Extracts from a conversation between Marega Palser and Iain Biggs.

IB. I hadn’t realized that you’d got that connection with Clifford McLucas. That’s fascinating.

MP. I’ve said it quite a few times over the last few years when people say: ‘Oh, who are your influences’? Cliff will really be there. And it’s funny because it was for such a short amount of time in the grand scheme of things and given the amount of time I’ve worked with other people that have been really quite key in my life. But it really did something, you know, that moment in time, just a switch to where you’re thinking about the body in space.

IB. That makes absolute sense to me. I often think with things that influence us it’s not about the length of time, it’s about an intensity or relationship that’s a catalyst. What kind of response, or what kinds of conversations, did you have around the phone box once you converted it into this map, shrine, information booth, whatever you want to call it?

Viewing the Climate Lab phone box installation.

MP. Well, I just sat quite outside of it, sort of woman-ed or man-ed it you know, just to make sure that no one was going to trash it. I wanted it to be safe for the purposes of Climate Lab. With other stuff I just go: ‘OK, what happens when you put something on the street happens’. A lot of the time, it’s fine. It’s the Council you’ve got to look out for, they want to clean everything up. So I stayed very outside of it. And then sometimes people would come and sit with me. Quite a lot of them seemed very … a bit like you just had a meditation. A lot of them said they felt very calm afterwards and so it was quite a profound effect because they’re still hearing the high street because all their focus is leaning in. It was a moment just to sit and be somewhere else. And I guess what happens as well, when you’re in that zone where your breathing starts calming down, getting slower. I think that’s probably why there’s this feeling of a kind of serenity, and I think people felt very moved by it. One of the key things is the image of a foetus of a baby in that it’s very strong, everyone can relate to it, whatever they’re bringing to that image. And I guess it’s a symbol of something that’s new, a new life, it’s hopeful.

Viewer in the Climate Lab phone box installation.

Detail from the Climate Lab phone box installation.

It’s really a way in for people, because they can relate to it directly. And then all the other images might at first look random, but because the baby’s got images in it, and you see the whole network of the body working, and that’s a sort of animal, there’s a horse head in the heart, and the baby’s got like a frog in it. But they’re making these connections further into nature.

IB. This reminds me of when I had acupuncture. My acupuncturist had an amazing image on her wall of a body that was also a landscape with all sorts of different elements in different places, a picture map of acupuncture points. And I’ve suddenly got to a vision of the telephone box as having a similar kind of feel.

MP. Yes, very much. Because I think what I really wanted to try and convey – and it feels like it’s still a work in progress – is the idea that we’re 70% water, we have the water elements, we have minerals in us, we have so much electricity, it’s incredible, you know… So there’s all this stuff that makes you, and this isn’t even our memory and our emotional memory, or our traumas or whatever. This is the fundamental makeup of the body. But because we can’t see half of it, it’s very hard to know that it’s there. So it’s really wanting to address this connectivity, to relate these things in nature to the elements, constellations. Everything is connected, it’s out there and it’s really fascinating. I watched a little documentary about Zen Buddhism last night and it had this lovely image of a tree. And it’s not a tree, we name it a tree, but actually, for the tree to exist, it needs everything. It needs the Earth, it needs this, it needs that. So everything is in everything. If we think of our bodies we’re the same as the tree.

IB. How did the scientists in climate lab respond to this? Particularly, I guess, to the phone box?

MP. Oh, I think a lot of them were like: ‘OH’!

I was concerned that it should be playful but also empowering. It’s about taking power really and doing something, taking a step into a public space that doesn’t normally happen, going there. I remember what one of the cofounders of the Incredible Edible Network [https://www.incredibleedible.org.uk/] said about asking permission to do things, ‘Just do it. Apologize later’. And I’ve always been the same. The response to the phone box has been really, really lovely, you know – there’s a word, ‘lovely’! – but positive.

What I thought you were going to ask me was: ‘how did the scientists respond to the whole process’? And on the whole the response was really good. Sometimes resistant. You could see people thinking like: ‘Why the fuck are we doing this’? ‘What was the point’? ‘Oh, my God, no, that’s hippie-dippie shit’, you know? But then people saw where it led to and it suddenly turned into something else and transformed those feelings. I guess any feelings we have of resistance, it’s just us being scared a bit, fear. Or coming in with a preconceived idea of something. I think sometimes when you just let yourself be open something changes. A lot of the responses, as well as being about really wanting to take in the body, the somatic elements, related to when people are working, not just for themselves, but in their teaching with students as well. Which is good, I think, really good.

IB. Thanks. Is there anything you want to say that I hadn’t asked you about ?

MP.  I guess I’m just thinking of the deep mapping now. It’s a never-ending process, isn’t it? Every day just keeps throws up something different with what’s going on in the wider world. What goes on directly around us and how it’s affecting us, how it’s affecting people. I think what I really noticed doing Climate Lab is how – coming back to place and space and how that affects us – is the environments and the institutions that people are working in. How they are affected by those places and spaces because of the demands on them and the amount of stress they’re all under.

What really hit me during the first Climate Lab was all these people working in various departments of Swansea university, which is quite vast now, and most of them hadn’t met. Or if they had they didn’t know each other, they weren’t really seeing each other “in the flesh” because of how they’re working. And so their connecting felt very, very powerful. I think they felt very empowered and also, a bit: ‘So I’m not on my own with all these thoughts and feelings’. Because what arose was how many of them expressed how they weren’t able to say how they felt. The opportunities just weren’t there. So you’re working in that world, then you’re going home and you can’t talk about it in a social way because people are going: ‘oh, no, you’re not going to talk about that, are you’! So it’s the amount of emotion being held in that people are living with. I could see that. The climate issue is what it is, you know, and none of us individually can go: ‘If I do this, blah, blah ….’ But what we can do is acknowledge how we’re being affected, how we’re being affected by our immediate environment, and what can we do within that. Starting with the body and things very close up to us, because if that’s not right, there’s no way you’re going to be able to do anything else….

Because I’ve worked with some of those people before in various contexts, I was very aware of how on edge they are in all sorts of ways in relation to the institution. They have to play the institutional game. They’ve got to put in grant applications, they’ve got to write papers, and so on and so forth, and the gap between those institutional expectations and where they are in their internal world, just seems to be under enormous tension.

IB. I could tellhow importantClimate Lab was for some of the academics at Swansea I know. So, congratulations. I notice that one respondent said:

No one talks about climate or ecology crises in my department – not in work time, not at work meetings. Let alone their feelings. It’s an extraordinary taboo. I am always thinking about it, yet never feel ‘allowed’ to mention it.

MP. Well it was a shared responsibility that the whole thing came about. Me and Fern were one part, but it took a lot from other people to make it happen. Some of them are deeply sensitive and throughout the whole thing I thought back to those people. I just wanted to say: ‘Alright, you know that it’s not alright. But it’s alright as well to really acknowledge that feeling that it’s not alright. OK, now what little things can we do’?

IB. It’s interesting, isn’t it? Because in a way that’s a kind of mutual mapping of the emotional situation and an acknowledging of it, and that somehow makes it possible to keep going.

MP. Yes. And the feeling of being heard. What came up a lot was people saying: ‘I feel like I’ve been heard’. I think that’s deeply emotional for people. Lots of people really cried when it came to talking and being witnessed, because I guess it was the first time. It’s a bit like keeping everything in, still keeping everything in, and then the balloon bursts. … I think that was especially interesting for me because over the last couple of years I’ve been doing work in Park Prison as well. It was very interesting to be working in a really fucking hard environment, with prisoners on the wing, when just going into the prison environment is so inhuman. It’s all just straight lines and there’s no room for ‘being heard’ at all. So to be able to start creating that within a very hard environment has been interesting, and then doing Climate Lab. I can see some similarities in environments there!

IB. Thank you very much.

M P with the Climate Lab phone box