. I attended on 7 November and ran a breakout session about my residency in Fabrica.
I found the session difficult in that it turned out differently from how I had planned it but actually that can often prove to be fruitful and I came away thinking about quite specific and thought-provoking matters.
The main thought centres around the institutionalised ways of being that we develop from performing certain activities repeatedly in similar contexts. I talked about this quite a lot in the breakout session and about how, with this residency, I have quite explicitly tried to avoid allowing those pre-determined patterns of behaviour to colour my interactions with others.
It was difficult to speak about, I lost my thread and almost entirely forgot to show the images I had prepared to structure my talk with. I know I grew slightly defensive and a bit hectoring.
I decided to abandon my talk and take questions, not liking the way everyone was looking at me expectantly and that I seemed to be lecturing them. This worked quite well but something inside me had grown very vulnerable and I was sweating and felt open to attack.
I think the whole session would have gone better if I had decided at the planning stage just to speak about my experiences of the residency and how it had affected my practice rather than trying to address "how [I] set about encouraging visitors to engage with the ethical and philosophical complexities of Hirschhorn’s work" , which is what I had promised on the conference programme.
This experience has taught me something about the extent to which I bend to what I perceive to be the expectations that others have of what I will do rather than really stopping to think about what it is that I want to say.
On a broader level this tells me something about how one’s perceptions of an event based on previous experience detract from being in the present moment or, put otherwise, how stasis within each step of a process risks altering or distorting a voice in the present. This has implications for the progress of democracy.
I was reading a passage this morning about democracy from a conversation between Derrida and Mustapha Chérif. I found it helpful in soothing a certain soreness from some degree of breakage within my perception of my own sense of integrity subsequent to this uncomfortable experience:
"To exist in a democracy is to agree to challenge, to be challenged, to challenge the status quo, which is called democratic, in the name of a democracy to come. This is why I always speak of a democracy to come. Democracy is always to come, it is a promise, and it is in the name of that promise that one can always criticise, question that which is proposed as de facto democracy." (Derrida)
