Hi,
Apologies for late feedback on the session of the 11th. I’m not clear who to cc here so I have chosen to only include those who were at the session, hope this ok. Do add people back in to any replies as needed, I’m not trying to exclude anyone.
The session began with shared soup made by Megan, we sat, ate and chatted in the middle space by the kitchen. After food Laila and Megan introduced the session. Part one began with two groups reading and interpreting arbitrarily clipped (i think arbitrary? is this correct?) text fragments from a machine transcript of the previous public matrix. There was excitement about what might be called reader oriented play. The edits precipitated novel meaning in the moment, destabilized the text form; the embodied moment entered. We reflected on this process a while then moved to the small studio.
Laila and Megan set up the small room with various drawing writing materials and papers which provided a brilliant welcome into the space of making after the though space of readings. Personally I get a lot out of the space of collective making that has some structure yet opens the way to play. My sense of working with others in what I could describe as intimacy with material I find rewarding and deep, not very critical language i know. It feels like reaching out to others in a mode that is particular to the act of making. Perhaps the ‘reching’ is not an intentional act but a function of the way the space is set up, perhaps its like school, in which the privacy of making is not available. The session carried the sense of a shared endeavour without a defined end, which is a problem for funders I guess, the proof of concept is that there isn’t one. Of course the outcomes looked chaotic unformed preliminary. Following the conversation between Laila and Ashish before the making session I wondered if this is because they have yet to form their poetic language, pre-revolutionary, a kind of school of the heart-child. I sent some pics of the collective montage artefacts to Ashish on whats app.
Urgent question. Is there a public matrix tomorrow? Sorry if I missed the publicity.
Love and peace, David.
Hello
Good to read your reflection David, and it reminded me to do mine!
The last meet of the collective had a sense of freshness. Laila and Megan had brought a plan which had a different structure, and also brought more structure, to how the collective meetings have been for most of the year. I felt up for trying something different at the same time as feeling somewhat resistant to losing the opportunity for conversation to unfold in a very free-flow way. Having the opportunity to finally work with the dreams from a public event was very satisfying though, it felt much more cohesive as a process in this regard.
When we moved into the studio to start collectively making/playing with the dream transcripts, I again felt resistant at first. Considering a clear creative task felt daunting, I wasn’t sure if I could do it or if I wanted to. Again, being a bit resistant to the level of structure. However, once we got going there was a growing sense of flow and ease. The way we worked with the images and poetics seemed to me to better reflect a kind of collective dreaming mind. Everyone seemed absorbed and it was satisfying to be alongside each other in this activity. Bits of the dream transcript jumped out as if I was being shown which words or phrases to use and how they wanted to sit alongside each other. That we worked for a time on something, and then passed it on to the next person to create from/with, seemed to offer a material way of enacting what we’ve often talked about in the idea of offering dreams into the collective and letting them go to become part of that and no longer ours. (Also as I think of it now, a bit like at a Ceilidh when you keep changing your dance partner). This was very much alive in the moment where something I had made was passed on to David and I remember him asking something like ‘am I allowed to do what I want with this?’ And the excitement provoked when permission was given. It made me think of the destructive nature of creation, or the creative nature of destruction, and how much energy can be released in this. And also a clear step outside polite social norms, or an individualistic sense of ‘mine’. I noticed for a few days after I thought a lot about the things made and found myself really wanting to look at them again. So would love to see the photos.
Unfortunately I won’t make this evening as I am not well. I have been thinking of Dream Ecologies though. I did some training at the weekend that was heavily oriented around the idea of ‘matrix’. I sat in various group matrices - sitting in circles of people muddling through to make some sense of what it is that exists between us all when we are in ‘groups’. Sometimes exciting, sometimes confusing, sometimes heated, very often uncomfortable! But on the whole pretty powerful stuff. It made me wonder how Dream Ecologies reflects Radical Ecology as an organisation, as well as the world. I wonder about the relationship between them. Something along the lines of what I think was discussed in the collective meeting prior to the last one, with the idea of it being kept a kind of secret, it being embarrassing in some ways, or that it might overwhelm the website due to to amount of content it produces, so how does it get integrated (what happens to these emails? Who sees them?). Does Radical Ecology contain Dream Ecologies or is it vice versa?
I am sad to miss out this evening and hoping to come work with whatever emerges at the next meet up.
Enjoy
Natasha