I used to blog a lot, blogging was a vital and prolific part of my creative process, as a channel for communicating and reflecting on the ideas and processes that were creating my public work, and began on this site in 2009 with The shape of things : The Gifts
I am seeing – as I wonder why I don’t blog as much as I used to, or feel the need /find the time to – that it has been a very gradual but concrete way into using longer form writing within my work itself (I had previously used only poetry and short form writing ). So now I spend a lot more time shaping work through narratives by: listening, recording , writing, editing texts authored by myself or strangers I interact with. So the act of blogging (and the responses to what I have written over the years) has transformed my work and the direction it faces (outward) and brought me a lot more confidence in crafting pieces of writing for publication or performance (which I wasn’t doing when I began blogging). So thanks AN for being instrumental in that… :)
So, to this project, this Research and Development (due to end witin the next few weeks) has, over the last month or so, clearly turned into three projects! All of them inter-related on some level and based on writing – based, narrative forms. One is a collaborative audio piece (The Fourth Wall) one a solo performance and publication project and the other a future narrative based digital work (I will talk about these in the next post or a new blog entirely as the titles are all different )
The first one, The Fourth Wall ( taken from the theatre term denoting the conceptual /invisible barrier between audience and actors but into stretched here into other realms ) is most clearly linked to the original aims of this R+D, to explore listening as a public medium and use it to develop work about conflict, belief, belonging and the sharp end of ‘otherness’. It will be finished next week and launched within the main community we have been working on the pilot with in Mile End, London (The Mile End Community Project).
I spent most of the last week transcribing 10,000 words spoken by around 20 different people within the – predominantly Muslim – community as we sat them down in pairs to respond to questions around people/places/times of safety, belonging, and conflict, to listen to each other and to re-tell (and record) each other’s story using the first person, so mirroring that story as if they were them. So stepping into their shoes and facing a future audience. This both created a different kind of listening, ensured anonymity around some sensitive subjects and gave them an experience of removal from their original story. Hearing the narrative of a 59 year old man voiced by a young man or the narrative of Bengali woman voiced by a British white woman also creates a different kind of listening for the audience. I am not going to go into much detail here or give too much away as It will be on Soundcloud next Thursday (after a live launch event ) and I will post a link to it and leave it to you to see how it comes across outside of the context of the time and place.
Nurul and Assan, who run MECP, are at the heart of really inspiring on-going initiative there, in the ‘Capital of Tower Hamlets’ – using mainly film – to question stereotypes and work on cohesion and conflict resolution within that community. They seem to be known and trusted by people across all sectors of the community and I always felt like I was in safe and sensitive hands, with creative input and themselves also as storytellers. They set up sessions with the men after mosque, took me to meet women in playgrounds and in their cars ( as the babies slept, a really effective space for a recording booth I realise ..) we sat in parks, on walls and in a kebab shop and took atmos recordings in all the spaces they were referring to in their stories.
We made most of these recordings on the day of, and then the day after the EU referendum. It wasn’t deliberate timing, it had been scheduled way back as they was the days that worked. A number of stories around historical racism, mainly from the eighties, when they had first arrived in this community, quickly emerged, recalled as if they were the “bad old days” and it was just the norm , to expect to be attacked when you walked out of your front door. Back then. These stories were always qualified with how much better it was now, how over time – and often after drawing clear boundaries or the intervention of elders into the situation – those neighbours who had called them Paki, or thrown insults or tried to exclude their kids, were now their “street friends”, their kids had done a lot of the work and become friends, in some cases the mothers sent food to their houses and saw them now as true neighbours and felt at home in once alienated environments.
In the piece I have been editing there is a reference to a road rage incident where the guy was being told to ‘ just wait a few weeks and we’ll be sending you home once the EU result is out, but even when I heard that I wanted to dismiss it as a-typical, I wanted to deny that this sentiment might become widespread. Even when the kebab shop owner, who witnesses conflicts every day from his window, talked about the fights between gangs across in the park, he declared they were not through racism but because of multi -ethnic gangs – I think he must have meant not white –on – Black / Asian racial lines.
I was gutted when only the day after the referendum (which was already a shock) – and since, the kind of racist (white –on –Asian/ Black/ Eastern European/anyone really) incidents that were spoken of as a thing of the past, started being reported in their hundreds in the media and on the ground.
It’s as if a Pandora’s box opened, with so much dark assistance from the Brexit campaign – and all those anti –austerity, anti – elites narratives just got switched at birth with an anti-migration agenda and created a grotesque new breed of intolerance and fear.
At the same time, listening back to the audio, I’m also reminded of what’s possible, beyond this, what has been possible before and what can be possible again.
MECP’s quiet, ongoing, dedication to cohesion and their consciousness of the fragility of peace, but the choosing to look across borders and consider the perspectives of those through a wall of fear and intolerance gives me some kind of small hope. It’s also what I need to keep doing with this part of my practice. There are many sectors of communities I have not worked with because, as an artist with migrant heritage (my mother was Iranian), I always gravitate towards that and also our definition of diversity seems to be BME based. However diversity is broader than that. But I don’t often really talk to or engage with my ‘white’ side (my father is English). That kind of sounds ridiculous , but hopefully you know what I mean. My Kent and Sussex English Tory or old Labour roots, some of whose views I find confronting /offensive /excluding of who I feel I am, or to try to understand what the human need is beyond a narrative of ‘othering’ , as I can see MECP have done from many of the things they talk about in the piece. I stay in the comfort zone to some extent. I feel at home in BME settings because I am a mongrel and its fed so much and so richly into the work and life I have made.
So that other kind of enquiry is to come and I have plans for that. But it feels like a mountain has risen up and I need a lot more energy and focus to set off on a path not taken before, with a small but powerful compass and a rather confusing roadmap…
