we receive this email from John-Paul...
Dear All,
I would have liked
to write a fully-referenced text as my contribution to the blog, so you could
see the genealogy of my reflections about the workshop; something polished,
complete. But my experience of the workshop is neither complete nor polished.
It stays with me, moving me, making me think and write.
There is always an
expectation when you walk into a space and someone else is there. You have your
own hopes for the situation and the other has their’s and the only way you have
of identifying with them is usually projection of your own desires.
I’m used to walking
into the space and being, quite literally, phallic. I show off, make jokes,
flirt, use a lot of sarcasm, shock tactics and I make sure I develop a
transference with each and every person in the room. And they usually want me
to centre the space so they can journey within it safe. Safe within their own
worlds, only because those are held in space by someone else.
This time, the
space was different this time. Everyone held their own space and the space of
the others and for once, I myself felt held.
It’s so difficult
to find words for the workshop and even more difficult to find a stable
metaphor or fiction or narrative or ethics for the experience. Instead an image
came to mind which is the nearest way I have at the moment for describing it:
In
fairytales and myths there is often a sacred or magical object, artefact,
weapon or adornment – sometimes it is a curse or bind, other times it is a gift
that will take the heroine to the next, most dangerous stage of her journey. It
is a delicately spun thing, cob-web thin, nearly invisible but it is as strong
as the strongest metal. It can capture a dragon and make a thief tell the
truth, it will help win the battle or bring a wrong-doer to justice.It’s a
magical object, we don’t know how it works. We only know that, in order for it
to work, we have to believe it will actually capture the dragon and it is this
belief that makes it work.
There was a cobweb
fine connectivity in the workshop, a network managing itself, self-organising
and evolving. I felt part of that network and felt I was given the space to be
an equal member of that momentary organization rather than a superior
one, or one that knew more.
This is perhaps a
very clear example of the ethics from which our own work arises, and which can
be polished away in the final product or over-ornamented in a distrustful
effort to distract the other from you and your world in the performance
in order to fit in with the already-existing market. This, for me, is where a
politics can arise from an ethics, rather than an idealised system or
fantasy. There is politics in our practice because there is always already an
ethics there, waiting to be brought to light – unconcealed. Ethics as a
meta-politics. If none of us ever manage to fully bring that to the
performance space, where we enter the system of exchange-value, then perhaps,
in staying faithful to the event that brought us to this place of performance,
we can still share our (non-exchangeable) value in other ways, through other
fields, without the medium of exchange, but through the medium of the gift.
This is certainly
what the workshop experience was for me – a pure gift –showing me how you gave
to each other and gave to the space as much as you gave to yourselves. As a
result of this it seemed that for the first time in a long time, I was being
given an appropriate space to test my own notions of what it means to be an
artist as citizen.
Special. Rare.
Thank-you.
John-Paul.
Stockholm 22.07.2014
