FRI 17 MAY 2024

Fri 17 May 2024

We pop up to the bakers at the end of the street  - previously a fish and chip shop and before that I can’t remember. Fresh pastries and sunshine to start a day.  There is much room for improvement but it’s so good to be able to offer welcome at the POWER HOUSE. Upstairs hosts two people with two more on sofa beds downstairs. This group is larger, so have also been hosted on the street and in local hotel but we hope to improve this with architectural plans and funding bids enabling reconfiguration and private access to the residential space.

Today is a day of mapping and manifestos and we’ve extended the invitation to studio holders and members of local collaborating organisations to join the Swansea team.

The street model is out and primed. ‘The Street Matters’ project is built from an idea and ethos of ‘anti consultation’ - moving from often damaging, inappropriate forms of consultation that further marginalise and disempower, to forms of dialogue based on ‘deep listening, empathy and empowerment.’ They aim to ‘re-engineer the power dynamics around how communities can articulate and explore their needs and dreams for their environment.’ This often starts with mapping as it does today: What is happening here? What would you want to happen here? What stops it happening? How can we make it happen here? We draw on layered maps and models – local histories and stories intertwined with future imaginings.  A map marked with play spaces, heat network, wind turbine, delineations of public and private alongside a colour chart of the street. The former substation has post it notes marked ‘café’ and ‘community battery’. Conflict and collaboration in drawn form.  We foreground energy but this is always intersectional where, as Owen reiterates, issues of climate, social, cultural and racial justice interact with planning, regeneration and sense of place.

They prompt a use of keywords and by the end of the day the walls are full of words -  from the mundane to the philosophical -  ‘ecosystem’, ‘time’, ‘parking’ added to ‘Ways of Working’ core – ‘collaboration’, ‘long-term’, ‘local’. One stands out – not a word but a phrase: ‘Dig Where You Stand’ taken from Sven Lindqvist’s 1978 publication and rallying cry for the empowerment of workers through self-education, historical research and political solidarity. This is elaborated on in the quote “The idea is that by researching and learning about their own history and the place where they are living, individuals and groups would regain some control over the understanding of their lives and their interconnectedness.” (Sarah B Dhanjal). We talk about indigenous knowledge and practices and what that means for a city of mobility and property.  We learn about the History Workshop Movement of the 1960s as a democratisation of history or ‘history from below,’ of the Welsh Valley’s Welfare halls as centres of political education and solidarity and from all this mapping and gathering of words and ideas we collectively write a form of anti-consultation manifesto/poem for the street.

We are

Of the earth

Soil

Air

We are

Manifold

Manifest

Memories

Past and future

We are here.

You are here.

There.

Everywhere.

They say.

Know your place.

No. know your place.

Our place.

Dig where you stand.

Stand where you dig.

Make a stand.

Change.

And make change.

It’s a work in progress. As all of this is.  

I am reminded of and share my favourite – ‘Parables of the Sower’ by Octavia Butler. ‘All that you touch. You Change. All that you Change. Changes You’ (Earthseed: The Books of the Living’).

We are energised and glowing. Quite literally as HEAL (Home Energy Action Lab) share an image of the group as seen through a thermal imagining camera.  They have been running a weekly retrofit helpline as part of the ‘street by street’ proliferation of the POWER STATION and today they are set up in the yard for a monthly practical workshop in collaboration with HEET (Home Energy Efficiency Training) introducing energy saving measures and training for retrofit. We’re developing a material showcase/library. Live demonstration models of solar panels, invertors, insulation types. Partnerships are building with local youth projects and college and, in this break, groups overlap – discussing ‘room to grow’ front garden initiatives, Swansea Council’s solar plans, Hiraeth Energy’s plans for Celtic Sea wind turbines building a Sovereign Wealth fund for Wales as Norway did from its oil bounty and the scale of investment in Welsh community energy cooperatives.

As evening beckons the Gleaners Cafe drop off their amazing dishes made from food surplus – part of their work to promote a solidarity economy that counters a prevailing food system that is unequal, damaging and unsustainable.  This is a now a long term, regular Friday event with residents turning up to take away ‘fast food’ on a pay what you can basis. Today, some stay and eat with our guests and join the evening film screening which is aptly ‘The Gleaners and I’ by Agnes Varda. Inspired by the 1857 painting by Jean Francois Millet ‘The Gleaners’, the French filmmaker takes us on a journey through France looking at forms of gathering after the harvest  - moving from vineyards and potato fields to urban street markets. She records a robe clad lawyer wandering through a vegetable patch reciting the penal code asserting the right to glean between sun up and sun down and shows this right eroded by mechanised harvesting and industrialised food systems. The gleaning extends to the act of film making – ‘finds’ lead the story – a replica painting in a junk shop, the accidental jazz dance of the lens cap, heart shaped potatoes that become a leitmotif of her life’s work. Her narrow studio on a Parisian street expanded beyond the space. She filled the street with sand – the cry of the protests of 68 reverberating - ‘Beneath the Paving Stones the Beach!’ It sometimes feels that way here. A sense of possibility that is more than in the air but in ways of working and persisting. We emerge and disperse under an indigo sky.  I’m always surprised by the audiences, the shifting demographic of this area. The activists. museum workers, Social workers. Nurses.

Joining together.

Where we stand.

From the archive

Friday 19 May 2023

The landline rings. This is unusual. It is Ann from Solar for Schools with an update on progress with the Council. There is a blockage in the form of a new arrival in the council team trying to stop plans for solar installations on five local school rooftops – something we’ve been working on for over a year and half – longer when including Tom from HEET’s (Home Energy Efficiency Trainings) first surveying. It is outrageous and we’re prepared to fight but for now it is more hopeful news of another Council senior smoothing the way.  It has not been a good period for building any belief in the Council as a collaborating force. Too many unjustified nos. Too big a gap between promises and strategies and action.

Leonie is here and in love with our new monopod – a one legged stick to support the camera and make the kind of mobile filming this project requires much easier. I’m still attached to our trusty original one that accompanied us on film adventures to Ukraine and Czech Republic. So that works out. I’m so busy updating her on the pace of action that I ‘m late for my ‘artist’s steering committee’ meeting. A group of four artists – me, Cherry, Sage and Alice meet regularly to trouble shoot and support each others practices. This was a brief one and I ‘m mortified to be late as I value it so much – a place outside of production to reflect and question. Right now we’re reflecting on what this can become now it isn’t tied to a specific project. This space is precious and also needs financing to stop the encroaching need to earn saying no to this time out of ‘productive’ work. I ‘ve written these regular meetings into a current Arts Council bid. We each come with a question that we’d value input into. Mine is how I might structure and articulate this form of mutual support – how to map this network of care and make it clear how it is critical to developing an ecosystem of socially engaged art practice. Sage invites us to come up with a word that embodies the feeling we want to keep with us as we work.  The word ‘grass seed’ - a way of being able to travel lightly but settle and grow quickly, a boat’s keel, the emergence from a walk through the woods into the light of a glade or vista of the sea. I can’t think of the exact word but describe the feeling I get when looking at the sunlit green of a sunflower leaf. We come up with Radiant. Luminescent. Vibrant. Verdant.

Knocking on the door signals the end of this and the beginning of the next meeting. This time a mixture of in real life and virtual as we set up the laptop and television to broadcast a zoom call with Octopus where residents can ask questions about the upcoming solar surveys and imminent solar installations. I make cups of tea for Ejaz, Nick, Meg and Pippa and Tom beams through from Octopus HQ. He is calm and knowledgeable and we talk through invertors, decisions not to use the flat rooftops, questions re smart meters and cables and time frame. Now comes the task of chasing everyone, scheduling in the complexities of household access when people are at work and the shifting yeses and no’s emerging from people moving house or changing minds. It always shocks me how something so seemingly simple (put a few solar panels up) can be so complex and time consuming.

I’m glad Dan persuaded me to be more peaceful today. I ‘d planned to meet Repowering London at 8am filming everything they are doing today as they survey seven community and leisure centre rooftops in the borough. Instead we’ve arranged to meet them at their final location at Queen’s Road to capture some of this first step and interview and talk to Etta – Repowering London’s Solar Development Manager. I’m excited that despite not getting the funding in this round of London Community Energy Fund Repowering have decided to push ahead anyway. The vision is they come in and initiate a large kw solar array across rooftops in the borough that is then transferred into community ownership via a local borough wide co-op who then owns and manages the solar and builds a community fund able to contribute to other climate justice action. Repowering London have been doing this successfully in partnership with other London boroughs but I can see the person at the council objecting to Solar for Schools on the idea that the council could be doing this and profiting also getting in the way of this. Too much power to the people. This is profiting the council – in their targets for net zero and in the fact that these are community assets generating cheaper electricity and income for the community.  

I don’t even make the meeting in the end. Leonie and I leave Dan to go on with the camera as we come across a young starling lying on the pavement. I look around for parents but he is in a dangerous position. As I go towards him he tries to fly but crashes into a window. Maybe he was clipped by a car. I manage to pick him up. The aggressive, loud shriek he emits makes me wonder for a second if I ‘ve got my bird identification wrong – that he’s actually a hawk and I ‘m about to be attacked by protective parents.  He calms down wrapped in my cardigan and we walk home. We call London Wildlife Protection and put him in a box. I send them a photo and they reply – that’s a young starling – he’s got that ‘don’t mess with me look in his eyes’.  Keep him safe.

After the surveys Etta comes to our kitchen and I pull myself away from the starling.  As she devours her pide we chat solar panels – how she’s doing her MSc with the amazing Centre for Alternative Technology in Machynlleth on end of life solar. Of how so much work needs to be done fast on their recycling and reuse. In an introductory interview on the Repowering London website she says “the solar waste crisis is already a huge issue. We need to think about the waste hierarchy and the circular possibilities of solar products. Reuse should come above recycling and we need a lot of changes in the UK solar industry to make that happen” Understanding of the subject is still at the early stages however “generally speaking, people are beginning to understand that you can’t ever make something with a view to using it once. And the type of people who make solar panels are also the type of people who know that better than anyone.”  We talk about our POWER book club session with Dustin Mulvaney -author of Solar Power and our meetings and early research with London Mining network. About the need to recognise and act on supply chain and justice issues of an energy transition and how this is weaponized by climate denial lobbyists undermining the alternatives.

It's all go and as soon as we say good bye and look forward to working together another knock at the door heralds our local, fellow dog walking, neighbour Sam. He’s come for an interview for a new strand of vodcast we’re working on for the POWER membership site on forms of climate action and activism. He’s clearly on an adrenaline rush from recent extremes and exposure – arrested at the coronation not even for wearing his Just Stop Oil t shirt but pre-emptively for just being there. Facial recognition software. Recent protest bills. He’s happy that his arrest helped push this forward in public discourse and outcry.  We work on different, parallel tactics for change. Different forms of reclaiming the streets. He says ‘We need all the weapons. We’re going to win by this being a multi-pronged strategy.’

I get to school pick up early to water wilting sunflowers and load as many as possible to take to The Grange for a big planting on session tomorrow. Kristin arrives to do the same and Brian helps shift them - doing his good deed for the day whilst contemplating what his dastardly deed could be.  Children come and take more compost for repotting and watch the watering action.

Later Kristin texts to say she’s dropping off her batch of sunflowers up the road but I just can’t face it. It’s cooler now and they’ll survive the night in the back of a van. I call my parents but I ‘m too tired and their comments on 95a being a shed and why do I give myself so much work? and how are the children doing in all this? are too much for now.  The starling saga continues. Sipke and his daughter answer my call on the street whatsapp for a cat carry case. On the doorstep Sipke tells of how he rescued and reared a magpie as a boy of 9 but he didn’t teach a fear of cats and the magpie was later killed by one. He also raised a duckling that then drowned. He tried and cared. 

The children attempt to feed the starling soaked mealworms and name him Jack or Joseph but agree that after his recent escape attempts, the name given by the rescue group, Houdini, is the best.  I’m in constant contact with the group but they seem to think I ‘m a good carer because of the way I ‘m holding him in the picture I send through and the bird will be safe with me overnight. At 10.30pm they call to check if I might be up for rescuing a sparrow and getting both birds to Essex Wildlife Hospital.  I ‘m not and they agree the sparrow will most likely die and the starling will most likely be ok anyway. He’s feisty. They ask me to call Sarah, whose cat has wounded a sparrow and who is coping with an upset 8 year old and a baby on her own. I do it and tell her not to worry. I’m not sure I ‘m the best comforter. The sparrow will most likely die but it’s too late to change what happened and at least they’re resting and as peaceful as possible. I remember the first bird I found as I child. A blackbird attacked by a cat. We tried to care for him in our greenhouse, keeping him warm and fed but he died in my small hands and went so cold and stiff, the light leaving his eyes so resolutely. Moments of piercing grief and mortality.