Burning The Books

I have had so many meetings and discussions about this project recently that I feel like I have been having an out of body experience! I think this is because when I began this blog, it was very much in the hibernation of winter mode and writing the backstory from a sense of stillness and reflection. As it begins to externalize, I see the challenge of keeping my own relationship to it, and feeding it from a quiet space, and balancing this with the collaborative process of pre – production and practical planning that is now taking place.

The other week, after London meetings, I went over to Portslade near Brighton to see Johanna Berger at the Blank Studios /gallery. It was a magnetic moment, as we dived straight into a conversation about debt, gift, exchange, money, alternative economies etc. They have done some very relevant work in relation to this project in the past and it is a good match to be working with them now. We began very quickly to cook up ideas not only for what form my R+D will take there but what could develop from that further in terms of a more substantial series of public interventions involving many others and focusing on the idea of scarcity and sustenance – using food as an added medium! Blank have applied to House Festival and I won’t say too much, but if they are successful, the form of what we will do will be a much bigger deal that my smaller scale interventions, which will anyway take place from late march through May. I am asking for an extension to end of May as Johanna felt strongly it would be good to hook into Brighton Festival audiences and their own track record of engaging local audiences during this period of time. It makes sense, and allows for more time for touring planning and meetings as well as the rescheduling of a talk I was due to give at LSE which was postponed due to the recent snow. It’s funny how sometimes the timeframes of projects have a life of their own, I’ve learnt to be more flexible around this, remembering that some ideas I have had (such as The Gifts) have taken 7 years to translate into a finished work in the public realm. You could say this work is a culmination of as many years in that the experiences that have promoted the enquiry date back at least that long. I just never saw it as preparation for an art project at the time, I was taken unawares!

Another encounter Brighton -side was with my friend Perse of the brilliant Feral Theatre. They have done a lot of work around performing Remembrance ceremonies for Lost Species in settings all over the country. Powerful and moving. She is one of my circle of supporters and I wanted to talk to her both about the performative aspect of the project and the enacting of public ritual and to ask her to contribute a debt story that can be classified as ecological, as it’s one of the aspects of the subject that I think is both very relevant to now and intrinsically linked to finance and power.

She raised the idea of the immeasurable, which I have mentioned before and which CE also discusses in Sacred Economics, in relation to the ecology – and questioned the rationale in applying finance-derived measures of quantity to ecological damage. Sometimes even before the damage is enacted, like carbon credits etc. – and seems to be a form of post-rationalization, a guilt-toll to enable profit to continue to take precedence over the well-being of the earth itself. This reframes debt in another context – that there is time, love, physical repair that needs to be ‘repaid’ to the commons – our collectively held and owned resources. More on this later.

It made me realize what one of the most important aims of this project is: to have a different kind of conversation around debt than the one you think you are going to have.

This last week has been very much about coming out of the comfort zone of my own thinking (or co-thinking/ planning with Andrew, the producer) and expanding into the next phase. This has meant a series of meetings, some intense but always exciting for me as now our planning to take the idea out into different contexts starts to solidify.

So I have now finally met in person Laura and Harun from the inspiring Fierce Festival, who will be the presenting partners for the project in Birmingham. It was great for me to see how broad and lateral their thinking is about the potential contexts other than the festival itself, that could best serve the project over an extended period of time. And to talk in depth around the themes of the work in a way which left me buzzing and feeling like it has a will of its own to land in spaces beyond anything I could have possibly imagined after that first intervention. Key to this has been Andrew’s connections and thinking and now giving over part-custody of the well being of the work to partners.

Next up was another meeting with Jason and Duponte and Simon Allen of The Swarm, who devise and conjure some really stunning multi-platform storytelling projects. They have taken my idea for how The Book of Debts might work online, extensively cross-examined me on my aims and visions, suggested totally alternative ways of approaching it digitally and reminded me of how I used to think when I worked in this field over 15 years ago. I have gotten over identified with the physical aspects of public work, and attached to my Book- as a book- and they reminded me that what is needed is to create a compelling space, through which potential contributors to the project can safely reach the book- and reflect on the wider aspects of debt through the lens of their own personal experiences along the way. As our budget is small and we are hoping to achieve a lot digitally and they feel a resonance with the project, they will become co-producers on the digital, and I am hoping if we get touring funding that there will be a lot more cross-platform work we can do to follow on from this phase. I have given them a script for a trailer, which they will produce as a ‘first stop’ on entry to the site, and to be put out on YouTube etc. I had feedback on this from three of my ‘Circle of Investors’ (of time and attention rather than money!) who are writers /directors. Interesting to see how a few words can change the tone of a 30 second script and also how much you can communicate in such a short time. Have now given Jason and Simon the script to do with what they will and will get to feedback when it comes back in draft trailer form. Can’t wait.

Also, this week I am starting to get in some requested debt stories and feedback from some of my Circle, to be used to inform the wording and questioning process of entering the book and to stand as examples online when people first arrive at the site. I will go into more detail on this later, as already a lot of intriguing and complex questions are arising. One of the things that is clearly coming back is to drop all questions around payback, it is more powerful to leave that unspoken and to allow contributors to reflect on this themselves. By offering up the Book to be burnt we are symbolically offering instant absolution and calling into question this assumed, universal need to make good on all debts – this crushing moral obligation, despite the fact that, for example, in the financial sector – the original terms of debt agreements (some in almost invisible small-print or ridiculously esoteric language) are misleading and often illegal (see the IMF and the way it has treated developing countries over the last decade – but more on that later, with my current reading, Graeber)

Have run out of word count to finish my week, more later….

‘Because it creates gratitude or obligation, to willingly receive a gift is itself a form of generosity, it says: ‘I am willing to owe you one. Or in a more sophisticated gift culture, it says: ‘I am willing to be in the debt of the community’ (Sacred Economics, Charles Eisenstein)

I have just finally finished reading Sacred Economics. In the final chapters CE talks a lot about gift, the starting point from which I then came to approach this subject of debt, its shadow side. His reframing of debt – social debt – within communities as an essential operator to making them work in the fullest sense possible brings up so many relevant points to this project and my own experience that was it source.

This notion of being able to receive gifts fully -in the form of money or other help for survival at our most confronting moments as a family when it all crashed for us – when in a state of material powerlessness, without fear of being in obligation, is something that we have had to learn intensively over the last few years. One sentence resonated particularly with me:

As in infancy, periods of helplessness reconnect us to the principle of the gift’

I had the growing impression through the book that its author had been through some kind of personal crisis which had transformed his thinking, and this does in fact get revealed in the closing chapters. Like us, he and his family had to go through acute material loss and the generosity of those around them to survive. It feels to me that this experience -as well as his reaction as human being to the ecological and social change in a broader sense – has on some deep level informed, the lucidity and breadth of his perspective. I am sure many will totally take issue with his ideas, but to me the overall synthesis of his and others ideas into a roadmap forward is fresh and potentially life-changing. I identified with this drive I felt he had, that comes when one has nothing left to lose and arises from a deeper need to to use what one has left – in my case my own practice – and put it at the service of others. The notion of art as servitude is also something touched apon in that book and that I have been thinking about in relation to how I operate in relation to the Book of Debts – servant, guardian, scribe, conduit?

Gift and service are of course closely interlinked and there are many questions around how we define them both depending on our value system.

When I wake up feeling like I am using one of my creative ‘gifts’ fully in my everyday life, when in flows, it feels like a form of true service. Service to who? To myself? To future audiences /public? To art? To the idea, as an entity In itself? To God/The Universe/Everything?

However both the ideas in the book and the notion of service – and how this kind of art sits within them – are rooted in the idea of the interconnectedness of all things, the non-hierachical nature of the way human beings can truly relate, and in this sense do both gift and service become a kind of currency that just makes society work better ? Within that way of looking at the world, debt has the capacity to operate as a form of gratitude – confronting to consider and at odds with /eclipsed by so many of the visible ways debt seems to be operating in society that gives it a dark and often violent name, I thought.

Then I opened up my next book ‘Debt : The First 5000 years’ by David Graeber’ and first off is the Oxford English Dictionary definition:

Debt

Noun 1 a sum of money owed. 2. The state of owing money. 3. A feeling of gratitude for a favour or service.

This is something I also want to look at more closely as I widen the definition of debts that may allow for a broader range of entries into the Book…



So, now, in this present research process, I remember how much of a Pandora’s box it can be. Opening up ideas and possibilities then opens up even more ideas and possibilities. And time starts to shrink with all there is to explore. Exciting though. One of the essential mediating factors and at the heart of this project is the network of relationships around it – like a human satellite- that give me both a mirror to reflect back and a staff to take me forward (can’t resist those biblical metaphors).

Some of them are very direct and clear-cut relationships, such as working my producer Andrew Mitchelson, who has been a brilliant support since last summer and helped me shape the narrative of the project and pull together our GFA as well as just having sheer belief that this something worth taking out wide and far. I also have the extremely helpful mentoring support of Ju Row Farr at Blast Theory, who I talk with monthly and gives me perspective and lines of questioning, to help draw the lines of the path I am following. Now getting on board are Simon and Jason from The Swarm, who are going to work with us to create the digital ‘persona’ of Burning the Books, to open up the project to online audiences and to help devise a space, a map for the public to be drawn into and navigate the process of connecting with the project. There are also the galleries, venues and communities we are going to work with for this R+D period and beyond (much more on that later).

Moving outwards, I also now have a circle of interested supporters (like investors, but with attention, not money) who have agreed to gift me their perspective on the project, at least once over the next year. Some of them will be contributors to the book directly at an early stage, one-to-one through the response to a set of questions around debts /stories they are considering submitting that include feedback on what it was like to answer those questions. This will help us refine what the most sensitive and appropriate process of entering into a relationship with the book – and myself – might be, both on and offline.

One of the questions from today with Ju that came up was over the language used within the conceptual framework of the project. Am I co-opting the language of the financial sector, asking for people to categorise their debts into financial, emotional, ecological, metaphysical etc? It will be easy to allow people to submit numbers towards a final total figure of debt collected by the book, but how do we measure what we owe, if what we owe or are owed is non- monetary? Is this contingent on measuring what we give in the first place? And how could that be represented in this project, as part of a ledger of debts and credits? What language should be used for this?

Eisenstein talks of this in his book Sacred Economics, considering the relationship between money and/as measure ; ‘the immeasurable was excluded from science – ‘consign it to the flames’ Hume said- and from economics as well. Thus is has come to pass that standard of living has diverged from quality of life. The former is a quantifiable standard: the latter is not’ and yet ‘of all the things that human beings make and do for each other, it is the unquantifiable ones that contribute most to human happiness’. Discuss!

It is this place, the place of the immeasurable, which could be the most challenging aspect of this project and also the most interesting. From the feedback I have been given so far and my own reflections on this, it is much more relevant to allow space for others to consider their debts holistically, whether in the form of money and /or, objects, relationships, love, etc. It is through referencing but then transgressing the format of a list of figures on paper, with their reductionist power, which only tell one, measurable, aspect of any given story, that the power of the bigger story of the book can be released.

‘It is not without reason that our financial elites have been called a priesthood. Donning ceremonial garb, speaking an arcane language, wielding mysterious inscriptions, they can with a mere word or a mere stroke of a pen, cause fortunes and nations to rise and fall’ (Sacred Economics, Charles Eisenstein)

To shortcut back to the Present in Public intervention in Liverpool, it evolved into this project, Burning the Books. The other artists interventions and their processes, with which this project is interconnected (thankyou to all of them and their generous contribution to my own process!) are very much worth checking out and are detailed here.

I spent that November day on the streets of the Liverpool One, approaching members of the public as a kind of confessor-cum-scribe, in a long black velvet coat – large sackcloth book in-hand and ‘collected debts’ – financial, emotional and spiritual -from whoever would give them to me.

This role evolved through reading Margaret Atwood’s consideration in Payback of the ancient concept that ‘there is an underlying balancing principle in the universe, according to which we should act’ and her journey into the mythologies of the afterlife to meet the figures there whose role it was to restore ancient balances. In particular in ancient Egypt, ‘Thoth, moon-god ..the god of time…the god of measurements and numbers and astronomy and engineering skills, and …a supernatural scribe or clerk’ and in Christianity ‘Angel Gabriel..the ‘recording angel’, the one credited with keeping God’s ledger book up to date’ . There is also a reference in my role to my pre-Islamic Iranian roots which I will go into later.

(Having just googled this to get the url I notice there was a documentary released last year inspired by that book. And here is Atwood’s Payback lecture I mentioned before on Youtube)

Liverpool on a Saturday afternoon was actually the perfect place to start this project – the stereotype of scousers being up a good chat about anything WAS true for me that day!.

I learnt within half an hour to preface my approach to people with ‘I’m not asking you for money and I’m not part of any religious organisation’. Neither did I say I was an artist or tell my own story unless pressed. This often meant a more authentic conversation as many people seemed more at ease knowing what my agenda was, though some didn’t care, they were just disarmed by the idea. My favourite line to use became that I was performing a free public service for one day only which they were invited to make use of.

Each person who would talk to me was invited to – anonymously – gift me information to add to the book, by telling me directly of a debt they owed or were owed, to whom and whether they were or would ever be ready or able to pay it back / forgive it. I then scribed this information into the book. In almost every case they opted to have their contribution recited publicly before burning.

In total I collected £3,285,103, 870.00 in unpaid debt that day, and an extraordinarily diverse range of personal debts and their stories – from small amounts of money owed to councils, credit card companies, unexpressed love and apologies owed between couples and to deceased spouses, to over £3 billion pounds in taxes owed by Philip Green submitted by Occupy Liverpool protestors outside Top Shop (I think it’s ok to disclose this don’t you) to souls owed to Jesus by some of those street Christians I mentioned in my earlier recounting of my research exercise.

At the end of the day, as it got dark, we staged a ceremony in the courtyard of the Bluecoat, where I read out a short address on the balance of debt and credit, followed by a listing of the contents of the book, inviting the audience to collaborate in a process of playful absolution and ending in the physical torching of the book and the imaginary annihilation of everything owed.

The recital and burning ceremony was filmed by the curator Tim and can be viewed here on youtube.