UNORDER

RESEARCH

GROUP

QUESTION

What is Community? And how to increase its Resilience?

METHOD

An assortment of people, each bringing their capability and insight to a toolbox of experiences, research practices, and processes – in one mobile festival. A festival that learns about community to realise and strengthen community resilience. A festival that can pop-up at school, conference, town, or festival.

LOGISTICS

From October 2013 the Researcher Group is collaborating in developing this festival toolbox ready for delivery in March 2014. Each month we -the Researcher Group- will create a record to share beyond ourselves, this being the first edition.

EDITION ONE > ECHOES Influences, general ideas, and contexts out of which each of us will develop a tool for the festival toolbox.

Contributor near Brussels - Gabrielle Fenton

The womb: People start being made into people (persons) when they are in their mother's womb. The two bits that join at the beginning and DNA that leads on from that is just the start. It is the food that feeds in, sounds of the environment within which the mother is, the attention brought by others to the mother and future baby, and many other thing that start making the 'thing' into a person. This is cosubstantialisation - your substance is built of the substance of the environment and relationships within which you grow . Once the baby is born, they are still not a person, but become it through the multiple relationships that they have, the food that they eat, the sounds that they hear, ... etc. I was wondering whether part of the kit could be to try enable people to re-go through the womb experience... Unknown sounds, unknown movements, unknown feelings.

A different portrait: We are embedded a network of things and tied to things very far from us. Our communities are strange, since we share things, real things, with people we don't even know the existence of. Whoever made the shoes that I'm wearing, whatever impact these shoes had on their direct environment, etc... Similarly to what Sian was saying about the tapestry of the direct community, maybe it would be interesting to explore the tapestry of relations that extend who we are outside of the 'direct' community. Obviously these maps change all the time, and are far too big to draw, but still I'd like to find a way of going about that.

Contributor on Pilgrimage - Charles Beach

This is ballistics gel. It's used for forensics. You can fire lots of bullets into it and then walk around it to see what kind of dispersal patterns they make. What kind of entry they made etc… etc…

Whatever kind of knowledge we gain from our toolbox can't just exist in our notepads. It has to somehow make its way into the toolbox itself for participants to see. The knowledge and ideas have to be captured by the framework of the toolbox and somehow become part of the festival as it is happening.

Contributor in Swansea - Sian Eleri Jones

Theme of education and self-ethnography. I want to explore people’s stories of their relationships to others, space, and place. Using their narratives I want to facilitate people to realise the value present within their community--something which, I think, is often missing. I find people are too easily swayed into negative imaginings of ones self and community, often reinforced through media endorsed stereotypes (although maybe I'm thinking more of particular socio/economically deprived areas). Either way, in order for a community to become resilient it needs to celebrate the value which is inherent within it and which is often unrecognised.

I love the idea of Charles’ self-ethnography through walking—a kind of pilgrimage to realising a community resilience! Maybe we could collaborate on something here? I also loved Gabrielle’s photographic project with ‘street children’. Maybe there’s something we can do there?

I like the idea of getting people to tell their stories and to document them in some way so that their vignettes live beyond our kit. I would love to see our work filter further into these communities where they take ownership of their own story telling in self-sustaining ways. I know that’s a big wish…but I like to dream big!

I love the idea of using different media to document their work depending on which style resonates with each individual—so for example, art, writing, recording, film, photography, movement, etc.

Ideally I would love for each community to create a tapestry of their tales. Each individual produces a, standard size, patch (obviously that’s more complicated in terms of dance, video, speech) which comes together to create a ‘community tapestry of tales’. This tapestry could stay with the community and be displayed in a local shop/school/youth centre/etc., and it could be added continually added to.

Anyway…just some ideas that relate more to the product and less to the process at the moment. I need to think about how I’m going to facilitate the telling of people’s stories vis-à-vis the social assets already present in that community.

Thought I'd have a go at making my own rudimentary tapestry...actually quite an interesting process in itself

Contributor near Bergen - Ragnhild Freng Dale

…about how we perceive, see, experience our surroundings, how the meandering ways of walking or otherwise moving through a community can generate a common "something" that can be seen, felt, heard, many individual experiences that are both personal and collective at the same time - and how an extra-daily (or extra-ordinary, special in the midst of all the daily experiences) happening in the flow of everyday life can be profound even in its most simple form.

I'm thinking of the retelling as well, how the narrative may live on afterwards -- whether there can be something in the toolbox on narrative or storytelling, on how the experience will be shared with others, both inside the same community and beyond.

In a story, there is a reason for starting, a reason to keep going, a road or a path that unfolds as you go along. I'm thinking of what I've called "a journey-map with traces" once before, but then I only used it to trace out my path through my ethnographic work. Perhaps this is extendable into the toolbox? So that after experiencing, and after recording in whatever format is chosen for that particular community, there is also a moment of tracing the journey made, of looking back and in the act of re-telling, re-membering, re-tracing, or re-counting, there is a (collective or individual) moment to fix in memory where and how the journey started, what paths were followed, what experiences shared, and what sensation one is left with of the time-space that has passed.

Contributor in Canterbury - Abraham Heinemann

'The Dream Machine' - As you enter a little hut you are greeted by a little Unorder Monster. A shapely cuboidal silver, she reminds you slightly of the guy who dressed up as a robot at that fancy dress party you once went to. After being invited to have a 5min power-nap, cup of tea, or a shoulder massage by the little monster's chaperone you are handed some blank paper and crayons. A large plug will drop down from the ceiling, connected to the little monster and you will be asked to plug it into yourself. Now the instructions* begin..... After the unorder process is complete the little monster will contact you on the date you agreed to interview you. Depending on the ouctome of this interview you may receive official status of being successfully UNORDERED.

*The instructions are currently top secret but may go open source soon. For a definition of unorder please see cover-page.

DEFINITIONS OF UNORDER

A

“Un-order is not the lack of order, but a different kind of order, one not often considered but just as legitimate in its own way… Bram Stoker used this meaning to great effect in 1897 with the word “undead,” which means neither dead nor alive but something similar to both and different from both… In normal usage, being and existing are stative concepts. They are not actions which a person must consciously perform, engage in, create. Words such as unbe and unexist, however, force the reader to see the dynamic nature of human existence. . . .” IBM SYSTEMS JOURNAL, VOL 42, NO 3, 2003 KURTZ AND SNOWDEN 465

B

“It's like something just over the horizon

Wanna take a walk, maybe see what we can find?

Look long and hard, look near and far

Above all things, remember always look inside“ INSIDE STORY BY HORRORSHOW

C

“History insists upon a linear causal progression - a neat passage from the past (which is already decided) to the future (which is merely the playing out of what has been laid down in the past). Tell me about your mother, then, and I'll understand everything about you. Beyond this causality is another temporality, uncovered at the point where schizonanalysis meets pulp horror. Here, cause does not follow effect: there is a process of retrocontamination in which the deep past finds itself already infected with the far future. The crucial question is one of becoming: what are you changing into, what is growing out of you? “ CYBERNETIC CULTURE RESEARCH UNIT