Skipping
I was thinking about skipping this month's update. My family and I have been ill, and between caring for eachother and working on my PhD, I've not had much time for anything else except rest. Rest has been good. To be fair I have figured out some stuff this month which has been very important for myself, but it's personal and not something I want to talk about in a public forum. A wise friend once told me, "some seasons you're having more input than output", and that's fine. I've been thinking more about salvage and social worlds. Food is so important, and I think I need to do more work around food, incorporating Food Not Bombs with Indigenous and ecological knowledges and ways of being. Learning to share with the other species we live with. At the end of the month I participated in some of the Harris' public consultation into the future of the Harris Open. I expressed a strong need for the event to get rid of its geographic boundary for eligibility. I prepared the following statement to read, but didn't get the chance, because the consultation was very structured. But I'll leave this here for my output for this month.
For the Harris Open this year I submitted this work, "Central Lancashire re/paired". It is composed of two contiguous Ordnance Survey maps stitched together with linen, a traditional material of our home. Our home is composed of many layers, and between Preston and Lancashire is Central Lancashire, a layer in my opinion all too often neglected. Preston, Chorley, and Leyland have always been closely connected, and especially over the last 75 years, they have not only each grown bigger, but they have also all grown more interconnected. The relationships that we have with each other, with these places, with The Harris, they are not determined by boundaries. Boundaries are the things used to print maps, and when the map-makers are not careful they cut communities in half. We currently have three separate local authorities, which might be merged into one, or might be pulled apart even further, depending on the whims of people who don't live here. The reason our housing, commercial and industrial property, food, waste, and transport systems are so fucked is because we are complicit in chopping up and outsourcing ourselves, our communities, our bodies: they are the same thing. The winds, birds, and rains move across the lands freely because that is what life does. And for a long time humans used to do the same thing, until people started to impose borders. Imposed borders are violence, a wilful threat to life, and any geographical criteria for participating in the Harris Open risks reproducing this violence. This is something we must learn to move past, we must find different ways of doing things. For the Harris Open, that means: knowing our capacity for submissions; knowing how we'll handle instances of being over-capacity; and using a simple binary eligibility criterion, "Do you or your work have a clear relationship with Preston?" I understand there is concern around how many submissions can fit in the exhibition, but I would personally rather see an Open more often, and see more works, or there be a richer process of community curation, than for an arbitrary border be imposed which makes another invisible cut through our communities.