So, to begin. This was a project I didn’t plan on creating. Like my last project Burning the Books (a live touring work exploring debt in it many forms) it takes a central metaphor – the Wall – and attempts to provide an entry point into thinking about a whole network of contemporary themes which are so complex, intense and troubling (conflict, belief, prejudice, fear, division, belonging, anti-migration narratives, trauma, violence, non-violence, forgiveness, justice etc …) that by the time we got granted the R&D from Arts Council England in January, part of me just wanted to lie down and forget the whole thing. Why couldn’t I be working on something playful, frivolous, fun, shallow and something I could forget about at 5pm every day? Just to get some relief. Oh, that’s called having a different kind of proper job, (I’m not sure what it would be) and that’s not what I am here for, apparently.
It seems that now, as I get older and especially over the last decade, subjects are choosing me rather than me choosing them – and they closely relate to either what I am experiencing in my own life or what I feel impacted or concerned by, to the point that not making work about these issues would feel like being in denial of something deeply important. And not doing my job as an artist – but that’s another discussion to be focused on later.
On the positive side, I am absolutely not alone in this project. . It emerged out of a series of conversations and provocations I was invited to take part in in late 2014 / early 2015 – a three part Salon series exploring Conflict and Belief (leading to new collaborative art works) and hosted by King’s Cultural Institute and 3FF (who had hosted one of my Book of Debts at their Urban Dialogues show and so knew my work).
The basis of it was this; ‘Faced with entrenched fault lines of opinion, belief, and practice, artists are often uniquely able to carve out an alternative space for reflection, imagination and discussion’. From that they seeded 4 collaborative projects between a few of the 30 artists, academics and activists who had been invited and found resonances in /proposed collaborative ideas. It was a kind of high-brow intellectual speed dating over some very nice food and wine thankyou. Some brilliant speakers from all sectors and a sense of impending pressure to come up with something that might turn into a seed project, as they had a little bit of money and support to give at the end.
I was very burnt out that winter after a ridiculously busy year and wasn’t sure I could come up with anything, and almost didn’t continue. But an image grew throughout the day of the second salon which intrigued me. It was the image of a great Wall, packed with hundreds, possibly thousands of contributed texts / objects and dotted with gaps here and there, through which people -strangers – were interacting, and passing pieces of the wall, until at one point, it got completely un-made and nothing remained. A kind of metaphysical Berlin Wall experience of sorts.
That evening one of the speakers – Craig Larkin, an academic, researcher and writer in the Institute for Middle Eastern Studies at King’s – stood up and starting talking about his work on walls (!) ; conflict, memory, narrative – from the peace lines in Northern Ireland (where he grew up) to his projects at the Separation Wall in East Jerusalem,and his research on young people’s experience of post -conflict cities such as Beirut, where he had lived and worked for a number of years.
However, when Craig spoke he managed to communicate a range of highly complex ideas and experiences in such a simple, direct and powerful way that I was immediately engaged, showing images and talking with great humanity about the people he has met and the complexities of keeping a balanced view of such an explosive subject – Middle eastern politics and faith issues – and finding alternative ways of looking at it through human story. So really I see him as a storyteller and social activist of sorts. And he was intrigued by the idea of a wall coming down not up and of the potential of creative processes intervening in the work he is doing.
I had also discussed ideas with another academic, called Paula Serafini , who is no longer on the project, and together we used the small amount of seed money we had to spend time together and devise /offer a closed workshop (with potential community leaders and partners) and a public event to test out the concept of the work (the sketch below was a rendering of what it could be, but this has change since), to see what the problematics of the project might be and look more closely at the way we each addressed the themes. The event was called Through A Wall : the role of the artist , academic and activist in addressing belief and conflict.
I’ll publish the writing I presented/performed and what developed in response to the responses we got or link it on this blog soon – I’m currently editing a version of it to go on the next stage of my Library Shelf for Akerman Daly which has just gone live. This is an online project connected to a touring show I have some of my sculptural work in called Tall Tales (currently in London) – more on that later when the full show opens in a couple of weeks, as there are some connections to be made between this and that project, embodied in my work straddling digital, written and textile culture.
The other collaborator is theatre practitioner Maria Pattinson, (who I invited on board last summer) and I have been looking at the more internal, psychological aspects of the project and how these could be explored using live, body and object based processes in groups and this is feeding into my current individual explorations at Blast Theory.
