2 Feb 2023

Look at a map.

Dig in my head – who are those ‘sticky’ FLINTA folx whose identities are intertwined with the countryside and the refusal of Compulsory heterosexuality? Go walking. Find out more about their personal life, the places they circulated in, their creative work, and the folx they kept company with. Take photos. Take videos. Take notes. Find quotes. Chat with strangers. Walk more. Take more photos. Ask Questions. Complain.

Mark it on the wall.

Move the map around.

Move the pins around.

Go somewhere else, somewhere new.

Send an email.

Get stuck.

Turn around.

Look at a map ….

• Identify a genealogy of the narrative – who started the story and who kept it going.
• Involve larger themes and/or social issues through walking prompts.
• Make a metaphor out of walking in places of resonance.
• Apply contemporary and historical performance conventions, recce findings, digital technology, online media etc. in devised, site-specific, walking recce context.

(is the recce the performance – is there ever a performance) 

• Conceptualise, organize (plan, budget, manage resources) and deliver an original piece of research. 
• Develop performance vocabularies and technical strategies: devised, walking, research-creation, provocations.
• Develop sensitivity and skills to observe group dynamics, outside environments, self-assessment, accountability, and general how ‘Others’ interact with walking research involving FLINTA lives. 
• Build skills to establish and manage group processes to produce walking-centred research in FLINTA contexts. 
• Incorporate critical, archival, and/or literary sources in an interactive, time-based, only-realised-through-doing context.

• Present walking as a pedagogy that ‘makes sense’ as neuroqueer ways of knowing and being.

The provocations generate a repertoire of micro-works involving movement, adaptations, spoken word, photos, videos, audio recordings, and prose that think-with and respond to the social, temporal, spatial, imaginative and environmental concerns of any given site-path.

* a site-path: the route between one place to the next

The process involves engaging with elements relative to any one site, such as sound, movement, text, the atmosphere, humans and other critters, signage, the built environment.

The research events explore their subjects in the studio, in the archive, at a desk, and in the field at locations in Surrey (Virginia Woolf), Worcestershire (Radcliffe Hall), Sussex (Vanessa Bell), Cornwall (the FLINTA folx of Lamorna), and Kent (Vita Sackville-West) – this is the site path.

In the studio and at the desk, practices responding to texts and works authored by the FLINTA folx (and their site-paths) involved in preparing on-site visits: maps, histories, and narratives come to matter on paper only. As such, the paper itself, whether it fits nicely folded in a pocket or is retrievable on screen without distraction, becomes an investigation object in its own right.

Unfortunately, or fortunate enough, this is a neuroqueer situation in its own right. At the Hogarth Press, typesetting was a form of therapy for Leonard and Virginia Woolf¹Storace, K. (2015) ‘A Woolf at the Hogarth Press: Virginia Woolf and the art of publishing’, Logos, 26(1), pp. 40–45.. Virginia Woolf would grow as a writer thinking not only with her plots, but with the arrangement of letters in a sentence. The sentence in a paragraph. A paragraph on a page. A piece of punctuation here and there for its shape.

There is a conflux of content and materiality that make experiential formats of learning and knowledge exchange necessary – ones that involve reading aloud in specific spaces (gestures help), live discussion, and other forms of on-site, co-creative activities.

On-site, these practices find their place – locations, movements, images, videos, sounds, and objects are gathered as content for a ‘final’ performance that is a mere pause in an ongoing process of learning. It is a moment for feedback and a means to gauge what happens when one group of folx ar e actively participating while another sits passively and themselves ‘performs’ the audience²I once watched a participant walk up and down a hallway, barefoot, picking apart post-it notes, declaring the only way she learns or communicates is if she talks to someone face-to-face while moving. And the only way she can make sense of anything is if she collects without intention or structure. Until she is exhausted. Then she makes something that might make sense to someone – but will never fully make sense to her again.. On-site visits are never complete work themselves, as they will never be complete. They are one part recce, one part micro project, and one part documentation of a process.

Then a rest.

A return to a site-path.

A second round of devising occurs, this time in tandem. Or at least that is the plan. A return to the place, studio, camera: a discussion, a chat, a reflection in motion – circulating ideas in and about the subject (a person, a place, a provocation). The walking companion has a set reading and we reflect collectively on what resonates, what has been raised by the reading, what metaphors are being used, and the conversation its having, we are having with the creative work.

The conversation generates a plan – an idea for another walk, a devised prompt to answer questions, a way to invite others into the conversation through movement, documentation, and creativity.

The work continues to be documented and developed on the bogsite.