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

https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/economy/2020/05/30/how-covid-19-will-change-cities/15907608009905

‘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”.’

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. ‘

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/

Sanctuary: a journal of research

This page is my journal and research as part of the Master of Creative Industries at the University of Newcastle. I’m working with the theme of Sanctuary particularly as a starting point for an online artist residency and collaboration.

The first phase of the project with be a series of conversations between myself and Beck Pope, one of the other sociocreative trust members. This page will document some of the investigations and research into the project.

Working predominantly in an experimental mode of practice, my work stems from a basis in electronic art and has included video art, performance art (online and in physical spaces), sound art, socially engaged practice, text and writing, festivals, residencies, installation and meditation.

My creative lineage () has encouraged me to transmediate, working with technology in experimental ways, for example scanner art, using old technology in new media (80s dictaphones in sound art), tape art, polaroids in performance art, the body as a site - and art as process working with ideas as sculptural forms into socially engaged practice.

Influences to date are varied including artists, writers and philosophers working in outsider art, low art, new media, performance art, situationists, Dada, Punk, Grunge Fashion, text, DIY, sound art, video art, social sculpture, internet art, installation art, environmental art. For me in my research and practice the expansion continues and always returns to a practice that is collaborative.

Some of my early investigations have been around the performative aspects of the everyday. On making an artform from life, and life design as a practice. This mode of practice and research was supported by graduate studies (completed in 2019) through RMIT University in Wellness. This program enabled me to look at some of my wellness practices, for example my interest in nutrition, food systems, yoga and meditation through a lens of elements of life design and methodologies within my arts practice. 

Incorporating these methodologies into an experimental practice and using my body as a site, I entered into an expanded field using myself as the model. I am also interested in participatory practice that invites audiences to become participants and setting parameters that opens up to the experiment, where process is the materiality, and where documentation becomes the archive or ‘the work’ in the sense of object. From past projects the audience members vary from those who are ‘initiated’ into the world of art and theory and understand the structure and boundaries of the practice and more interestingly to me, people who may have wandered in from the street, or accidentally encountered what was going on and became interested and engaged. 

Over the past few years I have been working with sociocreative trust (SCT), made up of myself and three other creatives - Gemma Robertson, Susie Anderson and Beck Pope. When founding SCT we envisaged a creative platform to connect us in projects with an open invitation to participate when other commitments in each other’s lives allow. Working collaboratively and each bringing our own experiences, backgrounds and skill set formed what we refer to as a ‘brains’ trust’. The trust values what each individual may bring to the group and work well with the flow of this mutual respect and openness. 

Some of the projects we’ve worked on have been festivals, curated dinners and performances, exhibitions, online conversations, interviews and publications. We also include discussions with each other in private and public spaces all of which explore our shared interests and philosophies. 

SCT is driven by the ideals of a community of practice around areas including sustainability, wellbeing, and possible futures. The trust looks at life issues, societal issues and through our modes of practice looks at ways of solving and bringing others to look at these big questions and open up dialogue and exchange. 

The project for this proposal is titled, Sanctuary. With aim to create an online community where artists and audiences may create and contribute works and ideas around their own experiences of Sanctuary. 

In our daily lives we create our own places of Sanctuary which may be physical or non-material places in our homes, or places within urban and public space, for example parks, libraries, civic centres. Sanctuary for many can also be an internal landscape which might be reached through meditation and other forms of flow.

Inviting participants to explore what their personal experiences of Sanctuary are to move this into a creative investigation and observation, part of my interest in Sanctuary as an action is to study what happens when certain elements and people are brought together, how this forms and becomes something organic with a life of its own.

The Australian artists Patrick and Meg Jones, as Artist as Family (12) have made the articulation of their lives their public creative practice. The pair shifted their performative and text based experimental practice into living according to their values in self-sufficiency and sustainability as art practice. Their work is documented through the Artist as Family website and additionally they work on projects with arts organisations, groups and festivals alongside opening up their lives as an arts practice. This practice as a performative work brings elements of accountability and creates a public discourse around the themes they explore and embody.

Sanctuary will use the SCT website to curate the experience for participants to entice participants into a reflective space that complements their other work and professional practices. A complementary point of practice.

With an experimental approach with technology as invitation to play and to experiment beyond functionality. This project starts from an idea that the internet could be a place of community, a conversation, to transverse across borders, cultures and languages and to create performative experiences and resources around the theme of Sanctuary.

While the project has been in the making for a number of years, with conversations between myself and collaborators (SCT) interestingly, as I work in this research project, the world has entered into a global pandemic with the onset of Covid-19 coronavirus (CoCoV). 

Currently in May, 2020 countries around the globe are restricting ‘non essential’ travel with regions closing borders. Who can travel, which borders are open have now become a very real part of life. We are seeing governments cancelling large gatherings of people and within Australia cancelling major music and arts festivals (including Dark Mofo and the Melbourne International Comedy Festival) and most major arts organisations closing down for an unknown period. Schools and universities shifted quickly to online teaching modes and many people are working remotely and from home.

I’m referencing CoCoV as it shifts focus into how humans connect beyond face-to-face gatherings and in person. Within Sanctuary I explore ways that people, artists and audiences members (also as participants) are invited to participate and to create community within an online space. People are already looking at innovative ways of working, creating and existing within online spaces far more than ever before. 

China, where the pandemic first took hold, adopted quickly to encourage the online presence of their cultural institutions.

A letter issued by the government last month directs museums to “enrich the people’s spiritual and cultural life during the epidemic” with “cloud exhibitions” based on planned gallery programming.

With the world entering into isolation for periods of months, masses of people are now looking at online communication more than ever before. Creative communities are responding to this with Live Streaming Music Festivals, online communities, art communities pulling together and creating platforms and live streaming from their homes.

These experiences signal the human need for connection and interestingly how humans find whatever tools and means possible to communicate and connect.

For Sanctuary I look for a time after CoCoV, post-pandemic. What does this time look like and how can Sanctuary contribute and be heard in what is becoming a noisy space.

As we now operate in an environment that is un-chartered and humanity becomes more keenly networked and entering into spaces of physical containment, the internet becomes a supremely integrated technology in terms of social connection. These connective networks are also quickly becoming the spaces in which we work and learn.

The polymath Roy Ascott, states that it is the ‘artist’s responsibility to build socially useful schemes.’  

By opening up the SCT website into an online experimental space starting with the four existing SCT artists to enter into the spaces created for them, a diarised account of their aesthetic observations of a new world as it develops post-pandemic.