Tuesday 21 June 2016

The Imaginative Tourist Trail for the New Forest Arts Festival 2016



The Imaginative Tourist Trail is a social art project I am currently running as part of Everyday Tourist Collective (ETC) with Noriko Suzuki-Bosco and Dr Yvonne Jones. The project was commissioned for the New Forest Arts Festival 2016 and explores the notion of authentic experience of place when it is seen through someone a fictitious frame. We have produced an edition of 200 Interactive Trail Guides / maps in the hope that visitors will engage with the 2.6 mile trail, beginning at The Fighting Cocks pub at Godshill in the New Forest, to produce alternative narratives of the area. We printed the guides using risograph technology and included a series of prompts indexed to eleven alternative tourist sites on the trail. The prompts have are not drawn from historical facts or official narratives relating to the sites and were designed to trigger the imaginations of participants and to inspire them to see the seemingly mundane through new eyes. We hope that the project will help visitors to re-image mundane rural sites and to generate a rich, multi-layered palimpsest of experiences indicating the complex nature of our engagement with place as mediated through both official narratives and emergent and unfolding understandings of our temporal, spatial and imaginative relations to site. All responses are submitted anonymously and have been used to conduct artist-led misguided tours, which have been taking place every Saturday during the course of the festival.


Noriko Suzuki-Bosco and Dr Yvonne Jones


Based on the understanding that tourism offers a way of shaping people’s experience of reality through narrative, the two week project hopes to bring into question the notions of authorship and authenticity in both art and tourism. Specifically referring to Foucault's concerns about who authorises the author within 'the functioning conditions of specific discursive practices' (Foucault, 1998), we have attempted to facilitate an imaginative environment in which participants are able to mediate between personally authentic place meanings and those authorised by cultural and institutional discourse to develop their own versions of ‘truth’. Indeed, our belief in narratives or histories as absolute truths, limits our experience of reality. Experiencing a place through a fictitious frame not only questions the authenticity of experience but also allows us to engage with reality as imaginative play.



ETC's Tourist Misinformation Station





















The Imaginative Tourist Trail 
 





Interactive Trail Guide (edition of 200)



 

Sunday 19 June 2016

Collaboration, Conversation and the Intertwining of Material and Immaterial Worlds: a reflection on the Mothership residency

In April this year I began a four week residency as part of Anna Best’s Mothership Residencies project. I used the opportunity open up the notion of conversation to the possibilities of collaboration both with humans and non-humans. Drawing upon Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas of affects and becoming, and Karen Barad’s explorations of human and non-human agents, I set out to start a conversation about the nature of conversation and collaboration in the art-site relations of the artist’s residency. At the Mothership person-site relations became part of an affective praxis in opposition to alienating and dehumanising effects of neoliberalism – individualism, competitiveness, exchangism, deskilling, social atomisation and so on. Harriet Hawkins (2014) stresses the importance of shared labour – literally collaboration – in transforming individual and collective consciousness. She uses gardening – a key aspect of my residency – as an example of a ‘grounded’ practice that has the power to disrupt and reconfigure the habitual relations of everyday life:


We could suggest that the physical, discursive, and haptic experiences of shared labour… was part of the creation of a rupture in everyday practices from within which new identities and shared consciousness could emerge (Hawkins, 2014: 170).


The unique labour relations of the residency were an initial source of suspicion as I adopted the cynical post-human perspective of trying to analyse the power relations between host and guest and the exact terms of labour exchange. However, in attempting to calculate and quantify these relations, I found that rather than reflecting the neoliberal idea that altruistic acts are are often thinly veiled opportunism and that everyone is ultimately self-serving, the residency provoked a sense that the reciprocal nature of the collaboration had far more humane dimensions. It seemed that the more I tried to quantify the exchange, particularly in relation to labour value, because I was not paying money to be there, the more the things shattered to reveal human truths and a qualitative value way beyond any kind of contractual arrangement. Thus my attempts to provoke a breakdown of assumed neoliberal labour relations were unjustified as the layers fell away to reveal a very human conversation about not only the need for people to live together but also the importance of bringing things together that are usually held apart. Instead of finding an illusionary micro-utopia sustained by privilege, which masked true power and property relations, I found a situation of honesty – a genuine attempt to make new worlds and recuperate old ones. Small-scale organic farming is an uphill struggle where the old binaries of the humans pitted against nature are initially reinforced, however, in responsible and ethical engagement with complex ecosystems, culture / nature binaries are eroded. Pestilence ceases to become a non-human enemy to be wiped out with petrochemicals when ecosystems are in balance. The context for the residency was not only thought-provoking but also provided a space for dialogue between humans and non-humans alike – “a potential space for collaborative thinking”, as one of my friends put it. One of the key things that emerged from the residency on reflection was the notion of ‘maternal space’ – of how, out of necessity, things of difference are brought together. Instead of seeing disruptions as inconveniences that break our ‘trains of thought’, by being open to ‘external’ factors and intrusions we are able to open out to new and emergent ways of being and seeing that foster generative creative processes. My challenge was to move beyond provocation as a means of ‘exploding’ power and property relations, and to embrace collaborative conversation as a means of gently unpicking the complexities of context without ignoring tensions and differences. In the words of Harriet Hawkins (2014), to develop truly collaborative art-site relations we must ‘remain open to the generative complexities of a given site… to be able to recognise the problematics of context, without sacrificing the ability to work productively within the community…’ (Hawkins, 2014: 166).


Hawkins, H. (2014). For Creative Geographies: Geography, Visual Arts and the Making of Worlds. London: Routledge.






You can read my feedback to host artist Anna Best on her Mothership Residencies blog.







A FOOL'S PARADISE:


















Remains of Spring Cleansing Ritual (installation views)













Figure of Eight (installation views)


















Flesh of the World: Powerstock / Abu Ghraib (installation view and details)


















 


Asymmetrical Codependence (installation views / details)








Discarded bath tub found on Anna's land





























Perfomance stills from Spring Cleansing Ritual II: #cleanforthequeen








The Tower (Inverted)








Figure of Eight II: site / interface (video still)









Figure of Eight II: site / interface (HD video)