We
are living at Steward Community Woodland, while researching and experimenting
with art practice in the woods.
Steward Community Woodland are an intentional community and live in a
sustainable and low impact way.
Steward Community Woodland is situated within the boundary of Dartmoor
National Park close to Moretonhampstead in Devon, England.
The members of the community live in benders they have made from reclaimed
materials and wood that they have felled from their carefully managed
woodland.
To find out more about the community, you can link to their website www.stewardwood.org.
Contents: Communal Living
About our time living at Steward Community Woodland
Communal Living
Our presence and participation in communal life made an impact on the
community, through the re-framing of the context to highlight the art
in the everyday and holding a mirror to the community to celebrate and
make special their way of life.
Our involvement with the communal life at Steward Wood affected our arts
practice in several ways. Not only the aesthetic choices we made but the
way in which we managed our project too.
Communal Meals
"We have also really enjoyed the dialogue we have engaged in with
the other members of the community at communal moments, around the camp
fire eating and drinking tea. This is a great source of sound bites and
revelations in the realm of philosophies, politics and spiritual beliefs.
Natasha recorded Dan talking about his interpretation of the 'being' of
a big tin tub that held bubbling water over the fire. This reminded me
of the conversations and discoveries that Natasha and I made when we were
in Berlin. Dan's assertion that the tub is a conscious being with life,
delves into the subject of how we define reality and what we understand
in our world." Eve's Diary Entry October 30th 2003
The community had agreed that we would have three communal meals a week
while we were there. The meals were an opportunity for us to get to know
the community members and keep them abreast of our progress and developments
in our work.
We weren't always successful in communicating about what we were doing
in the woods. This was talked about in our evaluation and feedback session
with the community in the week after we left. The community members agreed
that they felt a little in the dark about what we were doing a lot of
the time and saw us 'commuting' off to the other side of the woods and
they didn't feel completely involved in that part of the working process.
Although they acknowledged that it was difficult for us to orchestrate
the collaboration between us and the community due to everyone having
their own agendas for work and living being centred around the settlement
area.
We think in retrospect that we should have prepared and created a more
formal way of doing this so that we could invite feedback and creative
collaboration with the community. We also needed to be more assertive
in instigating the opportunity for showcasing our work to the community.
Because there is no hierarchy in the community it is up to the individual
to take responsibility and power for the issues that concern them. Although
meal times would seem the best opportunity to do this because all of the
community members were present we found that in reality we were all too
tired and exhausted and that after working on the project all day that
by this point we were ready to switch off and relax.
"We have tried to eat at least one meal together every day in order
to ensure that we socialise with each other. However we have found that
we have very different needs regarding meals due to various health problems,
intolerance's, allergies and preferences. This has increasingly resulted
in people purchasing and preparing their own food and eating it at different
times and so sadly communal meals haven't always happened. We recognise
the importance of eating together and its role in maintaining a healthy
community and so we have recently been making a renewed effort to eat
at the same time even though we may be eating different food." 'Communal
Meals' www.stewardwood.org 2003
These meetings for collective eating were also the time when the community
conducted their business meetings. So as well as being a social event
for sharing and enjoying the company and conversation of one another,
meal times were occasionally times of stress and unsettled atmosphere
as important issues and decisions were discussed and made.
Consensus
The community use consensus to make decisions so this means that issues
are discussed until each community member agreed upon the outcome. This
is at times a lengthy process. The consensus decision making process involves:
Presenting the decision to be made.
Discussing the different options.
Articulating your wants and needs
Discussing the implications of the different options and
Then coming to a unanimous decision.
"Consensus is a decision making process that works creatively to
include all persons making the decision. It is the most powerful decision
process as all members agree to the final decision. This is truly radical
democracy as all participants have a direct voice and veto power.
Consensus can work with groups as small as 5, groups of 300, or even over
500,000 people. Within a small group consensus tends to be more simple
if all the group participants are kept abreast of each other's activities
and all the factors of the decision. Within groups of 300 or so, consensus
takes fractally different shapes: the group might have a single facilitator,
and the 300 members may be arranged into mini-groups of 5 using consensus
and with one spokesperson who speaks in the larger group.
Or consensus can work with territories such as lower Mexico (Oaxaca and
Chiapas). The Zapatistas answer to a public control called "la consulta".
This group - comprised of all men, women and children 12 and over - meets
in local meetings where discussion is held and all the members make the
final decision. This process worked in declaring war on the Mexican government
and held through the initial attempts to diffuse the situation with offers
of "peace talks" from the Government.
In short consensus takes into account and validates each participant.
Everyone gets the opportunity to voice their opinion, or block a proposal
if they feel strongly enough about a decision." 'What is Consensus?'
www.stewardwood.org 2003
The process of consensus was part of the management of our project from
the time we entered into negotiation with the community. The decision
as to whether they wanted us to come and work and live with them was decided
through consensus. We started the negotiations with the first letter we
sent to them back in August. LINK TO LETTER
In September we went to visit them and communicate our intentions and
plans to them. Cheryl, one of the community members was not there on that
day so we met up with her in Totnes to relay what we had said to the community
so that she could be part of the decision with the same information as
the rest of them.
Natasha and I discussed the implications of using consensus in arts practice
and it brought up some questions. Does consensus disempower the individual
because if they want to do anything that affects the community they have
to go though this process. So can it suppress spontaneity and creativity?
Does it embrace diversity? Is it good for visioning and reaching common
goals? Is it vulnerable to an abuse of power and the use of bullying and
emotional tactics?
The influence of the consensus process on our collaboration and decision
making was a positive one. Natasha and I found ourselves discussing issues
with a greater success in articulation throughout the process and the
skills that we had learned at the communal meetings were filtering through
into the way we negotiated with one another.
We already had a good basis of skills for this, from our experience negotiating
other theatre projects at college and with larger groups and our awareness
for the sorts of questions our assessors and tutors ask of us. But the
communal experience built upon and strengthened these skills of evaluation
and constructive criticism. For example when we suggested ideas to one
another we would interrogate that idea and translate it into our own language
so that we could fully understand the others point of view, motivation
and reasoning. We developed our skills in listening to each other by really
giving the other the time to verbally work through the idea and concentrate
on what they were saying without interruption. We worked through strategies
for making ideas happen.
To start with we would sometimes abandon ideas if we could not convince
the other of it's validity but we realised that this was a pattern that
was emerging and so agreed that we must be open to exploring these ideas
practically in order to see if they worked. This habit that we developed
for discussing objectively didn't always naturally appear to happen in
such times when we were distracted and unmotivated by personal emotions.
So we then put into action a more structured way of assessing and planing.
At the start of each day we made a 'wish list' of objectives and tasks
we wanted to achieve, we then assessed how long this would take and how
long we actually had and the resources available to us. We would then
make a timetable for that day. It was very important for us to schedule
into the timetable an hour slot in which to review the day and assess
our progress.
This was a successful strategy for working but it surprised us that it
had been three weeks before we had put this into action. We realised that
we had spent three weeks experimenting and exploring, listening and being
responsive to our context but that also at times we had got a bit lost
and engulfed in the daily life and the magic of the woods.
The vastness and limitlessness of the context was largely due to the quintessence
of the community. They mostly work, live and socialise within the boundaries
of the community. This is a contrast to our usual environment where boundaries
between these areas of life are clearer.
"The individual in urban society lives his social life in a multiplicity
of contexts, residing in one, working in an other, travelling through
still others, perhaps taking his leisure somewhere else altogether. This
plurality of contexts is replicated structurally in the very ecology of
the city, divided into separated zones ('zones of succession') clearly
distinguishable by population and function." Cohen, Anthony. P. 'The
Symbolic Construction of Community' London: Routledge (1985) pg. 26
The realisation of being 'lost' in the woods was the realisation that
we were saturated in the context from the moment we got up in the morning
to the moment we fell asleep, and most probably in our dream time too.
This vastness and saturation of the site is probably what made us cling
so tightly to one another, always working together, exploring , experimenting
and making work together. Had we felt more inclined to go off separately
and work on our own sometimes we may have found more spontaneity and diversity
of ideas which would have enriched our collaboration.
BACK TO TOP
Nesting
"Already, in the world of inanimate objects, extraordinary significance
is attached to nests. We want them to be perfect, to bear the mark of
a very sure instinct. We ourselves marvel at this instinct, and a nest
is generally considered to be one of the marvels of animal life."
G. Bachelard 'The Poetics of Space' The Orion Press Inc. (1964) pg. 92
This first week was spent repairing the bender from leaks and insulating
it with blankets. We also spent our time finding and collecting wood,
chopping wood and then of course burning it in the wood burning stove
in our bender.
"Wood keeps you warm three times, collecting it , chopping it and
burning it"
Dan - Steward Wood Community member. October 2003
The process of nesting was a matter of survival we needed to acquire the
skills to enable us to live in the woods in a sustainable way.
Nesting is also a natural instinct in the process of finding a sense of
place. Humans as animals are bound to this behaviour in order to feel
safe and at home. For us to spend the time making our bender warm and
secure was just as much about survival as adjusting to our new environment
and establishing our identity in that place.
Nesting and surviving is interesting to us as artists if we can represent
and re frame these activities through artistic mediums.
We didn't want to take the whole act of chopping wood for example and
just represent it on film but to take elements of that action in order
to frame an essence. To deconstruct the everyday and represent it in a
new way is to understand it in another way. The daily activity of chopping
wood yielded slices of the action which we later displayed:
Link to the story of the
display case.
Dan, one of the community members was in the process of building his house
when we arrived, and so we took a trip to Leese's skip yard to find materials
for house constructing such as chip board and windows. The way in which
the community live affected how we made work. We wanted to make our work
in the way that the community and ourselves were living. The cultural
background of the community is an important contextual issue for us here,
since it explains why they live in the way they do and explains the cultural
and political context of our work.
So finding boxes at the scrap yard set us off on our way. The boxes represented
shelter, nesting and refuge to us and we wanted to be able to show a sense
of this to our audience. The boxes at this stage were going to house our
work we were going to make so that they were protected from the elements.
In the end as you can see they represented the essence of nesting and
our connection with other animals who do this too:
The frog in the box also represents to me the novel and fantasy that we
apply to everyday life in order to celebrate it and take away the monotony
and boredom that can so easily set in if devices for making special are
not used in our life.
This perspective for finding the novel, beauty and art in the everyday
activities and objects has been taken on by the community since we have
been there. It was one of our objectives to "offer an opportunity
and focus for the community to create art", which has been achieved.
Over the weeks I have seen interesting and beautiful pieces of wood displayed
on tree trunks and listened to poems that have been written by Pete a
community member.
Link to Artist/Audienece
Cohesion
