We have finally concluded the site specific module,
all the work has now been installed and we are assessing. Once assessment is
over the work will be tweaked to make sure it is audience ready and it is then
open to the public. Some useful lessons
have been learnt by a good percentage of the people involved, not least the
importance of good planning and the testing of pieces on site. However it’s the
more subtle issues that perhaps lead to deep learning. It sometimes appears
that the whole process is linear. You start the module with walking the site
and getting a feel for its history from the people that work there. Because
it’s so easy now to take photographs, people usually have very good documentary
evidence of the site to take away with them and it is very easy to research
about any historical or other aspect related to the site because of the
Internet. Therefore it’s easy to think that ideas will germinate out of this
mix and that once they start surfacing it’s simply a matter of manufacture and
installation. However time and time again, it is the people who spend a lot of
time on site that make the more interesting and powerful work. Often these are
students who had an initial idea and through trial and error have scrapped it
and evolved a new idea through a poetic engagement with the experience. This
‘poetic’ engagement often taps into areas of thinking outside of logic. “I
don’t know what this means” or “It just seemed to come out that way” are
typical responses to the process that might not fit the structure of the
rationale, but are honest appraisals of something that is about just getting to
know the subject and finding a feel for the place. I suppose this is the
difference between art and illustration, the one discovers something new and
unexpected about a situation, the other clarifies what we already know. Somehow
when someone gets lost in the process of responding and making on site
something else starts to emerge, something intangible yet meaningful, something
you cant quite put your finger on but which opens out new meanings, meanings
more to do with a feeling tone or intuitive grasp of possibility that a logical
analysis and this is a territory where poetry starts and education ends. As an
educator it is a privilege to watch this happen and I’m not sure how to
facilitate it because I have to on the one hand get students to evidence their
experience so that we can record it as learning outcomes, and on the other try
to edge them towards something that is indefinable and so easily lost, that
something that allows you to keep playing whilst being alive to the moment that
is magic or that ‘works’. Perhaps that re-creation, re-making, re-imagining or
revealing is in fact easy, but logic makes it hard, only experience and trust
in yourself can tell you when to just let it happen. Today I saw some staged photographs
of two people having a good time recreating proposed comedic moments that could
have happened if workers had had time on their hands to play about. Something
happened and the images transcended their makers. Rough texts written on walls
engaging with these images in such a way that you just knew this was good, this
was in the game and was worthy. I hope to see more tomorrow.
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