Extracts from a conversation between Marega Palser and Iain Biggs.
Background and context
Marega Palser and I first met in 2017. We walked round her home town of Newport and talked about the possibilities that deep mapping might offer someone like herself: trained as a dancer, then at art school, and at that time working with movement, drawing and performance. (She has since also trained as a yoga teacher). We met again later during her project Framing the Transient NoW (An exercise in deep mapping), part of a residency she had in Swansea. In 2023 I found myself attending Climate Lab, an unusual collaboration between scientists, engineers and artists that began at Swansea University in 2022, via Zoom.I particularly wanted to talk to her about the way she sees the influence of deep mapping on her work with Climate Lab because her background and ways of working. Her performance work “on the street” seemed to me to place her differently in relation to deep mapping from the points of departure represented elsewhere in this section of the PLaCE International web site.
Marega co-designed and co-hosted Climate Lab withFern Smith [https://fernsmith.uk/], co-founder of Volcano Theatre and initiator of Emergence, a forum for dialogue and collaborative practice in support of a life-sustaining future. (For Fern’s account of Climate Lab see the Emergence web site – https://emergenceuk.blogspot.com/). Fern sees Climate Lab as ‘an experiment in the power of connection, creativity, and spontaneity’ and designed to take ‘the expert viewpoint of climate researchers out of the box of the scientific method’ by ‘creating a space for those on the front-line of climate research to connect to the emotions they have about the climate data they are collecting or working alongside’.
Climate Lab came about due to an exchange between a 12-year-old Japanese schoolboy and Professor Tavi Murray, a highly respected Glaciologist and Antarctic Researcher base at Swansea University who he interviewed as part of a school project. At the end of the interview he asked her a question that, as a professional environmental scientist working in academia, she’d never been asked before. “How does it makes you feel seeing the changes you’ve seen?” Over time she tried to answer that question and inviting other climate scientists to do the same. Climate Lab grewout of theirconcerns in relation to that emotionally difficult question. Drawing on their various skills, Marega and Fern facilitating processes that enabled Climate Lab participants to witness emotions, create art, and imagine the future.
N.B. All the images used here are copyright Marega Palser and are used with her permission.
Introduction
What follows here is edited extracts from a long, fascinating, interview-come-conversation with Marega. As her observations will make very clear, Climate Lab has lessons for us all. However, the length of our conversation, which sometimes rambled, required some editing and I have occasionally changed the order of sentences for greater clarity. I’ve also chosen sections that focus on those aspects of Climate Lab likely to be of particular interest to readers, whether institutionally employed or otherwise, concerned with the many ‘faces’ of deep mapping. I hope in doing this I’ve not lost the gist and spirit of what Marega told me.
Iain Biggs (IB) First of all, many thanks for agreeing to talk to me. Can you start us off by telling me how you came to be involved with Climate Lab and what was your role in it?
Marega Palser (MP) A call went out to work with scientists to do with emotions. Working with data that just doesn’t seem to be penetrating is emotionally so overwhelming for them. Fern got in touch and said, ‘look, this call-out’s happening, would you be interested in collaborating on it’? In a pilot Climate Lab they’d focused on the sea level rise and, coincidentally and at the same time, I’d seen this map of the coast of Britain with all these red areas saying ‘just go and look, this is all the land that’s going to go’. So we needed to explore how we could work through their situation in a creative way, tapping into those emotions.
We’d known each other since 1988 and every now and then we’ve done bits of work together, but never on this sort of project. Anyway, we said: ‘yes, let’s rise to the challenge’ even though it was very scary. You’re working with people that inhabit this totally different field and suddenly you’re finding reasons to justify why you’re going to use this process with scientists, coming in with a different way of working, a different language. We spent a week together throwing loads of ideas into the mix. Fern is one of the most qualified people I can think of for these kinds of workshops because she’s done lots of counselling work over the years, but we were also thinking about how to get people out of their heads and into the body to find different ways of looking at things. Fern put a proposal in and it got accepted. Oh, and part of that was to work with two other artists so there’d be an artist’s response to all the information that came up….
IB. You made two really quite distinct types of work for Climate Lab. First there is Seeing and Feeling, put together by Steve Jones and yourself and based on words and responses from the participants.Then later you made the phone box installation. Can you say a little about the thinking behind both pieces? How they were put together and why you chose to take the approaches you did?
MP. The first Climate Lab was in three parts, with the first part about doing lots of exercises and listening to the scientists. The response I made to that was a performative piece. You saw how people responded to what’s said. Then it was as if the work wanted to develop or grow into something else that can be a final piece. So I made Seeing and Feeling for the third part of that Climate Lab because it just felt like: ‘well, I can’t do a performance for it but it could be filmed’. It was very much based on performance, on a total response to everything I heard and witnessed from the first Climate Lab.
IB. Your phone box installation draws on your experience of deep mapping. What was involved in putting it together and why did you take the approach that you did?
The Climate Lab phone box installation.
MP. I’ve got to break that down a bit first. Tavi, who’d initiated the project, was bowled over by the first event and got funding to open up Climate Lab internationally. We knew that we had to do that on Zoom, so Fern and me spent lots of time working on it and rehearsing to make it even more succinct because the international event had to be in two parts because of Zoom and time zones.
I was working as a co-facilitator and as an artist, so I made two different art responses to each of those workshops. Then what I did was to take everything from the workshops into the phone box. So earlier I’d looked at shrines and what it is to make a shrine, but also at the idea of a baby and the internal network and patterns that are formed internally and in the exterior world.
Detail from the Climate Lab phone box installation.
Detail from the Climate Lab phone box installation.
As you know, I like doing stuff on the high street and I’ve done lots of what some people might call gorilla art. I don’t know what you’d call it. But I think over time, especially when lock-down happened, me and Steve just used the high street as a gallery. You know, we’d drag things around, take a vacuum cleaner for a walk and install it somewhere. I want to say ‘stupid shit’, but I think what I love about it is the conversations that arise from doing it. And during lock-down, a lot of the people were out there, living on the streets or maybe just doing their shopping in a supermarket. So there’s always this question: ‘who is your audience? Who is this for”? And I always think: ‘well, anyone that’s curious’. On the high street you will get every age, every colour, every background, every social status. It’s there for anyone who’s curious….
IB That reminds me very much of the way that you worked in Swansea on the Framing the Transient NoW project.
MP I think doing that project really taught me a lot because it was the first time I’d really worked in that way. I’d done other stuff on the streets as the Clarks, but Swansea went deeper…. Our conversations really helped me ground it in something else; not just conversations, not just about art, but looking at something wider in society. Anyway using the phone box was a way for Climate Lab to take a message out, to say: ‘look, this is what’s happening’. It takes that message out of an academic situation or as a Zoom thing and puts it very directly on the high street. So it’s broadening the underlying message without saying: ‘This is what it is’. I think people started seeing these connections for themselves.
Detail from the Climate Lab phone box installation.
The reason I chose the phone box is that I’d done another one. I’d had to move three times this year. So I have all this stuff, and art pictures, and postcards I’ve collected for years and years. And I thought, Oh, God, you know, part of me just wants to burn them all. And then I thought no, what can I do creatively with them. There was this meggie old phone box outside The Place in Newport, which is a community space. So I thought, right, I’m just going to start pasting all these postcards up in there. And it looked amazing. And there was another phone box the other side of it so I just covered the two of them in these images which stayed up for ages and ages. They were going to be part of an event in Newport but about two weeks before it started BT took them away!
As a result of that, I thought of using the phone box as a gallery for Climate Lab. I love the idea of a BT phone box as places where communication was key. I remember leaving home at 16 and I was in London and I’d phoned home every week on a Sunday, you know, in the phone box: ‘Can I reverse the charge”? So, coming back to Climate Lab, I thought it’s a lovely symbol, really, that it’s about communicating something going on.
IB. When you introduced the phone box installation at the two Climate Lab sessions I attended, you mentioned deep mapping as an influence on how you worked. Can you say something about that influence, because what’s always fascinated me is that you come from a place that is actually much more about the body and performance. And although performance was what deep mapping in Wales was about early on, a lot of it has moved away from that. You somehow seem to move between those two approaches.
MP. The mapping really came out through dance. I started combining my love of making art and dance, because for years I thought: ‘how can I merge these two things’? They always felt quite different. Being at art college as a mature student doing my final project just birthed this idea: ‘I’ll just manage to find a way of doing drawing, printmaking and performance’. And then out of that grew a show called Sometimes We Look, which was all about drawing and dance, responding to choreography. I’d be going through some notebooks thinking: ‘oh, there’s my stick figures of that dance, how does it go’? And then you’re trying to ape these stick figures, and then another dance comes out of it. So it’s a feedback thing and out of that questions. ‘Why do I do certain moves’? ‘What is it in my body that goes to do certain positions’? You know, they’re not taught positions, they’re just felt. So I started thinking of the body as a map where things are held, and about the story behind that mapping of the body. So it goes into a whole emotional, somatic, mapping.
Then there was the idea of how spaces affect us because I always like working with space. And it was Clifford Lucas who really introduced me to that again, back in the late 80s when he was with Brith Gof. We did a small project with them, Dance Wales and Brith Gof. And I always remember Clifford said: ‘Why does a dancer start in the middle of the stage’? You know? And so he just really flipped my head about working with space. I love architecture anyway, and places and spaces; some people might call it psychoactive space. So how does the space trigger something in the body and the body respond to a place and memory? That is really my way into deep mapping. It hasn’t just happened instantly, its grown over time. And then before doing the Swansea project I saw this term ‘deep mapping’, which is how I met you. I read your article, where you quote from Clifford.
So it’s been a long, winding, way to deep mapping and the Climate Lab. But I think what I really love about it and the Swansea project is that it’s a form of documenting something in its present moment and looking at the past and future. It felt really relevant to Climate Lab. It’s such a natural process for me to ask: ‘What is happening here, not just in this little bit, but as a whole; what is happening in this time-frame with these people’? So it was a way of collecting their responses, all this information coming in, and then going away and laying it all out. That’s where the … What’s the word? Not just curation. But finding a way of going: ‘how can I best respond to this and give it back.’