NEGOTIATING SYSTEMS
As an aside to making connections and traversing cracks, I am reading Foundations by The Free University of Liverpool: the bit about negotiating systems, making them visible and accountable in a fair and clear manner. My own words are inside this book, I am the meandering outsider revelling in truths and fantasies; and I am reading it from the outside.
The a-n Re:view bursary, conversations with Gareth about the fundamentals of money systems and a fractured ankle are leading me somewhere. A space of words but actions too. It is not enough for me to talk about this, doing is desirable, essential and inevitable. Until my Aircast boot is removed, hopefully today, I am in a liminal space between reflection and action. It is increasingly hard to be still.
CRACKS IN TEAPOTS AND LIMINAL SPACES
Ah but cracks in teapots or otherwise are liminal spaces inhabited by who knows what. Did you ever avoid the cracks in the pavements when you were a child? Was a bear going to grab you if you did. My Mother always said ‘look where you are going, pick your feet up’, because I was always falling over. She was right – I didn’t pick my feet up or look where I was going and now have a fractured ankle.
But maybe then as now, I was looking out for the cracks, the liminal spaces, maybe I was traversing a terrain inside my head that is full of liminal spaces, full of potentials that I could pursue. Yes, I think those are the ‘bears’ and they are big and amazing and it’s full of risks but that is what my practice is all about here on the margins.
MAKING CONNECTIONS
Now I’m reflecting on marginalisation and how to resist that. I’m not always clear how to do it. Wading through the media, it looks as though our daily lives are homogenous, banal, white middle class male orientated. How to change this facade? How to colour perceptions to include what is happening at the margins, how to highlight the genuine, exciting risk-taking by other non-w/mc/m groups or individuals.
What is clear is the importance of connecting, collaborating and conversing thoughtfully with others who want to resist the homogenousity. Is that the right word? It is for how I feel today. It may not be in the dictionary but then it’s not so long ago that people spelled words however they wanted till someone came along and homogenised spelling. Was it the advent of the printing press that fixed spelling? I rest my case.
