Now What?

FIELDWORK International Summer School 2020 and 2021

Considering loss of voice and silence as a political imperative, this series of workshops, running from 2020-2021 proposes to rethink loss as instigator and potential for alternative learning for the future, to increase the volume of the stories that must be told, while moving towards creating a scenario, a speculative narrative that takes place here, now and in the future.

2020 marks the 700th anniversary of the Declaration of Arbroath, one of Scotland’s most important historic documents. The document seeds the first ideas of democracy by declaring the desire to be disentangled from hereditary rule which was dominated by the relationship with English monarchy.

Near Arbroath, the Forfar museum holds a ‘ scold’s bridle’, an iron torture device (used until the early 1800s) that would tear a person’s tongue if they attempted to talk. They were used on non-conforming people, most often women, who were then cast to be witches. The act of ‘making mute’, not having voice in society, has been addressed by feminist activist and political theorist Silvia Federici: “In many parts of the world, women have historically been seen as the weavers of memory—those who keep alive the voices of the past and the histories of the communities, transmit them to the future generations and, in so doing, create a collective identity and profound sense of cohesion […].They are also those who hand down acquired knowledges and wisdoms. […]. It is in this way that women have been silenced and to this day excluded from many places where decisions are taken.” ( Witches, Witch-hunting and Women, PM Press, 2018).

And Octavia E. Butler wrote, in 1998 in Parable of the Talents: "Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought. To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears. To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool. To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen. To be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies. To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery.”

Departing from these prepositions, participants engaged in a collective dialogue to understand place and bodies as carriers of experience, archive and site. What are consequences of making mute, of silencing, of suspension, for people, species and the earth? How can we, during crises, actively listen and take care of the world we share and pass on? What don't we want to see coming back, and what do we want to develop?

After, a series of Living Newspaper Online Study Groups from March – April 2021 lead up to a three day summer school at Hospitalfield in 2021. Through workshops, talks and performances participants joined an experiment of collective learning, with The Living Newspaper as a model to imagine and rehearse the possible futures that lie ahead, while focussing on aspects of the Living Newspaper production process; writing, costume and prop making, performance, videography and reflection.