It’s clear why I make these journal entries so infrequently: with the deadline approaching, I spend all my time on the main text rather than on reflections (or else focus upon even more immediate tasks related to my teaching/admin duties). With no notes recorded at the time however, I must summarise the outcomes of a discussion-event in which I participated at the New Art Exchange, Nottingham, this evening. Described as “the culmination of months of conversations with artists, institutions and communities across the city” (having previously run similar exercises in Milan and New York I think he said), the Italian ‘curator’ Claudio Zecchi led a series of what he called ‘games’ to “explore how art engages with the local community, and the legacy of these relationships.”
The first exercise required us (groups of 3-6 around half a dozen tables) to identify and model the time-span required for community projects: it emerged that several need to be running concurrently – some extremely short, others much much longer, some mixing both, but above all lots of cross-currents of projects which come to nothing, which come from nowhere, or which develop into other projects (a good model for how a community-orientated practice ought to operate). The next exercise centred on the use of language in community projects, drawing attention to its role in shaping power-relationships and in enabling people to express their identity (‘self-forming’): my own group picked on William Burroughs’ concept of language as “a virus from outer space” – we think we’re speaking it, but in fact it is the words that are projecting ourselves into the spaces between people (a reminder of Latour’s reference to the Mafalda comic strip – p.55 in “On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods” – and reference to the ancient Greek ‘middle voice’: neither active nor passive, as the boundaries between object/subject, made/maker, acted upon/actor are not so definite). Zecchi also asked us to consider the relationship between the words ‘long term,’ ‘language’ and ‘sharing’ – revealing that long-term community relationships allow a common language to develop which enables ideas to be shared. In the final game, about ‘sharing’ (which we distinguished from simply ‘exchanging’ – another insight relevant to the problem of putting a monetary ‘value’ upon community interchange), we identified the word ‘empowerment’ as a key feature – although another group chose ‘blurring’ in consideration of the space between people rather than taking the viewpoint of the individuals themselves as we had done. When it came to ‘acting out’ our understanding of this word, everyone had recourse to gestures – the most successful being the group who demanded that everyone copied their movements (this being a community-orientated event, after all): the lesson is, just do something – it’s not about talk. Times English Dictionary (p.1706) defines ‘voice’ as “a category of…verbal inflections that expresses whether the relation between the subject and the verb is that of agent and action, action and recipient, or some other relation” – the latter being ‘middle’, defined (p.984) as “(especially in Greek or Sanskrit grammar)…expressing reciprocal or reflexive action.” Deeper understanding of the ‘middle’ is available via http://www.greek-language.com/grammar/20.html : omitted from the dictionary description, for example, is the rather inaccurately termed (but commonly used) third alternative of ‘intensive’ action. There is no equivalent in English, but we tend to use the active voice with a reflexive (“-self”) pronoun or “each other” (if plural); in Hellenistic Greek, no pronoun is necessary, as the middle voice signals that the subject of a sentence represents in some sense the benefactor of the action expressed by the verb. The subject of the verb is seen as acting upon itself or for its own benefit – eg ‘John bought himself a new car’ or ‘Jane accepted the offer’: in Greek, the middle voice is used mainly to imply that the subject benefits or suffers directly from the action expressed by the verb (it is often the case, though not always, that the subject also represents the cause of that action).