Very glad to hear another, noisy member of the Theaster Gates fan club painting this picture out loud 🙌 What a magical story! Dougald, I’ve gotta know - Did he smell good? (I’ve always imagined he would smell good.)
Your identifying lack as the first port of call sent me straight the practice of ‘appreciative enquiry’. Is it one you know or have used? Paired with ABCD, I’ve seen good things emerge well.x
Years ago, I remember coming across appreciative enquiry and noticing it had the same feel, the same turn of attention as ABCD. Glad to hear about the pairing working well! If you have any examples or resources you can point to, I'd love to flesh out my picture of where this might lead.
Now I'm feeling like I should have leaned in closer! But the whole place smelt good, imagine cocktails and 1960s leather furniture and old books and magazines and people dressed up fine for a Saturday night.
And isn't it always about the way we choose to see...apparently the quantum physicists have found this to be the actual way we create our realities. How do I choose to define myself and the spaces I inhabit, and what does this create? Am I living in ruins, or in a place full of the rich possibility that, in a way, is far more evident than in a place that is "finished"? Through the cracks...where the light comes in.
There wasn't a whole lot more to the exchange, it was a small but ample encounter. Enough to affirm my sense of his way of being, and for him to plant a seed with the comment that led to this piece. I had a similar encounter once with John Berger – and it's struck me that, often, this is all we need from meeting someone whose work has mattered to us, not to explain the story of why or of what it led us to do, but just to see and be seen, and to share a few moments of humanness together.
I have MUCH to say about America's structural ruins, urban and rural, and how they are so different than Europe's, but I will bite my tongue. I saw Theaster Gates' exhibition Afro-Mingei in Tokyo this Summer and was absolutely invigorated by it. There was a bar there, too, but no one serving and a sign above it that said SHINTO PENTECOSTAL which seems like a school called home kind of vibe...
Well, I'd be curious to hear what you have to say about America's ruins! I remember in 2001, having spent half a year in South Africa, then coming to the US for my first (and only) extended stay, and thinking (in language that was probably old-fashioned even then), "This doesn't feel like a first world country, it feels like a rich third world country." I guess I try to underline the presence of ruins here, too, because there's a mode of contrasting Europe and the US which can disguise the common elements in the trajectory of unravelling.
There's so much more to say about the particular relationship of Sweden to the US, too – everything from this being the only part of Europe where the distances become continental in a way recognisable from North America, to the shared experience of being spared the destruction of industry and infrastructure in WWII, which meant Sweden's 1950s were far more like the US than like the rest of Europe.
Nice to hear about that Afro-Mingei exhibition – completing the arc of the Yamaguchi Institute era. I do feel a long-distance entanglement with Gates's work. Even down to us both having unknowingly chosen the same names for projects over the years – Feast, Sanctum – and this centring of the gathering of people around a table, sharing food and conversation.
Very glad to hear another, noisy member of the Theaster Gates fan club painting this picture out loud 🙌 What a magical story! Dougald, I’ve gotta know - Did he smell good? (I’ve always imagined he would smell good.)
Your identifying lack as the first port of call sent me straight the practice of ‘appreciative enquiry’. Is it one you know or have used? Paired with ABCD, I’ve seen good things emerge well.x
Years ago, I remember coming across appreciative enquiry and noticing it had the same feel, the same turn of attention as ABCD. Glad to hear about the pairing working well! If you have any examples or resources you can point to, I'd love to flesh out my picture of where this might lead.
Yes please to more smells!
Now I'm feeling like I should have leaned in closer! But the whole place smelt good, imagine cocktails and 1960s leather furniture and old books and magazines and people dressed up fine for a Saturday night.
Thanks! That brings it all much closer to my body's reality... it makes the story bigger somehow.
I'm remembering during the first lockdown, when i was living on my own, how much I wanted to just wander up to people and sniff them in
And isn't it always about the way we choose to see...apparently the quantum physicists have found this to be the actual way we create our realities. How do I choose to define myself and the spaces I inhabit, and what does this create? Am I living in ruins, or in a place full of the rich possibility that, in a way, is far more evident than in a place that is "finished"? Through the cracks...where the light comes in.
Oh this was fantastic! Why have I not heard of Gates before? You were pretty short on the exchange between the both of you, I want to know more too!
There wasn't a whole lot more to the exchange, it was a small but ample encounter. Enough to affirm my sense of his way of being, and for him to plant a seed with the comment that led to this piece. I had a similar encounter once with John Berger – and it's struck me that, often, this is all we need from meeting someone whose work has mattered to us, not to explain the story of why or of what it led us to do, but just to see and be seen, and to share a few moments of humanness together.
I have MUCH to say about America's structural ruins, urban and rural, and how they are so different than Europe's, but I will bite my tongue. I saw Theaster Gates' exhibition Afro-Mingei in Tokyo this Summer and was absolutely invigorated by it. There was a bar there, too, but no one serving and a sign above it that said SHINTO PENTECOSTAL which seems like a school called home kind of vibe...
Well, I'd be curious to hear what you have to say about America's ruins! I remember in 2001, having spent half a year in South Africa, then coming to the US for my first (and only) extended stay, and thinking (in language that was probably old-fashioned even then), "This doesn't feel like a first world country, it feels like a rich third world country." I guess I try to underline the presence of ruins here, too, because there's a mode of contrasting Europe and the US which can disguise the common elements in the trajectory of unravelling.
There's so much more to say about the particular relationship of Sweden to the US, too – everything from this being the only part of Europe where the distances become continental in a way recognisable from North America, to the shared experience of being spared the destruction of industry and infrastructure in WWII, which meant Sweden's 1950s were far more like the US than like the rest of Europe.
Nice to hear about that Afro-Mingei exhibition – completing the arc of the Yamaguchi Institute era. I do feel a long-distance entanglement with Gates's work. Even down to us both having unknowingly chosen the same names for projects over the years – Feast, Sanctum – and this centring of the gathering of people around a table, sharing food and conversation.