Last night I worked for the first time in about three months. With my friend Luci Gorell Barnes I run a workshop that responded to the artists John Wood and Paul Harrison’s Erdkunde – itself a new video work responding to Bristol City Museum’s collections. (These were not, it has to be said, much in direct evidence in the film, but so be it). After meeting at the Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery to watch the Erdkunde film we walked up to the RWA (where Luci and I had already spent a frustrating half hour struggling to get PowerPoint up and working) and assembled in the small upstairs studio. I started us off by linking some of the key features of a deep map to what we’d just seen. What I said is pretty much as follows.

The word “Erdkunde” can be literally translated as ‘physical geography’ – but in German ‘Erde’ can mean ‘world’, ‘ground’ or ‘earth’, so it’s a very inclusive term. That makes it a perfect title for John Wood and Paul Harrison’s work. Their interest in collecting, cataloguing, and displaying various kinds of information – through notes, sketches, photographs, thoughts, ideas – questions how we look at things, identify them, talk about them. To do all that we use given systems of classification, even though our actual experience is always somehow both more and less than the systems and categories we use to tidy up the world. Deep mapping asks questions about the official categories we apply to space when we start to think about our experience of place.

So ‘deep mapping’, like the Erdkunde exhibition, is a way of questioning the relationship between official classifications of what is or is not important and our own immediate experience. Of course all places are shared to some extent, so our sense of place is always a combination of lived experience, given information, and various kinds of memory. Any deep mapping exercise begins by asking: “what needs to go onto a map of this particular place” and, because a place is always changing, being re-shaped, deep mapping is in turn always as much about time as it is about space.

I can identify each of these four snapshots taken in Bristol in terms of a particular place, but they are also evocations of different times – the slow change and decay of architecture periods over against the span of a human life or the growth of a sunflower.

We make sense of places through sharing stories, which are like crossroads where what’s important to us personally meets shared histories and social values. Here’s a story about a place in Bristol that’s no longer there. This was a medieval church dedicated to Saint Leonard – patron saint of prisoners – down on the Westgate, one of the original entrances to the medieval city, which became known as St Leonard’s Gate. This medieval church was in the way of ‘improvements’ to this area of the city that, in the C18th, needed to rework itself as a port in order to accommodate its expanding trade. So the civic authorities destroyed an ancient religious building dedicated to a saint who, according to legend, had the right to liberate prisoners and, having done so, to gave them land to live off. Ironically, they did this in order to facilitate the slave trade. I’m telling you this because one of the things deep mapping does is try to make visible the tensions between what’s remembered and what’s forgotten in constructing a sense of place. In doing so it inevitably asks questions about our values.

So deep mapping is a way of visualising the mesh of social tensions – both productive and unproductive – inherent in the processes of remembering and forgetting. Since these processes happen at the point where the personal and the public meet, deep mapping is always in some way collaborative. This slide shows a project by Rebecca Krinke called Seen / Unseen – the mapping of joy and pain  where she and her students took a plywood relief map of Minneapolis / St Paul into the park and asked people to map where they had experienced joy and pain in their city. It’s purpose, however, was really as much to make an intimate public space for people to share their experiences and the stories that make Minneapolis / St Paul not just a city on a map but a lifeworld held in common as it was to make a specific art work.

Luci then talked about her Atlas of Human Kindness and opened up the parameter of the evening’s thinking  by referring to ‘narrative mapping’ rather than ‘deep mapping’.

We then asked the participants to plot particular locations that mattered to them onto a big map of Bristol, using PostIts colour-coded according to three general types of experience, so as to create a high-speed pro-deep map of Bristol. Here are three photographs Luci took:

It seems to have been a good evening for the participants and it was certainly good for me to be ‘back in the saddle’ in terms of doing something educational, having been wholly emersed in family matters and the new house for so long.  

So what has any of this to do with ‘autumn in suburbia’? Perhaps nothing, literally speaking, but I find it increasingly hard to take things entirely literally these days or, indeed, to keep the separate elements and levels of my life from seeping into each other across the usual boundaries we erect. At sixty-five and recovering from six weeks illness in a house that’s been half building site, I am tending to feel a bit autumnal myself, so very much in tune with the current season of ‘mellow fruitfulness’ and decay. And to find myself living in suburbia is, for me, to be living in a space that is neither truly urban – I got something of a buzz from being out on Queen’s Road at seven at night yesterday, the familiar feeling of the street on Friday night just starting to get busy – nor (despite the plentiful evidence of foxes, owls, etc.) rural in any meaningful way.

The world in which I now live is characterised by reticence – there’s little sense of neighbourly communication – on one hand and excess on the other. (Oddly, John Wood and Paul Harrison’s reticence in their film seemed to me to resonate oddly with the suburban world, their piece a kind of absurdist ‘Janet and John’ exercise directly at the culturally sophisticated). Excess out here, on the other hand, has seemed to me to be personified by the plethora of vast 4x4s – often two to a house – that I see driven by small, determined women in a hurry with little sense of how to manage the mechanical beast they’re in charge of. (Yesterday I watched as one such women took three goes at backing into her own drive, reversing clearly being something of a problem). Their husbands, large, corporate types, tend to have a better grasp of the beast, but seem to regard speed limits as some kind of personal affront.

I could go on but there’s no point in airing my prejudices – unnecessary consumption and similar forms of selfishness and excess are hardly the prerogative of the Bristol suburbanite!

As so often when things are difficult, I find myself turning to music as a way of steading myself, making space for something else to well up into whatever troubled place I currently happen to be in. (This will hardly be news to anyone who reads this blog regularly).

As I write this, in hopefully the dog days of a long bout of ‘flu that went to my chest, I’m listening to a new CD – by Alela Diane and the guitarist Ryan Francesconi – called Cold Moon. This sounds like the necessary and inevitable followup to her beautiful About Farewell and somehow perfectly matches where I find myself just now. If you’re into this kind of music – which is almost impossible to categorise (although she sometimes reminds me of the spirit of Sandy Denny, the intensely personal narrative refigured through the lens of a sense of the collective that belongs to any folk tradition) – start with the tracks Cold Moon and Shapeless and, if those press your buttons, listen to the whole CD.

And, while I adjust to the changes emerging in my life and try to pick up my health again, all manner of bigger and more serious storms rage elsewhere – not least in the political world and in the lives of some of my friends. The first are too large to think about in my current state and the second too personal to be included here. I am, however, turning once again to trying to realise a recurrent desire – the idea of organising a ‘hedge school’ for those whose I know whose creative potential in all its ecosophical dimensions has somehow been failed by their encounter with the university system. That desire, and an unexpected enquiry from a Dutch friend, remind me that there is still a great deal of interesting work to do out in that currently distant quarter of my life, no matter the current difficulties and sense of restriction.

Just a question, as always, of ‘keeping on keeping on’.

Recently the poet Anna Saunders recommended I listen to Madam Life, a CD by a band called Little Machine who specialise in setting poetry to music. She also mentioned that she didn’t know what music to listen to any more so I promised that, in return for letting me know about Little Machine, I’d send her some recommendations. Afterwards I rather wished I hadn’t.

It wasn’t that I begrudged Anna doing this, it’s more that I didn’t know what to recommend to a poet whose work I much admire but whose musical tastes are, I suspect from past conversations, very different to mine. (She is, not least, a whole generation younger than me).

Given her enthusiasm for Madam Life, which I too very much enjoyed, I initially thought I’d focus on what I assumed to be ‘poetic’ songs – songs by poets or, in some cases, poetry set to music (not quite the same thing). We had also talked about my fascination with old ballads – Tam Lin in particular – which she did not know and about listening to different versions of old ballads, so a number got onto my list. The songs I recommended were:

Yeats’ Sweet Dancer by The Waterboys from ‘An Appointment With Mr Yeats’, The Jeweller by Pearls Before Swine, Fairport Convention’s version of Tam Lin from ‘Liege & Lief’, The Wolf That Lives In Lindsey by Joni Mitchell, Yeats’ Long-Legged Fly from Christine Tobin’s ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, Neko Case’s Magpie to the Morning from ‘Middle Cyclone’, the delicious You’ll do from Rachel Harrington’s ‘Celilo Falls’, Twenty Seven Strangers by Villagers from ‘Becoming A Jackal’, a second, very different version of Tam Lin from Pyewackett’s ‘The Man in the Moon Drinks Claret’, Nancy Elizabeth’s Coriander from her ‘Battle and Victory’, a version of Willie O’Winsbury by Meg Baird, Leonard Cohen’s Anthem, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds The Ship Song from ‘Boatman’s Call’, a third version of Tam Lin by Anaïs Mitchell & Jefferson Hamer, White Dog from The Handsome Family’s ‘Twilight’, a fourth version of Tam Lin by Steeleye Span,  Venus by Anais Mitchell from ‘Young Man in America’,  Michael Marra And The Hazey Janes’s Mrs Gorrie, Emmy The Great’s Edward Is Dedward , Magpie from The Unthanks’ ‘Mount the Air’, Black-eyed Susan from Laura Veirs’ ‘Orphan Mae’, Furr by Blitzen Trapper, Salters Road from Karine Polwart’s ‘Traces’, The Rolling of the Stones by The Owl Service, Sally Go Round the Roses by Great Society, Your Ghost by Kristin Hersh, an interpretation of Hunter and Garcia’s  Row, Jimmy by Susan Kane, Cold Atlantic Ocean – which has my lyrics set to music by Gary Peters and is from our ‘Fish in the Flood’ project, the beautiful Child Amongst the Weeds by Lal Waterson & Oliver Knight, You Want That Picture from  Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s ‘Lie Down In The Light’, River Girls by Tanya Donelly from ‘This Hungry Life’, Alasdair Roberts’ wonderful version of The Cruel Mother from ‘No Earthly Man’, America from Laura Veirs’ ‘Warp & Weft’, Ticket Taker by The Low Anthem, Quit These Hills by the Pinetop Seven, Aberystwyth by Paper Aeroplanes, Laura Veirs’ Dorothy of the Island, a version ofLeonard Cohen’s First We Take Manhattan by Joe Cocker, Yr mother called them farm houses by Robin Holcomb, Washing By Hand from Jackie Leven’s ‘Creatures Of Light And Darkness’, The War On Love Song by A.L. Kennedy & Sons and Daughters, Bird Song by the Grateful Dead from a concert in New York in 1990 that features Branford Marsalis guesting on saxophone, Robin Holcomb’s Deliver me, Midnight singer from Laura Veirs’ ‘Troubled By The Fire’ Patti Smith’s version of Neil Young’s Helpless, Mairi Morrison  and Alasdair Roberts’ version of his The Whole House Is Singing from ‘Urstan’, and It’s Good to Know by A Weather from ‘Cove’.

Looking back at this list now I really wonder what on earth I was thinking? In terms of my attempt to find songs with poetic lyrics, how come there’s nothing by Bob Dylan? (Not so much maybe in his guise of bad-tempered ‘translator/updater’ of grumpy Old Testament sentiments, but as the lyrical writer of Visions Of Johanna, Tangled Up In Blue and Blind Willie McTell). I think the problem is that, despite my own brief attempts to write lyrics for the musician Garry Peters,  I’d somehow conflated the output of three overlapping but ultimately distinctly weighted entities – the poet, the musician and, ideally the perfect combination of the two, the lyricist. In recommending songs to a poet, that’s maybe bound to cause some concern.

In the first case – the poet – the lyric is clearly privileged. Yeats’ Sweet Dancer, Sailing to Byzantium and Long-Legged Fly, no matter how good their different musical settings, seem to remain poems first and foremost, although they may be enhanced to some degree by the quality of their setting. As the product of a poet, Leonard Cohen’s songs would seem to fall into this category. To some extent this is equally true of the vernacular poetry of ballads like Tam Lin, The Rolling of the Stones, Willie O’Winsbury and The Cruel Mother. (Although if we’re interested in old ballads we’re likely to hear each of these with undercurrents of different versions as an additional resonance. (In much the same that orchestral interpretations of a piece of classical music are, I understand, heard in the context of other interpretations). Borderline cases here would be songs like Lal Waterson’s Child Amongst the Weed and Magpie from The Unthanks, both the product of sensibilities so saturated with traditions of vernacular song that they seem to be the product of that tradition of slow distillation and variation, rather than of an individual. The same can be said of the best (in my view) of Alasdair Roberts’ songs.

Then there are honest-to-goodness, through-and-through musicians, for whom the music is what it’s really all about and the lyrics just an afterthought. (I am still enamoured of the music produced by the Grateful Dead, but it’s no surprise to me that when Gerry Garcia wanted to produce songs, he worked with the poet Robert Hunter as a lyricist. A interesting recent example of this is the collaboration between the novelist A.L. Kennedy and the band Sons and Daughters, which produced The War On Love Song). My own sense is that very few of the songs I’ve chosen are by people who are primarily musicians in this sense. Examples of people in this category whose work I very much enjoy would include Bill Frisell, Rachael Grimes, and the Bristol-based band Spiro, whose CDs ‘Lightbox’, ‘Kaleidophonica’  and ‘Welcome Joy and Welcome’ use violin, viola, mandolin, accordion, acoustic guitar, and cello to produce a form of music that owes something to minimalist classical music and folk music, but remains largely unclassifiable none the less.

An interesting borderline case between the categories of poet and musician is, for me, Robin Holcomb. This American singer, songwriter, conductor, composer and pianist makes edgy ‘hybrid’ songs out of elements of jazz, minimalist chamber music, and both country and folk Americana elements. But her lyrics are also highly particular and, to my ear, deeply poetic in a way that echoes Emily Dickinson as much as the vernacular lyrics of the old hymns and Civil-War songs she admires. They are very much paired down, and she says of them that: “when I write poetry, I go for the fewest number of words that evoke a lot or let the readers connect the dots, or relate it to their own experience, and the same with music”. So, a poet/musician in the strong sense of both terms, maybe?

As my list suggests, I like and recommended songs with intelligent, witty, thoughtful, or otherwise engaging lyrics. I’ve nothing particular against songs like Cream’s I’m So Glad, The Rolling Stones’ Jumpin’ Jack Flash, or Queen’s Fat Bottomed Girls, but these are not songs that have me savouring the words or that prompt me to listen carefully, let alone inspire me to recommend them to a poet! This has nothing to do with content as such – listen to Rachel Harrington’s You’ll do for example  – but with the quality of the writing and a certain sense of the particular observed or evoked that draws me back to a song.

The bulk of the songs in my list are by people I would regard as good lyricists – that’s to say they have a way with both words and music. Some of these songs are clearly in the poetic narrative tradition of the vernacular ballads – Villagers’ haunting Twenty Seven Strangers, The Handsome Family’s White Dog, Blitzen Trapper’s Furr, The Low Anthem’s Ticket Taker and Karine Polwart’s Salters Road, to name just five very different approaches to drawing on that storytelling poetic. Others seem to owe much more to lyrical or love poetry –  Laura Veirs’ Midnight Singer, Aberystwyth by Paper Aeroplanes, The Jeweller by Pearls Before Swine, Jackie Leven’s Washing By Hand, Neko Case’s Magpie to the Morning, or Tanya Donelly’s River Girls, which got onto my list simply for the lines:

“… Some river girls make their way
To the sea
Some settle into the bed…”

Some of these songs, of course, simply belong to what might be called the modern vernacular tradition of urban popular music (‘Pop music’ for short?). Michael Marra and The Hazey Janes’s Mrs Gorrie, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds The Ship Song,  and Emmy The Great’s Edward Is Dedward being three obvious, if very different, gems in this category.

I have no idea what Anna Saunders made of my list. She hasn’t told me. What I do know is that she enjoyed the versions of Tam Lin sufficiently to be provoked into writing a poem based loosely on its narrative.

Maybe some day an enterprising musician will set it to music?

Postscript

The day after I posted this I heard Emily Portman’s ‘Coracle’. Her lyrics are extraordinary, very clearly in the tradition of folk stories and vernacular songs, but somehow simultaneously utterly her own – a marvellous balance of a sense of the deeply personal and poetic and the down-to-earth eroticism, hardness and darkness I associate with the old quasi-pagan mentality that haunts the best old British vernacular songs. This seems to me another kind of poetic, almost mediumistic in quality. If Robin Holcomb’s aesthetic is finally inseparable from a certain stripped-down, Puritan element in vernacular North American culture (which is, of course, also the ultimate point of reference for Agnes Martin (her interest in Oriental philosophy notwithstanding), this resonates with something far older and stranger.

Shortly after I’d posted this I opened today’s Guardian and found Neal Ascherson’s article Independence day has already dawned. Since it relates to much of what I’d written, it seems sensible to amend what I’d written earlier so as to take account of some of Ascherson’s comments. 

I find it a bit odd when someone gives themselves a monolithic identity – as in ‘I’m English’.  This may be because I was born in London, had a Scottish grandmother, spent my childhood in Kent, Dorset, and Inverness-shire, took my degrees in Leeds and London, now live in Bristol (while spending part of each summer in County Durham), have working links to Europe (the Netherlands and the Irish Republic recently), carry a British passport, and am close to good friends in the USA and Australia. Or it may be because I understand myself as inhabiting a polyverse, one in which it makes no more sense to think reductively about identity than to try to configure my lifeworld as a monolithic ‘life-as’.

Whatever the the case, I wonder if I’m the only person to sense something weirdly indicative about Sarah Lucas representing Britain at the Venice Biennale, given the political situation in Britain following the election?

It seems to me that Lucas, along with Tracy Emin, has always been a poster girl for a particular cultural position – the knowing metropolitan ‘bohemianism’ of the YBAs if you like –  that is highly specific to London and the South East, while presenting itself as something much more ‘representative’. (If that seems too big a generalisation, think about what might have been if their cultural sensibilities reflected the urban worlds of, say, Cardiff, Glasgow, or even Newcastle. If they’d been working in those cities – famous for their Hen Nights and heavy drinking, in-your-face party girls – their work would almost certainly had other elements in the mix, other specific cultural and historical traces entirely absence from the bland literalism that signifies so much of the YBA’s work).

But why place Lucas in the political context thrown up by the British election, given that the critic Laura Cumming writes that at the Biennale her work “stands out purely by having no political content whatsoever”? Because, as Ascherson points out, the question of ‘Great Britain’, of “how to save the union” is now quite simply meaningless because “the 1707 union between England and Scotland is already dead. As a piece of architecture, it was abandoned in 1999, when the devolved Scottish parliament met” … “Today, what exists instead is a constantly changing set of relationships between London and Edinburgh, confused by feeble constitutional wheezes that arrive too late”. So what exactly is this notion of a cultural ‘British-ness’ that Sarah Lucas is supposed to be in some sense representing? In my view it’s a political slight-of-hand we’d do well to dispense with.

What is increasingly clear about the rise of the SNP is that, while in one sense it can be said to represent a ‘Nationalist’ politics (although not, I would suggest, in the narrow sense that Plaid Cymru does because of the issue of the Welsh language). Rather it is intended to deliberately evoke an alternative set of social values. In short, the SNP is in large part about contesting the assumptions of the two traditional mainstream parties, for whom both the Westminster status quo and the economics of austerity are simply taken as given. My feeling then is that Sarah Lucas represents ‘Britain’ in very much the same way that the recently elected Tory Government does. That Government, as Ascherson notes, is now working from the presupposition that: “Westminster is well on the way to becoming an English parliament anyway. As Michael Kenny writes in his book The Politics of English Nationhood, ‘As an unintended consequence of devolution … an increasingly Anglicised polity has quietly emerged as an incubus at the heart of the UK state … the Westminster parliament is gradually evolving into an English-focused one'”. And an England that, increasingly, is identified by those in power with the City of London and the South East.

I’m suggesting then that both Lucas’ art and the Tory party ideology are, in their different ways, inseparable from a tacit understanding of an anachronistic and exclusive ‘English-ness’ dominated by a particular (and particularly arrogant), set of parochial cultural and economic presuppositions that regard London and the South East as ‘the heart of Britain’. (As Lucy Lippard observed in The Lure of the Local (1997): “The urban ego is in fact parochial; New Yorkers (like Parisians or Bostonians) are among the most provincial people in the world” I would argue that this is equally true of the London art world). I see just that kind of provincialism reflected in much work by the YBAs (now not so young, of course), and by the fact that Lucas was one of 200 public figures who signed a letter to The Guardian opposing Scottish independence in the run-up to the referendum. That stance, after all, was really little more than a reactionary denial of the different values that let those living in Scotland to reject Tory ideology.

Whether my view is justifiable depends, in no small part, on whether you think the SNP is primarily motivated by the nationalism that socialism still tends to reject out of hand. (Notwithstanding that it is capitalism, and not socialism, that dominates the global stage). Personally, and as Nicola Sturgeon has made very plain post-referendum, I see the SNP as first and foremost an anti-austerity party that, in the name of those living in Scotland, rejects a political and cultural status quo that sees the term ‘Britain’ as largely referring to an ‘England’ that presupposes the superiority of the South east – of London and the Home Counties. (Ascherson appears to share this view, writing that Sturgeon’s “nationalism is instrumental rather than existential: independence as the means to social justice and prosperity, not the end”).

Acknowledging other lifeworlds

I first came across Lois Williams when she was studying to be a teacher at Goldsmiths College in 1975-6. (My wife studied there the same year). However, I only really registered her work when it was included in the New North exhibition at Tate Liverpool in 1990. Later I read the exchange between Williams and Iwan Bala in his Certain Welsh Artists: Custodial Aesthetics in Contemporary Welsh Art (1999). My interest in her work is part and parcel of a wider interest in the cultural mechanisms that ignore and suppress lifeworlds that do not conform to the presuppositions of the status quo; that reduce them to monolithic identities or a ‘life-as’. Cultural work that opposes those mechanisms is what animates my interest in the Irish artist Deirdre O’Mahony and the farmer and and performer artist Ffion Jones, both of who I mentioned in my last post, and in projects like Hannah Leighton-Boyce’s The Event Of The Thread. 

It is sometimes said that ‘comparisons are odious’ but, thinking about social tensions as articulated in contemporary politics and culture in the UK recently, I can’t help ponder the differences between Williams’ A Living Position (1997), Lucas’ Au Naturel (1994), and Tracy Emin’s My Bed (1998) – all of which use found objects located within a bed-like space.

Williams’ contribution to the chapter co-authored with Iwan Bala seems to me to set her apart from the values of the ‘British’ (in actuality ‘South Eastern English’) art world of which I’m suggesting Sarah Lucas’ work is indicative. In that chapter Williams writes: “I have always been interested in the parallels between art and farming” (Bala p. 142), something I cannot imagine a contemporary ‘English’ artist saying. Equally ‘un-English’ (in the reductive sense I’ve indicated) is Williams’ willingness to teach for many years in a secondary school in Sheffield while practicing as an artist, part of her clear sense of the importance of maintaining her links with Cefn, St Asaph.

Nothing could be further from the cultural presuppositions that inform Tracy Emin’s My Bed that, with its overwhelming emphasis on the artist as isolated individual – the stained bed sheets and litter of condoms, period stained pair of knickers and personal everyday objects. That work seems to me to stand as an embodiment of the preoccupations of those YBAs who evoked the reductive hedonism and consequent anxieties of the culture of possessive individualism. A culture predicated on the consumption of a  ‘quasi-bohemianism’ as fundamental to the ad-man’s focus on consumption, sex, and identity conceived in terms of money as a route to a rampant individualistic exceptionalism (to celebrity, to put it at its simplest). Both Tory politics and the art world that sends Lucas to ‘represent Britain’ in Venice can only maintain power and status by ignoring or marginalising alternative, less reductive, values.

What in my view links the work of Lois Williams and Hannah Leighton-Boyce’s The Event Of The Thread is precisely what is absent in the work of Sarah Lucas and Tracy Emin. Both Williams and Leighton-Boyce are, it seems to me, centrally concerned with the specificity of community and place as these are constellated in and through a particular taskscape. In short, they understand that working relationships, rather than leisure and consumption, as the formative element in social identity. In Williams’ case the relationship  of the Welsh farmer to the land farmed and those whom it feeds, and in Leighton-Boyce’s the traditional relationship between cloth manufacture, place, weather, the act of stretching woollen cloth on tenter frames, and their resilient trace in language despite massive social change in areas such as the Rossendale Valley (also known as the Forest of Rossendale) in Lancashire. To work out of that understanding is already to act politically – not as a metropolitan provincial but as someone conscious of being placed in the multiplicity of relationships that Felix Guattari characterises as constituting ecosophy. Which is why just how we approach creative work has everything to do with issues of multiple lifeworlds, identity, culture, and politics.

In Hannah Leighton-Boyce’s book documenting and celebrating The Event Of The Thread, there are two photographs of her spinning wool (one publicly, outside the Robin Hood pub in Helmshore, the other on the great wheel at Helmshore Mills Textile Museum). For me these are extraordinarily resonant in a variety of ways with elements in both Ffion Jones’ performance Dear Mike Jagger – in which she span wool in order to enwrap a ram’s skull – and with Lois Williams use of wadding in works like Journey (1989) and A Living Position (1997). These acts and traces of acts, taken together, evoke the constitution of a weave of resonances that speaks of the interdependence of social, individual, and animal tasks capes; of a mycelial mesh of place, activity and identity, that in turn evoke a sense of cultural – and ultimately political – value utterly at odds with both a reductive Tory ideology predicated on the global economic bottom line and the maintenance of existing wealth and power, and with the values of the London-based cultural mandarinate that sent Sarah Lucas to represent ‘Britain’ at Venice.

I’ve been busy with the Bristol City Water project recently. One activity on Sunday was Perrie and Proxi’s celebration in the form of the The Bristol Syzygy Oath, administered at high tide in Bristol on 22 03 2015, shortly after 8.29 am.

I have just attended a very thought-provoking and I hope productive two-day workshop on ‘resilience’ in Groningen, organised by Melanie Bakema, Britta Restemeyer, Elen-Maarja Trell, and Gwenda van der Vaart, who are all either teaching or undertaking doctoral work at the university there. The workshop was organized around four presentation ‘tracks’, each with its own keynote speaker; a field trip into the region that included a number of site visits and brief talks by local officials and others; and finally a brainstorming and report back session on the final afternoon. (My own contribution was to give the keynote for track two, which explored the social side of resilience and the possible role of art in that).

The contributors to this track gave us insights into a range of topics, from resilience in urban slums in India and among women in coastal communities in the Philippines to issues effecting the local communities in the north of the Netherlands, for example the Wadden area. These were all interesting, with unexpected insights coming from topics in which I might not have expected to find them. Of particular interest to me personally where presentations from Jessica de Boer, an artist/researcher who spoke about co-evolutionary behaviour in relation to integrated energy landscapes; Victoria Brown, who presented a telling paper on the impact of coastal erosion on coastal communities in north Norfolk – this coincidentally related directly to Simon Read’s work further down the coast, which I referenced in my presentation – Sebastian Becker, who talked about projects demonstrating the potential value of permaculture; Jethro Brice and Seila Fernandez-Arconada’s on socially-engaged art practice; and Gwenda van der Vaart’s on her work looking at the uses of art in building community resilience.

To put the workshop in context it’s important to point out that Groningen is the main city in a region that is in decline in terms of its population and, to some extent, its economy. In both cases this is linked to the fact that both the region – and indeed now the city itself – are increasingly suffering from earthquakes as a result of decades of gas extraction by a company part-owned by the Dutch Government – a factor that gave the workshop a real sense of social and political urgency. Interestingly, there is local anger and related political activity but, it seems, in the context of a majority view (53%) that believes that ‘keeping quiet’ is probably the best option. However, as the safety of individuals is affected by property being weakened or damaged, this may change. Significantly, the Government itself siphons off the several billions of euros that constitute the annual profits from the gas extraction, while still (presumably) considering itself to be the ultimate representative of the Dutch people (or rather, perhaps, those of the people who do not live in regions effected by the earthquakes).

Quite apart from the usual issues of the duplicity of Governments when working hand-in-glove with business to the disadvantage of a proportion of the electorate, the workshop and the socio-environmental circumstances informing it served as a stark and timely warning in relation to the likely consequences of fracking in the UK. Sadly, given the combination of naked greed, insularity, and chronic lack of vision that characterises the present British government in pursuing the policies it does on energy (and indeed on almost everything else), nothing that happens in the Netherlands could possibly be allowed to get in the way of its policies!

Perhaps the most interesting and unusual aspect of the workshop was the final session, in which we were reorganised as new four groups, each with members drawn from different tracks. These were each tasked with creating an outline resilience strategy for Groningen on the basis of what we’d seen and heard – all in about two hours! I have to say I though initially that it would be impossible, or rather that we’d produce something too hasty and superficial to be of any real value. However, I had seriously underestimated the ability and capacity for teamwork in my own group. In addition to Jessica de Boer and myself from ‘track two’, this turned out to include some very focused and thoughtful contributors from other tracks. Having been reminded the previous day that it can take a couple of years for academics in an interdisciplinary research unit to understand each others’ language, it was both very heartening and a little surprising to see how quickly the group sorted out priorities and agreed a way of organizing and presenting our thoughts – a process that appears to have been replicated in the other three groups. Although obviously we could do little more than sketch out a proposal in the time available, I was impressed by the enthusiasm, attention to detail, and degree of mutual respect within the group and by the fact that our proposal – although sketchy in many respects – did have a workable sense of process considered, informed detail, and democratic inclusiveness, along with a genuine sense of vision that I would not have thought it possible to achieve in such a short space of time.

There’s obviously a lot to think about here. Among other things the workshop demonstrated that there are plenty of good, grounded ideas about place-building the reanimation of questions of community, ‘resilience’ (a term I personally find deeply suspect – preferring the more vernacular notion of ‘coping strategies’ – a phrase proposed as an alternative by the landscape architects Maggie Roe and Ken Taylor). There was also a sense of both the issues of political pragmatics and vision and the corresponding need for practical understanding of the issues around implementation of any strategy for the area. All this suggests to me that we might need to pay more serious attention to the following.

Firstly, ensuring that younger researchers and others are enabled to have the closest possible dialogue with a wide range of ‘lay’ constituencies and that this is understood in the context of a broad-based, ‘multi-constituency enquiry’ and NOT as ‘interdisciplinary research’, a term that signals a tacit denigration of those skills and understandings that draw on experiences that are not authorized by disciplinary academic knowledge. Secondly, that flexible policies need to be in place that allow for the accessing the widest range of ideas and strategies that can be generated by mixed skill and disciplinary groups when these are given a clear focus, as happened during the workshops at Groningen. Finally, genially socially engaged institutions need to find ways to ensure that they do whatever they can to ensure both that these ideas and strategies are taken seriously by those with the leverage to do so and that they are constantly debated and reformulated by being taken back into the region for further discussion. This process needs, however, to ensure that it generates productive action, since without this it will degenerate very rapidly into the kind of rudderless talking-shop that currently seems much in evidence when it comes to thorny issues like the liability of the company responsible for the gas extraction.

The response to my own presentation and the insights of others presenting in track two suggests that there is an important role for those able and willing to work imaginatively and creatively as ‘lifeworld translators’ in the sense I proposed. As I suggested at the end of my presentation, in different ways and in different contexts, projects already under way are working to facilitate new coping strategies by making space for the empathetic imagination necessary to shared ethical action – including political action. They do so by translating across lifeworlds normally assumed to be insular ’worlds-unto-themselves’, by listening out for the anomalies that might allow people to re-narrate those insular worlds in other, more open and empathetic ways. They invite exchange between global knowledge and local understanding, between professional practice and lay skills, between all the multiple elements of lifeworlds as polyverses. And if they facilitate ‘resilience’, it is a shared social resilience that collectively chooses to face, rather than resist, radical change.

(photographer of group image unknown)