As I am sure I have mentioned before I have a slight weakness/addiction for BBC documentaries. Recently I have been hooked on Dr. Aleks Kotroski’s The Virtual Revolution. Trekkie Monster, resident of Avenue Q, would do well in watching the second episode, Enemy of the State?, because he would quickly come to realise that the internet is not just for porn. In said episode Dr. Kotroski investigates how the internet can be used as a tool for individuals to “play David to the state’s Goliath”. The example that most stuck in my mind is that of Austin Heap. This young American living in San Francisco responded to the post-election disturbances in Iran with direct action. As civil unrest worsened, the Iranian government blocked sites such as Facebook and Twitter to restrict its citizens’ ability to upload information, photographs and footage of the repression onto the internet. On the other side of the globe Austin Heap sprang developed Haystack, a piece of encryption software that allowed Iranians to access the blocked sites without being detected. The story seemed to resonate with i am small THE WORLD IS BIG. As tiny individuals we can make a difference, whether big or small, that can reverberate throughout the world. Moreover, the fact that the internet had been used as a tool for empowerment is also relevant to our project. We are currently investigating the possibilities of using Twitter and Skype throughout the piece. Although the use of this technology will be somewhat reduced in February’s presentation, we fully intend to expand this aspect of the project in future versions.
This is somewhat overdue, almost two weeks to be precise. As I mentioned in my previous post logistics and practicalities have, at this stage, a tendency to take over. But I have managed to steal a few hours to give you an update on our developments.
On Monday 1st February we had a much awaited visit to the SenateBuilding. This was the first time we were properly able to explore the space and spend a significant amount of time in it. Our aim: to find our specific relationship with the building, and how we would situate i am small THE WORLD IS BIG within it. We were accompanied by Laura Hobbs (4th year dramaturge student) and Sebastian Grau (MA student in European Theatre History). They had requested to see us in action because they will be writing about our creative process and the project in their respective dissertations. In the end their role was not merely passive and they helped us quite a bit, not just moving furniture about and figuring how to draw a crude plan of the space, but by asking questions that pushed us towards clarity. But I digress….
The two main practical issues we set to resolve were the audience’s route through the building and the layout for the ‘production line’ in the upstairs room. I will attempt to discuss the intricacies of the audience’s route first. i am small THE WORLD IS BIG will take the shape of a journey where the audience will be led though different rooms and areas: through the automated sliding doors and into the foyer, up the stairs to a welcome desk, into the main chamber and out again, down in the lift, into a small waiting area, into the vox-pop ‘booth’, and back out through the foyer into the wider world. The journey follows a logical, almost intuitive route through the building. Interestingly, it describes the outline of a spiral, first inwards towards the centre (where the large world map will be remade), and then outwards towards the world itself. This is strictly speaking not a one-at-a-time experience because for the most part, the audience will pass through communal areas (foyer, stairs, chamber, and waiting room). However, in line with the project’s concerns, we did want to offer some space where the audience members will stand as an individual: alone or in the company of a single performer. We therefore decided that the journey down in the lift will be taken by one person at a time, and designed the vox-pop ‘booth’ as a one-to-one performance exchange. The lift, to us, is a crucial moment. Even though the ride only lasts 10 seconds we hope this time spent alone will serve as a direct stimulus for personal reflection. This emphasis on the individual is also reflected in the way in which people will be led through the building. For Schengen Smile we used instructive posters and other similar devices that very clearly shepherded the audience: you must go here, you must wait here, you most not enter here, you must proceed here… For i am small THE WORLD IS BIG we wanted to use a less authoritative attitude, as we did not feel this would suit the project’s ethos and sentiment. We therefore have to strike a delicate balance between letting people know where to go and what route to follow, and maintaining a friendly and warm tone.
The layout of the production line, on the other hand, is set and secured. One the one hand is is always easier to work on the layout of one particular room (in this case the upstairs Senate chamber), rather than a whole route through a building. On the other hand, this is, at the end of the day, the project’s main thrust so it is not surprising that we were able to achieve a great level of clarity so quickly. When we first settled on the idea of setting up a ‘production line’ we instantly decided that the layout should be circular rather than in rows. Our aim was to quote, reference, or allude to industrial sweatshops rather than actually recreating one. Due to the project’s concerns the circle presented itself as the best and most logical option. Coming together, community, making a joint effort. Circle, circle, circle. On a more practical level, this option was the best one to fir the octagonal chamber where the ‘production line’ will be placed. But one question remained, how would be the circle organised? Since this ‘production line’ is made up of several stages and there are several workstations we would have to find logic to its layout. At the same time we were interested in the possibility of also quoting, referencing, and alluding to international conferences/summits. How would this be done? The answer came with a picture.
The above photograph was taken during the G-20 summit in Pittsburgh in September 2009. The layout suited out ‘production line’ perfectly:
-an outer circle of independent tables (for the cutting, the shredding, the sewing machines, and a workstation for the audience to directly contribute towards the map-making)
-an inner circle of chairs where collaborators will stitch their personal fragments by hand
-a central area where other collaborators will stitch together these disparate fragments, creating a large re-shaped world map on the floor.
We then simply decided where each of the various stages of the process and workstations would be placed. Our final decision was shaped by the building. On the one hand we followed its symmetry and alignment. On the other hand, following a spatial narrative, we placed the cutting-table nearer the door used by the audience to enter the space and the shredding-table on the far end. This layout will allow the audience to come into the circle following a spiral route (into the room, along the outside of the circle, and then into it). The route will be emphasised by the movement of collaborators coming and going on their shifts.
February is well and truly upon us, which means there are only three weeks until i am small THE WORLD IS BIG opens its doors. If we have been somewhat absent from this space it is because we have now entered our production schedule proper; meaning that every day there’s something to decide, to do, to make. As a result the posts that will follow this one are somewhat retrospective (and will potentially be quite short).
Right now I wanted to tell you about people: the wonderful people who have come on board to the project. It strikes me that up to now we have never really worked with other ‘bodies’, other ‘doers’, other ‘makers’. So it is somewhat comical that we find ourselves in a situation were we are collaborating with over 20 individuals. That’s it, Accidental Collective jumps into the deep end! But don’t worry; we are taking like ducks to water.
At the beginning of January we sent out a call for participants who will become an integral part of i am small THE WORLD IS BIG. Due to the project’s themes we tried our best to gather people from a wide demographic (ages, backgrounds, etc). Once we had a significant number we organised a few meetings (on the last two Saturdays) where we gave some basic information about the project, noted their availability, answered questions, and also did some sewing/stitching (we prefer a hands-on approach). It was fantastic to meet everybody. Especially because it suddenly felt the project was happening. This is it.
i am small THE WORLD IS BIG was no longer an idea in our heads, but a reality. Moreover, we realised the project’s potential to generate ‘community’. As we sat together in the upstairs room of The Jolly Sailor (thank you to Ian - the landlord- for making this space available to us), there was a true coming-together. People who had never met before were embarking on a joint, creative effort. Together, each contributing their little bit, we were going to make something big happen. To say that this filled us with excitement is probably an understatement. This accidental community was full of potential beyond the project itself. If anything, one of the most direct benefits of these meetings was the exchange of stitching tips. The mother of more than one gentleman will be awfully proud that their son is picking up a needle and thread, and familiarising themselves with this ‘alien’ technology. On a more practical level, for us, these meetings were highly beneficial because suddenly it was not just three brains thinking about the project, but many more. Even though we had come up with the basic structure and framework of the project, some of the individuals involved clarified our thinking with their questions, whilst other still gave us some very interesting ideas: could the ‘workers’ do something in unison at some points, could the centre map be photographed every hour on the hour…
So, as a little tribute to all these people, here is a list of names of those who are involved to date:
Lewis Barron, Amyie Butler, Muriel van Cruchten, Jo Dyre, Olivia Farrant, Richard Franklin, Sebastian Grau, Laura Hobbs, Maggie Johns, Lorraine Keene, Liz Knowles, Phoebe Marsh, Jessica Nine, Alex Norcott, Mez Pondole, Hannah Riches, Estelle Rosenfeld, Daphne Seale, Marc Shilling, Alice Taylor, Catherine Ward, Gemma Williams, Paul Williams, Alex Wood
Thank you, thank you, tank you. To each and every one of you (and a special danke to Sebastian who let us upload the pictures he took during the first meeting).
And of course… We sill hope that more will join. The more the merrier!
Earlier this evening we all met at chez Rick's for our first session of stitching and sewing. There is, of course, nothing special about messing around with paper, needles and thread. But the fact that we were finally sitting down and experimenting with the finer details of the project was something we had all anticipated. So much so that we felt it was appropriate to document the moment (that and the fact that I have been meaning to properly test out my new laptop's recording capabilities - thanks Santa).
Fuelled by tea, jaffa cakes and crisps we gave ourselves wholeheartedly to the task at hand. As we tortuously progressed along the path of atlas-stitching ideas came to mind, questions arose, tips were exchanged, and a few bad jokes were shared. The process, I have to say, is quite meditative and sedate; something which we hope our collaborators will appreciate.
And here it is... For your eyes' delectation... Accidental Collective at it!
The final result, although not seen in the footage, was quite important. In just over an hour we managed to achive a significant chunk of reconfigured world map. So, we can only speculate, the final outcome of the project should be of an impressive size.
Later on Daisy, bravely, attempted to use Rick's mum's old hand-powered sewing machine. As a tribute to her courage and determination here is another little video. Unfortunately it was Daisy 0 - Singer 1. At least for now...
If everything goes to plan, this darling year of ours will end today at midnight. After trudging along relentlessly, 2009 will finally pass. It will have had twelve months, filleted into fifty-two weeks or, if you prefer it, crumbled into three hundred sixty-five days. Something takes place around this time of year, every year, which gives me a certain degree of pleasure: news programmes have a nostalgic tendency to show footage they have steadily collected over the last year. The images, I have to say, tend to include a high percentage of despair and tragedy, only peppered by a few fortunate incidents. And yet, I sit and watch. Perhaps it is not actual pleasure but rather awe that I experience. What I am sure of is that I enjoy sitting and watching the year go past in images; a rather trivial reminder of the inexorable passage of time, and perhaps a last ditched attempt to understand what has happened. So far I have not been able to get the same high whilst browsing through the 20 events that Hotmail tells me ‘made the decade’, but they served as an appetiser. However, for the first time, I have read something in print which has come close to producing the exhilaration I feel when watching an edited potpourri of news footage. And I believe it is able to do so because it highlights the inevitability and complexities we all face when leaving a decade behind and starting a new one:
History doesn’t seem to have a taste for round figures. The decade of the 1980s, for example, began in May 1979 when Margaret Thatcher swept into the British Parliament. The decade of the 1990s also began ahead of its time, just at the moment when the Berlin wall fell, in November 1989. And the first decade of the 21st century truly seemed to get started with the terrorist attacks on September 11 2001. There are decades that are marked by ideas. Ideas are something different to events. Ideas are often the consequence of events, although they can also be the cause that leads to events. On the one hand, the communist regimes were a product, at least in part, of Marx’s idea that history would end with the triumph of socialism. On the other hand, Francis Fukuyama’s idea that history ended with the triumph of democracy and the free market was the consequence of the event that closed the 20th century: the failure of communism. In the decade of the 1980s the idea that led to events was economic ultraliberalism; and the decade of the 1990s the idea that defined the period was globalisation, the vision of a more interdependent world. The first decade of the 21st century has been defined by the attacks in New York and Washington; attacks that kick-started a period characterised by global terrorism, from London to Bali, passing through Madrid and Istanbul. But this decade has also been dominated by an idea: the so-called global war against terrorism and its first battle started in Afghanistan. The idea that dominated George W. Bush’s presidency was neoconservativism, a maniqueist cosmovision. And the fear and wrath resulting from the 9/11 attacks facilitated that the neo-cons should apply their idea which, amongst other things affirmed that the soviet threat had transfigured into militant Islamism. The overthrow of the Taliban regime (2001) and Saddam Hussein (2003) marked the unilateral/centralised moment, the period when the USA exhorted its highest level of power. But the neoconservative vision demonstrated that it was incapable to reorganise the world. The Bush Administration pretended to revolutionise, with wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the system inherited from the Cold War. The result was a disaster, amongst other things because the war against terrorism did not become an organising principle for the international system. Bush announced the democratisation of the Middle East after the invasion of Iraq, but the Middle East has taken a turn for the worse. The autocracies in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, for example, had become harder, which does not necessarily mean they have become stronger; Iraq is total chaos; Iran has become a regional power; new non-govertamental players such as Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas and the Mahdi Army have become consolidated; peace between Palestinians and Israelis provokes general scepticism. Global terrorism has affected Western societies, but the war against terrorism has relegated to the background the events taking place in South America, where populism doesn’t relent; in Africa, tormented by poverty, illness tribal rivalries, and the tragedy in Darfur; and in Asia, where two emerging superpowers continue to grow: China and India. That is to say, the world has become multifocal/decentred. Bush invested his first term in the search of weapons of mass destruction that Saddam was supposed to have. When he left the American presidency it became known that said weapons rested underneath Wall Street. Then, on a date that was not a round figure either, the unilateral/centralised moment came to an end. Shortly afterwards Obama walked into the White House. It was the beginning of a multifocal/decentred decade in which the world’s organisation will not depend upon the war against terrorism, but on the relationships between the USA, the established superpower, and the emerging powers, beginning with China. (The text is by Xavier Batalla and I have taken the liberty to translate and edit it myself.)
I prepare myself to greet 2010 and the new decade with a different kind of excitement to the one I experienced ten years ago, on 31st December 1999. This I feel, is a sober excitement, free of the naïve anxieties caused by a possible crash of all computers systems around the globe. A further difference is that back then, as far as I remember, I did not have this sense of waving goodbye. I was so fixated with what as to come that I did not fully register the period we were just leaving behind. Yes, we were also exiting a decade and arguably a century, but somehow I was so busy thinking about the new century that I did not take stock. Things are different now. Quietly, I am taking stock. This, the decade that is about to slip through our fingers, has been my decade. I have the ‘honour’ to say that I was born in the early 1980, then, the remaining years until the end of the decade came and went in the stupor of childhood. After that, the 1990s came and went in much the same manner, this time muddled by the negotiations and awkwardness of adolescence. For instance, my only memory of the first invasion of Iraq remains this: my mother, standing in front of the television, ironing a pile of clothes, wearing a black and white keffiyeh (at that stage the Palestinian headscarf had not yet become a fashion accessory and retailed its militant aura). The rest is rather hazy. So… this has been, finally, my decade: I have gone from being 17 to being 27. As far as periods go, this has undoubtedly been the most important to date in personal terms. The narrative of my life coils behind me like a used rope and I prepare for the next tug.
So this is it. And I have only four hours and three minutes left. And as the last twelve seconds of the year rush past I will push the metal bar and open a heavy door with an exit sign glowing above it…
PS: though of course, things are never as straightforward as that. It is peculiar to think that the new year and the new decade have already commenced, at least numerically, for millions of people living on the landmasses that stretch from India to New Zeeland. And on and on and on and on and on the Earth’s rotation continues...
So last Friday I managed to escape the weather nightmare at Gatwick and only suffered three hours delay. I was flying to Spain for the festive season after a year’s absence. And now…? Now I am in Alicante, a place I can only really call home because my family lives here and there is a room full of my stuff – old stuff. Anyway, last night I had a long and somewhat overdue chat with my mum: told her everything about i am small THE WORLD IS BIG. I don’t know what this kind of conversation is like for other fellow creatives out there, but for me it’s an important moment. Though my mother is certainly cultured she does not necessarily have a full understanding of the ins and outs of contemporary performance practice. Furthermore, though she is certainly supportive she is equally critical and analytical. And so, the moment I tell her about one of our new projects is always exciting because I know I will get a barrage of questions followed by her honest opinion. She was excited about i am small THE WORLD IS BIG and was impressed by its scope and scale, but that is not what I wanted to write about…
We were talking about world atlases and how we plan to use them for our project when she referred to them in passing as a ‘defunct technology’. That strange thought grabbed me. We live in the age of Google Earth and other such technological marvels. In fact this morning my brother showed me that Spain is the most ‘photographed’ country after the US, on Google Street View that is. So it is strange to think that I could give you my ‘home’ address and you could have a peek at my family’s house! Though to be honest I’m not sure how I feel about that… At any rate it was something I had not considered before: the possibility that good old world atlases printed in book form might already be a thing of the past. Where does that leave i am small THE WORLD IS BIG? At the moment I cannot say. Of course you don’t yet know what we intend to do with the atlases we have collected – and we have collected quite a few! (We already have atlases in English, German, Spanish, and we are still hoping to find more in Easter languages such as Arabic, Cantonese, Japanese, Hindi, and Mandarin.) For the time being all I will say is that we will be cannibalising these world atlases… So, if we accept the statement that printed world atlases are a ‘defunct technology’, does that mean they are becoming historic artefacts? Should we therefore treat them with more respect? I am not sure. A telling moment came a few weeks ago when we received in the post an atlas I had bought on eBay. It was printed in 1917. When he saw it Rick put his foot down and was adamant that we could not cannibalise it. This, he said, was a precious thing… But why? Do we feel some strange nostalgia? What happens when we see Canada appear as the Dominion of Canada; or see that Pakistan, India and Bangladesh were united under British rule; or that Germany was once huge? I don’t know. Or is it rather that we value artefacts such as this 1917 world atlas because they have survived the relentless passage of time, because they offer us a window into the past? After taking into account other, more practical considerations (such as the quality of the paper), Daisy and I compromised and agreed not to use the 1917 atlas in the same way as we intend to use the other ones. However, my mother’s comments put this into perspective and problematise our attitude. If all world atlases are ‘on their way out’ and will eventually be replaced by electronic copies, then does that not mean that even newer atlases (from the 1960’s to 1990’s say) are already in the process of becoming historic artefacts? Will we be cutting this process short by using them in our project? Or rather, do we mind that they will become different and transformed artefacts once we have cannibalised them? The whole question reminds me a little bit, though tangentially, of the discussion that ensued after the Chapman brothers (Jake and Dinos) ‘defaced’ or rather ‘rectified’ 80 of Goya’s famous prints (http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2003/mar/31/artsfeatures.turnerprize2003). Not that I think we are operating on the same level of course! I am aware that the world atlases we will be cannibalising are not precious works of art, but they do have a value in themselves. Hum… Many questions. Few answers. For now.
Pablo
PS: and if I don’t blog before the end of the week… Feliz Navidad!
Accidental Collective is a live art and performance group based in the South East. Accidental Collective is the sum of its parts: Daisy Orton and Pablo Pakula.
www.accidentalcollective.co.uk
