tues 5 dec

 Last night dogs and children flew across the rooftops of this city.  Our house, always a moving stage set, became a green screen studio and friend, neighbour, editor and now we find dancer, compositor and many more things extraordinaire, Natalie came over to film the shots we couldn’t get last week. We momentarily mourn the fact we are not in 95a – the building up the street we built a campaign around buying and owning as a community in Spring – hoping for some kind of miracle as it still sits empty. But then, as always, we just have to get on with it.

I sit on the stairs as Natalie directs some flying, passing bagels up to the children, keeping dogs back until they’re ready for their closeup. I spot a book Anna has given me on top of the massive riso printer. ‘Packington Works’ by Claudia Janke. She makes work on the Packington estate where she has lived the last 25 years.  The book contains her documentary images and portraits of neighbours. Inside. Outside. In stair wells and domestic spaces. Still lives in corners. Images exhibited back in the space of vacated homes, empty and awaiting demolition. Invitations to participate across the balconies of the new estate via string telephones and window poster conversations.

In the foreword Anna describes it as ‘a glorious antidote to the thinness of ‘place-making’. Places are made already. They shift and flow, in difficulty and in beauty.’ She also states ‘In times of perilous housing insecurity, more must be understood about those in proximity and the permeating impact of an artist taking a risk to work with their neighbours.’

I look around at the neighbours in the house. Think of how this all emerged from here - our home place already made and always in the making. Of the difficulty and beauty of working in this way.  In a discussion with Andrea Luka Zimmerman, Claudia recognises that ‘as a photojournalist you are often told not to work on your own doorstep’ but Andrea understands it as a necessary – in both their cases through impending demolition of their home estates, in ours through lockdown and the question ‘what could we do from here?’ – from this ‘typical’ terraced street.

The conversation takes in all the things that inform our work here. Visibility and retreat. Respect and care. The ethics of engagement. Giving attention. Tension. Trust. The complexity of working on one’s own community. What and who that community is. How the process of community building is never finished - a constant negotiation involving deep social engagement, vulnerability and accountability.

Andrea references writer Christina Sharpe’s ‘beauty as a method’ – talking of bringing beauty to an everyday practice as an obligation. As we speak to people about what ‘Bread and Roses’ means and find beauty relegated to ‘hobbies’ ‘extras’ and ‘luxuries’ It feels like that to me.  A deep obligation and responsibility to our shared humanity in which the biggest challenge is to find ways to keep the lightness of touch -  the humour and light -  when the weight and risk of this oppresses. When the threshold between public and private shimmers and boundaries of art and life disintegrate.

Claudia foregrounds perseverance as at the core of this form of vernacular practice. This resonates. The doing of something despite difficulty or delay. Driven by both beauty and obligation to just get on with it. To persist.

I check social feeds and news too frequently and glimpse the word ‘endurance’ as Ella Saltmarshe shares a series of posts from clinical psychologist, professor and writer Hala  Aylan – author of Salt Houses and the Arsonists’ City -  on the persistence of vision and witness. The obligation to at least see and say.

‘We owe Gaza endurance.

Endurance might feel impossible right now.

For two months we’ve witnessed massacres, bombardments, starvation.

We’ve witnessed the dehumanisation of innocents.

We’ve witnessed complicity, apathy, gaslighting.

We’ve witnessed rubble, mass burials, babies turned to ash, infants abandoned to slow deaths.

We’ve witnessed children beg in their second language for a ceasefire.

All relentless entities depend enormously on a few things:

Your fatigue.

Your hopelessness.

Your turning away.

We belong to long, gorgeous lineages of endurance. We are all here because someone, somewhere endured. When it feels impossible. Find land. Find breath. Find songs and poems of endurance. Seek out the journalists, the healers, the historians. This feeling (of despair, of rage, of unreality) is what helps us seek and preserve truth. This feeling doesn’t have to be turned into anything other that what it is to be endured.

Bearing witness is an honour. It is a commitment to truth-seeking. Especially in the face of distortion, erasure, blackout, censorship. We witness so that we may tell the truth.

Find steadiness where you can. ‘