Site Specific Module

 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.