In the midst of a global pandemic & civil unrest how do we find sanctuary?
Sitting in the relative sanctuary of my home while exterior to this, in the public space the world whirls to the surface the toxins enacted by broken systems.
If the personal is political then what do my actions and choices contribute? I am a symbol and what is the message?
This afternoon I did a yoga class with one other participant, a korean woman. her name is Kitty. today’s instructor is Nhi, a Vietnamese woman who speaks softly words like, ‘Chillax your shoulders, Chillax your belly’. Although next door the apartment was in full renovation mode I thought this a good sign, a sign of renewal, of people investing in a post-covid future. As the drilling sounds threatened to bust the small room we’d created we somehow meditated and breathed away the noise. During Savasana Nhi gently massaged my scalp digging into the pressure points and pulled my head so i felt more long into my neck and elongated. Being touched like this after months of physical distancing was a yearning realised. i understand how animals feel when you scratch their itch.
How Covid 19 Will Change Cities
‘Operating out of his studio in the Perth CBD, urban designer Peter Ciemitis is one worker still supporting retailers in the city centre, grabbing lunch at cafes down the street and provisions from the deli below his office. He’s seen the change firsthand.
“Walking around, it is clear that the CBD has become an estranged place,” he says. “Its mood has dampened; it is no longer convivial and lively. There are few people on the street, and it feels that there is an undercurrent of social anxiety.”
He thinks about the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-20, which prompted Australia’s suburban “garden city” movement. “We saw better building codes for ventilation, room sizes and crowding,” he says. “We are still enjoying most of these legacies today.”’
‘He envisions wider footpaths through removal of parking strips, and new developments set further back from the street. While this would allow for better social distancing, it would also create more opportunity for socialisation.
Ciemitis sees more space for public art in our post-coronavirus cities, too. “Perhaps we might see pop-up exhibitions helping to reactivate ‘ghost retail’ spaces where more shopping has gone online,” he says.
He says that any attempts to bring people back into cities will need to strike a balance, offering space for people to be comfortable while still allowing for “compact living that makes viable, sustainable walkable cities”.’
I discover Gaston Bachelard and enter into reading about him and his work. I edit screen shots of earlier Whats App conversations with my collaborator and colour in words to block out to make public the private. Editing the versions of a personal exchange into something that informs this process.
The Poetics of Restlessness
Saturday expansiveness extends further than the usual Covid days. I am still, in a restless stillness one of inbetweens, the inbetween of doing. This is the time that the impetus to ‘do’ pushes through, to read, to meditate, to move small objects around my apartment, to make a sense of action in a place of restless stillness. This becomes part of the experiment. If i allow myself to still what then becomes of the boredom the expansiveness of doing.
Gaston Bachelard: The Imagination is a Tree https://www.interaliamag.org/blog/gaston-bachelard-the-imagination-is-a-tree/
The Poetics of Space, The Classic Look at How We Experience Intimate Spaces https://sites.evergreen.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/88/2015/05/Gaston-Bachelard-the-Poetics-of-Space.pdf
‘Without the vital impulse (elan vital), as perceived by Bergson, the human being is static and therefore moribund. Referring to Anna Teresa Tymieniecka’s book Phenomenology and Science, we can say that for Minkowski, the essence of life is not a “feeling of being, of existence”, but a feeling of participation in a flowing onward, necessarily expressed in term of time, and secondarily expressed in terms of space. ‘
‘Art, then, is an increase of life, a sort of competition of surprises that stimulates our consciousness and keeps it from becoming somnolent.’
The Various Inventions of Topophilia https://www.placeness.com/topophilia-and-topophils/
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for a long time i was a sleep walker. i remember this. we were in the mining town of kambalda. we were new and it was my first day of school. My mother took me to the school and dropped me off and the girl who was my buddy for the day said she was in grade 1 too and that she would bring me home when her mum picked her up. the thing was that after my mother had left, i realised there were two grade 1s. i had a good day until after school when i went to find my new friend. i couldn’t find her anywhere so i started walking. i headed up a big hill and kept walking, nothing seemed familiar. this memory is a vivid one for me, the smell of the gum trees and the crows cawing. on top of the hill i found an adventure playground. i stayed and played for a while, climbing on the logs and swinging through the tyre swings. after a while it was getting late and i kept walking. i came down the other side of the hill, and saw our new house. i kept this exploration to myself.
in this town i would walk in my sleep at night time. my parents would find me in strange places. at the foot of their bed. in the middle of their dinner parties i would make entrances gibbering and gesturing, sleep talking. One night i was missing from my bed and in a panic my mother threw open to front door to find me, curled up asleep on the front verandah. the neighbour said i’d been knocking on doors but they thought nothing of it.
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Socially Engaged Practice & Social Sculpture
I work in the realm of social sculpture. This includes my creative practice and also in the various facets of my career and how that develops. Both (or all things) are about making something from nothing, bringing energy and groups of people together to make concrete and substance from the materiality of thoughts and ideas.
My practice is driven by contribution, in a broader post-object manner where the process itself becomes a durational performative action. The begins with inquiry and self-awareness of what is the creative action and framework and how this differs (or not) from the exquisite fucking boredom' of the daily human life. Often referencing the self and the body as site, and as the methodology of the experimental practice.
Beuy’s Concept of Social Sculpture and Relational Art Practices Today. http://chicagoartmagazine.com/2010/11/beuys%E2%80%99-concept-of-social-sculpture-and-relational-art-practices-today/
‘Beuys is famously remembered for two things: the theoretical hypothesis of “social sculpture,” and the statement “everybody is an artist.” A close consideration of the relationship between these two concepts reveals Beuys’s program for art and his historically motivated vision for society. Both concepts have influenced participatory, socially engaged, and relational art today and provide a vehicle for unraveling their historical significance, even if they claim to detach themselves from Beuys’s historical moment.’
‘ “an art taking as its theoretical horizon the realm of human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space.”’
‘“Only on condition of a radical widening of definition will it be possible for art and activities related to art to provide evidence that art is now the only evolutionary-revolutionary power. Only art is capable of dismantling the repressive effects of a senile social system to build a SOCIAL ORGANISM AS A WORK OF ART.”’
Relational Aesthetics - Critique of Culture and Radical Research of Social Circumstance https://www.widewalls.ch/relational-aesthetics-nicolas-bourriaud-social-circumstance/
‘relational aesthetics is used to describe all those artistic practices that tend to erase the line which separates spectators from the work of art. The artist is merely a catalyst who replicates existing social environments for people to participate in. This social event can practically include any profane activity from our everyday lives like drinking coffee, having dinner or booking a hotel room. ‘
Josephy Beuys on Social Sculpture
today's reading
An underlying influence around Sanctuary as a theme for this research project comes from my interests and inquiry into more consciously designing our own futures. Or at least thinking and talking and engaging with the ideas of ‘what if’ and what things could be beyond our fears and patterns.
Part of this practice is using mediation and yoga to step away from the dialogue with myself and look at bigger picture issues and trends. This is part of why I am drawn to collaboration, to transcend the ‘self’ and to interact and play with others, it’s a system that I observe and assess the changes when engagement with others takes place.
Here is some of what I’m reading today.
Beyond Disaster Capitalism https://www.stirtoaction.com/blog-posts/beyond-disaster-capitalism?mc_cid=9c9310520a&mc_eid=09a12df57
‘But what if the expected responses either fail to occur or are only marginal? What if the temporary breakdown of social hierarchies allows for new ideas and systems to emerge? What if disasters resolve pre-existing conflicts? And what are the new political powers of this ‘community of sufferers’? ‘
‘So could the opportunities for disaster capitalism also be an opportunity for ‘disaster collectivism’? Or in other words, can disasters disrupt ‘institutional patterns of behaviour’ and allow different social systems to emerge?’
Consciousness and Society: Societal Aspects and Implications of Transpersonal Psychology https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/c853/e8560262107ac7f82ae77f72251602d1e45c.pdf?_ga=2.135936949.509554591.1590640210-830822620.1590640210
‘More recently, both Charles Tart (1986) and Guy
Swanson (1978) speak literally of a “collective hypnosis of everyday life,” or a shared “hypnotic trance” that forms the experience of being a part of a social group. ‘
‘ In effect, the more deeply we go down and in to states of individual imaginative absorption, the more we simultaneously go out and into implicitly shared metaphors of the social field, or what Jung (1959/1969) described as deeply shared archetypes. Thus, there exists the potential for rapid societal impact by creative visionaries who Jung (1963) credited with making conscious just those images...which compensate for the general psychic distress” (p. 550). ‘
‘Horrific situations of mass destruction and crisis can actually result in the spontaneous emergence of temporary intensely egalitarian communities based on shared numinous states that have the ineffable and paradoxical features of classical individual mysticism'.
A Paradise Built in Hell https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/e47a/792b3af73c2796c8b2dc57b19ca22d529dbf.pdf?_ga=2.68374805.509554591.1590640210-830822620.1590640210
Reasons to be Cheerful https://reasonstobecheerful.world/
