the whole

Just a quick one really and it's about process. I had a good meeting with Rachael on Monday and as I walked into town I was thinking that somehow we hadn't explained things well enough. How the product related to a broader process and today I have worked out that it's by talking about product and process as two different things we make them separate and distinct through language and somehow we need to get around this problem. In my mind and I suppose on the blog I've got a real disjointed clarity on how from walking through town with a rag and bone cart through to now the project is a single thing with nodes and point so just to remind us I'm going to re-post our diagram.


Kate Pahl was talking about spacial social justice today and it got me thinking again about agency and arts practice as a way of asking questions about social justice. For a long time and still to an extent I'm happy with asking questions but in the end it's important for things to have agency to enable change in some way. I think that we need to explain things better and this perhaps needs to be integral to the work. Like Paul says maybe we should set up a discussion group as part of the next bit of work. I've avoided this as it looks like Consultation which I'm not interested in been involved in but maybe we could use some of the money to pay Dennis to make some food and have a drop in. Just a thought one portion could serve 12.

I started off thinking I would try and sound posh and write something about Hegelian Dialectics and the notion of the whole as complete and indivisible - then I realised I know nothing about this but it sounds like something I should know something about.

For me the project changed on the way back on the train from the conference in liverpool and we as a group decided that the purpose of the work was to be active in trying to make SOAR works works to the best of our ability with the time and resources we have at hand. I use the word epiphany far to often but this time it sort of was one - like the meeting of the ways things began to make a lot more sense and the idea that our art could and should have a more direct social purpose and direction and still be art or maybe not be art but be something different and enabled by our position as artists.

I am really aware that this is a new skill and one of the first times that I've felt I've had a hold of the bigger and the smaller picture the meta Miso and Macro as david would say. It feels like we need to find a better way to explain this thinking with clarity - I will ask Kate to write more about the idea of been within the space I think this is what I think we need to do to occupy and dwell as artists and people in the space not as people delivering a project which is why the Ruskin idea makes sense on lots of levels