Resident at x-church in Gainsborough

Mapping seems to become more and more a core theme in what I do in this residency. Yet in many ways, the activities that I initiate and what I do myself does not seem to produce or involve a map as such. I go, for instance, with Clive MacLennan for a walk, and we don’t follow necessarily a plan or check out coordinates. What we do could maybe described at best as drifting.

When Guy Debord put forward his theory of the dérive he thought primarily that this would be a new way of engaging with urban space as part of psychogeography. The dérive as an activity is intended to allow the participants to engage with what is actually there not only on a factual but on a visual and emotive level. According to Debord the best arrangement is a small number of people, groups of two or three, thus insuring that they are attuned to their environment in a similar manner. Having said that, the first dérives in Paris in the 1950s were not walks as we imagine them but were usually a day long drifting from bar to bar. In short, a pub crawl. When I go with Clive for a drift we do not go for a drink. We start at the x-church café but that is all. I might ask Clive about a place or landmark mentioned by someone at x-church and maybe we go there. But that is all. This kind of aimless wandering allows us to look at what is actually there in that moment in time. Not yesterday, not tomorrow, not two hours ago. The intention is not to record all the corner stones and bus shelters in the neighbourhood. Neither do Clive or I want to take note of every fly tipping site. I believe we simply engage with what comes visually together in front of the camera. This is not only the semi- permanent structures such as walls and trees but also the traces of usage and the present light, most certainly decisive in creating emphasis in what we perceive.

When I invite the smaller children of the kids’ project to put something on a very large piece of paper mounted on a board that is somewhat precariously balanced on a table in the café space I have learned not to expect actual roads or lines of houses. I must say, I can’t help it, and to my discredit I still prompt them with questions such as: ‘Do you like the corner shop?’ or ‘Do you go sometimes to the park?’ I am glad to say that they kindly ignore me and draw what they feel is important. This can be themselves, their family, their home, a swing. They use all the colours they can find and like to explore forms that expand the usual conceptions of the human body and our environment.

There are many authors on the expanse of these paper plains and what they draw more often than not overlaps. I actually do call them maps as they intended to capture and lay out what is there. They look to me like webs, emotive networks that link them to each other whilst capturing their dreams. Staggeringly beautiful, heartbreakingly frail.

Yet is not this just that what I aim explore? The way the residents within the communities of x-church feel about living in this neck of the woods? The emotional renderings of a neighbourhood? How it affects you to live just there? Does the ever changing environment that we as residents use as part of our daily routines not only influence how we feel but also visualise, in part at least, our rather all too complicated feelings?

Engaging with our emotions is never easy and can be rather messy. That it manifests itself in beautiful drawings and leaves visual traces in our environment is reassuring. I for once am not the biggest fan of psychogeography but the concept of the dérive is simply useful in this respect. I suppose I could call what I do as part of this residency just that, a dérive, as I aim to capture and map what is there by a conscious drift through everyday life. How affect might inform what is there and what we perceive, where we see the emphasis to be is simply intriguing and compelling. To me drifting within the communities of x-church might be my attempt of mapping what matters to me and maybe to many other residents of this world.

This blog post was first published on https://loosespace.wordpress.com/2018/02/27/the-lure-of-the-drift/

At my latest stay as a guest-resident at x-church Marcus Hammond and I organised a small gathering for artists. I imagined it to be something equivalent to a jam session in music. Not that I ever participated in one. But jam is nice. It is sweet and gooey, and at its best sticky and messy. We ended up titling this inaugural event rather obscurely ‘Salon Slum’. To be truthful, I have been part of various artists’ groups and networks but have never participated in a salon before. This left me a bit confused as I associate the word salon with a specific kind of cultural happening that was popular at the turn of the Century that is from the 19th to the 20th. Actually, I nearly forgot but I even have a friend who wrote a book all about salons in Vienna around the Fin de Siècle.

As far I understand, these gatherings were predominantly organised by powerful women usually from an affluent background. In some way, it could be said that they loved the bohemian life style of creative thinkers and doers without engaging in the financial challenges of a truly self-employed existence. One person I am particularly hung up about is Alma Marghareta Maria Schindler, the daughter of the painter Emil Jakob Schindler, was not only a socialite but also a composer, author and editor. Yet her creative aptitude is not the reason why she stands out to me. Berta Zuckerkandl-Szeps, another hostess of an influential salon, was also active as a writer and journalist. Alma Schindler, however, not only provided a platform for the top creatives in Vienna but she seemed also to engage in a particular form of talent spotting. So was she involved with Oskar Kokoschka who took their break up so hard that he got made a life size ‘Alma’ doll that he carried around with him wherever he went. She also was successively married to Gustav Mahler[1], Walther Gropius[2] and Franz Werfel[3] and through these relationships sort of elongated her name. At the end of her life, she was called Alma Marghareta Maria Mahler Gropius Werfel.

But really this is not the point I ought to be exploring. There might be a much more interesting yet not necessarily easily to be answered question hidden within the proposition of a salon in relation to these all too mighty women. Bluntly put, Mahler and the likes of her instigated exchanges between diverse art forms. So would a salon not only bring together sculptors and painters, but also writers, poets, critics, musicians, composers, and architects. These gatherings are likely not only to have  led to marriages but also to frank exchanges of ideas provoking sometimes the founding sparks of future collaborations. In short, the purpose of these social and professional gatherings, perhaps a slow living version of today’s networking events, is likely to have been to provide ample space  to mix and meddle with each others’ conceptions and ideas.

Yet the question is where what Alma Mahler Gropius Werfel and the other grande dames organised to take place today at an acclaimed art space such as ICA in London or Arnolfini in Bristol would that then be classified in terms of socially engaged practice or relational aesthetics? Or would they call what they do performance art in reference to the 1960s happenings culture? Where the activities of these socialites in reality decoy art practices?

Having said all that, I finally have taken part in a salon and I even helped to organise it. I am for sure not a mighty lady nor have I lived all my life without having to worry where the butter comes from for my bread. But what I like, and I guess Marcus as well, is instigating and that is what we tried to do. We invited artists from very different practices. Some live only around the corner, others came from further afield. I won’t go into too much detail because, in a way, this was more a launch event and every artist just brought something along to show and share. To me, talking about art is usually never straight forward and overall rather messy business. Yet this very quality also makes us and things more often than not stick together in previously unimagined ways. It is not easy to say what actually happened at this first Salon Slum. Yet to give you at least an idea, I will briefly indicate what the participating artists presented without going in too many details and entangling myself in off the mark interpretations.

There was Joana Cifre Cerda, a performance artist, who showed her first experiments with sculpture. Stuart Marshall present a new short story where he explored, in my opinion at least, a fusion of sci-fi with the gothic genre. Mary Ward-Lowery let us listen to a complex audio play that she had produced for the BBC. Clive MacLennan’s small set of photographs chosen out of his fast and ever expanding archive on Gainsborough was simply amazing and a humbling reminder of how temporality is embedded in any place no matter how big or small. Kevo and Sam performed their very first collaborative sound piece. Exciting and mesmerising! Kevin Ribis read a deeply moving poem that still resonates in me. Fenia Kotsopoulou showed photographic experiments but from a different nature altogether. Her images were one offs made with homemade plant dyes and intended to fade away into oblivion. Daz Disley showed us an experiment where he separated a strand of pixels spanning over 7000 images. This involved a turn table, a laptop with a plugged in lens, sugar crystals on sticks and, for me at least, incomprehensible programming skills. Duncan Chapman got equally nerdy and demonstrated how he constructs a vocal ductus entirely through programming.  Marcus talked about his durational process of creating a painting and I finally began to understand why I really like them. I just showed a bit of work and talked about what I try to do during this residency. I hope it made sense as I still feel my way along. We also were very spoilt at this evening by Steffan Plumtree, the new chef, who made a very special buffet for us.

It is now over a week that the inaugural Salon Slum took place, nonetheless I keep thinking about what I saw and heard. I only can say that things happened for me and more than likely for the others as well.

Look already forward to the next Salon Slum!

P.S.: Lots of other interesting and thought provoking things happened at this residential stay. I will talk about them in another blog.

[1] Mahler died 1915.

[2] They got divorced 1920.

[3] Werfel outlived her by over 20 years.

Octavia, a member of the writing group at x-church, prompted me to join in somehow. The word she gave me was ‘everyday’. At the time, it was Saturday afternoon, I was in the thick of it, meaning I was with my family, helping with homework whilst doing some of the much overdue household chores. Octavia messaged me saying that she hoped that I had some time to myself. Well, I definitely didn’t have that.

Yet being busy with Saturday life made me realize that reflecting about the word ‘everyday’ and what it might and might not imply warrants to take a step back. To introduce a certain distance to see that little bit clearer.

When Michel de Certeau wrote ‘The Practice of Everyday Life’ (first published in French, 1980) he had, in my opinion at least, a very particular bone to grind. Above all, I think of the chapter where he described how a walker moves on the streets and how social life can perceived. His dig was at mainstream social theories und urban planning with their neat schemata und all too clear statistics. To make his point, De Certeau uses as example the vantage from the world Trade Center in New York, a view that in itself has become anachronistic. He compares this with how being on the street is immersive and likely to give a totally different perspective. According to him, cities ought not to be drafted on paper but should emerge out of the experience of everyday practice which consists of a constant stream of micro-negotiations. Yes, de Certeau was an avid believer in the everyday and that most theories are too removed from what is really going on whilst feeding into strategies that inform the planning of our public and not so public spaces. However, de Certeau also put forward that we as individuals with our daily routines and idiosyncrasies  are good at subverting things. Mostly without noticing we can single-handedly adjust planned usage and at times we excel in temporary space poaching and not necessarily unfriendly trespassing.

Personally, I love gorilla gardening and the corners omitted by the local council give me a real buzz. I love subverting the usage of street furniture and I regularly put my unwanted things on the garden wall turning it into a real time gumtree with a ‘free for all’. I love that the owners of my favorite grocer shop put boxes with plants on the pavement, that they expand shop life into the street. That they make me stop if ever so briefly is priceless.

The other day I saw writing scratched into the bricks at x-church I simply had to photograph it, even more so as graffiti has such a long history going back to the Romans if not longer. I love accidental spillages on the pavement that seem to go on forever. Encountering a shopping trolley on the pavement makes me smile. It tells me that somebody solved their transport problems in a straight forward manner. Four shopping trolleys parked in a row in the street astound me endlessly purely because I can’t work out how that many got lose and still managed to come together for a gathering. Can shopping trolleys ever get lonely? Or, because of their outgoing nature, are they born socialites?

I even delight in colourful wrappers dropped by children in the street, because it reminds me that young people have other priorities. Their friend coming around the corner, that race to be finished, that joke to be told. Mess per se can be very beautiful as it shows us something taken out of context. It raises questions about the objects we seem to need, about their relatively short lifespan. I know fly tipping is also very annoying as it trashes a neighbourhood and I am not one who would encourage it. However, it also makes me think about how as adults we tend to conform to the rigidity of space management and how a council might not provide enough free services to get rid of obsolete objects.

But you don’t have to place your rubbish in the local park as part of your everyday practice of questioning or actively subverting your environment. Have you ever tried to take your friends for a picnic in the local shopping mall? With blanket, barbeque and all the trimmings? I still need to do that, partly because I want to see what happens.

Yes, I think that the practice of everyday life is exciting and without it the world would be not the same. It is also simple as you do it on a day to day basis and most times without thinking about it. How you go about things can nevertheless make a difference in your life  and it might even change the bigger picture. Who knows? Reclaiming space that is called public though it is actually privately owned by staging a picnic might be the first step or set the next trend. That is as a demonstration of slow living of course!

This was first published under https://loosespace.wordpress.com/2018/02/06/accidental-spillages-and-everyday-life/

There are many intriguing maps around that don’t involve mind or altitude. There are the ones believed to have been made by people living in the stone age, there are socio-geographic maps acknowledging the traces left by different groups through time, there are dream maps,  maps about and sometimes on skin, there are the near perfect maps such as Lewis Carroll’s Ocean Chart or the surveillance maps generated through the tracking traces left by our mobile phones. Do I like maps? I think I do, and this is definitely not because I share a house with a geographer. Yet what are maps? What do they record, what can they contain and what might be spared out?

Last week I asked the kids at the children’s project to draw me their favourite place. The result was simply a surprise as I expecting pictures from the park, from houses, street corners, shops, playgrounds, maybe from places unknown to me. Yet what they drew was more what they did or what they liked and loved. They drew hearts, intriguingly coloured rainbows the shape of sliced melons, their family home. They drew swings and slides they are wishing for. There is currently little to none play equipment at the local park. Only few of them focused on a concrete location and drew spatial maps. X-church came up a lot, not to please me or anyone volunteering but simply meant as fact.

Whereas when talking with the adults it was another experience altogether. They seemed to have little difficulty to name a location that had a particular meaning to them. These locations seemed to be personal to them and I confess that I also have  my specific spots in my own neighbourhood in Bristol. And like Clive MacLennan, a great photographer and visual record keeper of Gainsborough, I take photographs of the locations that resonate with me.

Yet coming back to my encounter with the kids at x-church and what place might mean to them. Because effectively, this is what I am talking about in more than one way. Maybe, when we are little, it counts most what we do and with whom. It matters less where we go to, as long as our favourite persons are there and maybe some beloved toy. Place means being within an activity, geography might be the tracks we do that are somewhat oddly linked to the maps at school. As with one of my boys, Bristol, for example, was for a long time synonymous with Britain. Why there was an England, a United Kingdom or Great Britain only added to his confusion.

Piaget claimed that spatial conception evolves over time and he put quite a rigid timeline on it. But what he didn’t articulate is how the way we feel about a place evolves and how this might inform our expanding spatial awareness. Overall, relatively little thought seems to have been given to how most internalised maps are drawn and why they have little resemblance with the one made up by cartographers. These maps that claim to give equal weight to every centimetre do not take into account the way we move through a place. They omit that every locality has a timeline attached and that the usage might significantly change whether it is mid afternoon or 5 in the morning. Whereas within a map that is drawn by what we actually do, some areas are likely to be left completely blank and routes like the school run might only be there when we need them. Some areas might be rendered in varying colours depending on our moods. There are likely to be large and small places depending on their significance, there could be loose terrain open for grabs and curious spots we wanted to revisit. Every map would be unique as different as we are but somehow they might still overlap. At least most of the time when we feel sociable. These are the kinds of maps that intrigue me, the ones that make the geographer’s hair raise in horror. Bring it on!

(taken by Savanna, a lovely personal mapper in Gainsborough)

Next week I hope to learn more about the geographies surrounding x-church and I will try to fill a large piece paper with what the kids think should be on it. Also I hope that I will be taken to some of the places that really matter and can not necessarily be found on the ever correct OS map.

I couldn’t come this week as life became more important than art. But there are two photos from the swings in use from last week!

This blog was first published under https://loosespace.wordpress.com/2018/02/02/mapping-a-mission-impossible/

I have always pretended that there is not much to how I take photographs hiding behind the Kodak motto ‘you press the button, we do the rest’. I would have said that I take most images singlehanded and this indeed was true when my children were smaller and I focused on improvised play and the city. At the time, I resorted to light weight cameras and often photographed on the way to and from school whilst holding in one hand their lunch bags. This was possible because I worked mostly with preset programs so that I still could talk to my kids and their friends. Other times though, when movement and space were not so restricted I used a tripod and took more control of the settings. Yet I must admit that the most important thing about photographing for me is not when I press the button, it is not the moment when what can be captured becomes somewhat more finite. A large part of what informs the final set of images happens not only in the editing or in post-production but in the reflection throughout. I write notes, I ponder a lot, I scribble, I note down things that matters to me about the context. All these different processes feed then into what eventually becomes a body of work or a set of images.

Each of these methods somehow involves my hands, and mostly my left. I don’t have anything against my right hand, it is useful in assisting in whatever I do, but the left leads, decides and is at the center of the action. If there is any doubt, the various scars on it are there to prove its vital role in my everyday.

Yet since Saturday my precious left hand is out of action. It got caught in the door of the taxi that I closed after a long and eventful trip to my home country. Some would say that this is the price that I needed to pay for closing a chapter in my life. Luckily, the damage is not permanent, in the operation theatre they inserted a wire to give my broken finger a chance to heal properly. All the same though, for the next six weeks my main hand will be barely serviceable. How will that impact on the photographs that I have planned to take as part of my project at x-church? Will I expand the abilities of my right hand, discovering that it is not too bad after all? Will I ask other people to take an image or press the button for me? Is this accident likely to expand the way how I collaborate with the lovely people of x-church? Might photographing in this way be like having your eyes wide shut? Could this help me discover things that I otherwise wouldn’t have? And for writing notes? Might I become desperate enough to start using my right hand?

One thing is certain though, my broken finger won’t stop me taking images, even if they turn out crooked. If lucky, this accident will become an asset to the project and will help me to develop a body of work that I otherwise would not have dreamed of. To start off, the relationship with my camera is likely to be a bit shaky, good old black box might object for its buttons to be touched by unfamiliar fingers. But it will get there and I will get used to it. One thing though is for certain, the journey of my residency has become even more unpredictable and exciting.

This was first published as https://loosespace.wordpress.com/2018/01/24/lost-for-want-of-the-right-hand/