It is taking time for us to work out how to work. I have no experience to compare this residency with however Sorcha said that this is like no other residency that she has been on, and she has been on several in the last two years. After a very slow morning we were tasked with identifying two outdoor spaces for installations – one large, and one small. Four of us headed out towards a large abandoned building probably less than one hundred meters from where we are staying. This particular building is simply a concrete shell, a four floor concrete shell pierced with large square windows in a strict regular grid pattern across the fasade.
Several rooms on the ground floor had curious features: two step-like blocks cast directly on/in the concrete, not far from that a pit with one sloping side. Another room bore traces that hinted that a row of four toilet stalls had been removed but perhaps the holes on the floor were something else. In one room brown paint flaked from the walls and ceiling in almost leaf-like forms. We climbed a staircase to the top floor. There was much more, and much better, grafitti on this floor. We walked the length of the building to the ’double return’ staircase near to the battered and rusted steel door where we had entered. No of stood too close to edge where it dropped to the floor below. We talked about fears of heights, fears of falling, fears of jumping. I experienced that curious tingling sensation in my groin that I always get when I approach a precipice. Walking down the stairs I realised that the fall from the floor above was of course only one floor, somehow standing on the top floor it felt as though I might fall through the whole building, all four floors, were I too fall. Was this a space for an installation?
The exercises that we are given raise questions that I cannot answer – at least I cannot answer them for the time being. I simply do not know what kind of installation space I am, or the group is, looking for. And at the moment I/we do not know how I/we will know what kind of space I/we are looking for. I could certainly imagine making something in (some of) the window apertures in the building’s fasade … but that would be my work work rather than a collaborative piece.
What is collaborative process? And how can it make work that exceeds the individual?
I note that I want the game that we are making to be as inclusive and as chaotic(?) as possible. While others talk of winning, taking turns, and it generally making sense I find myself drawn to it not making in sense, to it being played over different time-scales by the different players, to it being about participation and process. Is it a) game if players use the components in their own ways? I think that I am interested in the playing … and the playing being the process … evolution and/or development happening ’in play’. I surprise myself by not wanting or needing to know what the game is before wanting it to start.
I note that I am open to not knowing, I actually seek out the space of not knowing, when I am making collaborative live work (performance). It is there that I one hundred percent trust the process! I remember Goat Island, Queer Glow, Frozen Progress, the project with the two Andrews at Trinty Buoy Wharf. I miss making live work with other people. I miss being in those spaces (physical and conceptual) of collective exploration.
What would it be like to make work together with someone – a collaborative creative partner?
Could artists place ads like musicians do when they want to form a band? Could I?
I found the discussion around designing, formalising, structuring the game very difficult. I wanted us to play all the variants before refining … defining … what it what we had created. I did not want to reach a conclusion … it felt far too early to do so. I wanted to enjoy more of the organic growth … I wanted to see where that you take us … I wanted more of the unknown. I was very happy (excited) to have components that I did not know either how or when to use – I wanted more features, tools, aspects that could be brought in to play as and when we needed them. I wanted the playing of the game to be creative in and of itself.
I think that in thinking about the game I am investigating what open ended creative processes might be. This is perhaps ’my thing’ to work with for the time that I have here.
Feeling inspired and even a little intimidated by the breadth and depth of yesterday evening’s presentations. The evident scale of imagination and the commitment to practice led me once more to wonder how long I can continue as artist and educator. I think that the difficulty is the ’and’ rather than either ’artist’ or ’educator’. Currently I am trying to be two distinct things at the same time – or at least in the same week (and by currently I mean in my day-to-day life in Sweden). I want to change this and I feel that I am on the way to doing so – this residency being a part of that change. That is perhaps why already the experience of being here seems so important. I am being reminded of what being an artist is.
I am writing these sentences to make sense of my jumbled thoughts and almost as soon as a sentence begins to form in my mind and on the page I start to edit it – consciously re-writing from (and in) a positive position. I say page, but I am typing on my laptop and the words on the screen. The delete key erases the words. If I were writing in pen on paper I would cross the words out and there would be visible traces of how I am shifting things. On screen is the result of thinking and writing rather than the process of thinking and writing. I rarely if ever use the strike-through function that sits quietly beside the b, i, and u functions – what is a keyboard shortcut for strike-through? The others I know by heart.
The morning’s workshop, the second with John, made me realise how result driven I am. The task is to create a game and I feel myself wanting to see things take shape … things are not taking shape. As a participant … collaborator(?) … how much to I voice my needs, how do I find a place for my needs in the evolving collaboration, how much do I let go of my needs? What is my contribution, and what is my contribution’s relation to other contributions?
I made two very concrete contributions/suggestions: the game should incorporate as much as possible, and each of us should ask a friend/contact to send us an instruction. We now have 20 instructions that range from the abstract to the specific.
What do I take from yesterday – both the workshop and the presentations? The importance of acknowledging process … truth to process … truth of process … truth in process(?).
The residency is not what I expected. Not that I (we) had received any information about what it would be. Perhaps that is why I found myself reflecting on previous residential artistic experiences even if they were not exactly residencies. I am here and I am doing things. I am doing this with other artists … I am spending all my time, 24 hours a day, with other artists.
Yesterday we started composing two lists: joys, and frustrations. I wrote ’the company of other artists’ on the joys list. I think that we held back in our contributions to these lists, perhaps they came too early in the process. I know that I could have said more but held back as I did not want to speak more than anyone else – perhaps we all did that. This week’s guest workshop leader, who is very clear that he does not want to be referred to as an ’expert’ (the word that that the residency hosts Kapsars and Laura used in their brief email about the programme), is John and his theme is ’games’. The three-day workshop is about making a game. Much of the first day was spent playing the board game that John and a friend of his made where the aim is for players to work together to establish an arts venue. It had been a long time since I played a board game, and even longer since I played one with other adults. We stopped playing in the late afternoon.
After dinner Kaspars asked us to help with kitting out the room that would become our kitchen. He had spent Monday evening hooking up a sink to the water supply in the bathroom next door. Now it was time to move the fridge, tables, induction plates, ceramic plates and other crockery, cutlery, cooking pots and utensils from his studio. Dinner that evening had been made by Lidija and Fenu in the common kitchen on the third floor, but we ate it at tables carried to the soon-to-be-kitchen on the fourth floor. Kristjan and I had realised the challenge of cooking for a large group in the common kitchen at lunch time when we could only use one cooking ring and a rather modest pot to make soup for the ten of us. After moving things we set about putting hooks in the ceiling so that lamps could be hung over the cooking benches and the long table. Throughout these activities there was much discussion about the tasks, about the day, about tomorrow.
Does is matter what I am/we are doing? Or is the doing, the process of doing, the important thing at this stage of the process, project, residency? Another strand of the residency is about collaborating … on the first day Kaspars talked about learning through doing … don’t black holes swallow up everything … indiscriminately? …
I am paying attention to my reactions, my challenges, my way of being, my willingness to be open, … my joy in the company of other artists.
Experience walking exercise. Three of us had an hour and a half outside to collect five experiences, we had to do it without speaking. Listening to the instructions (?) immediately reminded me of previous performance projects – specifically the one that became Frozen Progress (2001). It was both comfortingly familiar and a reminder of how distant such projects and ways of working have become. It awakened something in me about physicality, or perhaps the absence of physicality in my current practice … something to note.
We climbed, walked, jumped, and danced through a rambling abandoned building almost immediately next to the one in which we are staying. It was playful – like being a child again – there were lots of tests. Testing how we communicated and checked in with each other – more eye contact than usual. Testing the ground – keeping my weight on my back foot and testing the burnt, charred, uncertain ground ahead with my front foot. Testing materials, dropping debris into dark holes that evidently had water at the bottom, whirling plastic tubes around above our heads, touching the velvety dampness of fungi. A large room, the only room where the ceiling was intact, and which was almost entirely dark – the windows had been bricked up, became a nightclub when Fenu shone his torch up through the perforated tile that Aina had found. We danced on the broken glass and I was transported back to nights out in Edinburgh and London … the lyric “stilettos on broken bottles” going through my head. How many times have I found myself becoming emotional and teary on dance-floors ’dancing on my own’ since John died?
Reflecting on the five experiences that we had collected we were unanimous that the most intense was the three of us jumping in synch forward and back on the fire damaged roof … jump forward with both feet and jump back as soon as you feel the roof beneath your feet, did we feel the roof move? Jump again. It moved. Did we hear something? Jump again. And again … again … we definitely heard something and felt something that time. We acknowledge with danger of what we are doing with spontaneous laughter. We stand where we are on the roof directly above a wall – safe ground. The laughter subsides, we turn to the left and in single file walk to the left where we one up one clamber down burnt roofing into the body of the building.
Earlier and in a few sentences about our motivations for being on the residency I had said that I want to re-connect with my artist’s soul – to ’let the crazy out’. The afternoon’s exercise was a very good way to start to doing just that. To pay attention to the people and materials around me, to be in the moment, to test, and to play, to do things for the sake of doing them, to learn and experience by doing. To be present.
