Summit Date: 17/12/2009

Attending: David Berridge, Rachel Lois Clapham, Alex Eisenberg, Mary Paterson.

Location: Cafe Zusammen.

Minute taker: David Berridge

We are approaching agreement. An oppressive place. You should subscribe. Its spiral is a slow, continual gradation. The shape of potential. We have to agree dates. When did we first become aware of this climate change crisis our own existence in time? One of us proposes 1984. Another says 1989. But each has their agenda, wishing to sit in their birthday chair, covered in crepe paper.

Maybe these are bargaining positions, the real year two or three years before. I do not yet have a year for acquiring awareness. Is that why I keep the minutes? How can we achieve agreement? One of us had a boyfriend who had one testicle. One of us had a boyfriend, born with forceps that slipped and poked out one eye. Maybe there will be a deal at the last minute.

This is my birthday. But everyone is in the next room watching television. The writers group have abandoned the democratic process to go off on their own and write villanelles about lego. They fight over end words, equating their predicament to the fall of the Soviet Union. Stupid writers. Perhaps no deal is happening but then there is a late intervention: if we have birthmarks we will celebrate them as parts of our body. Everyone who sees our mark in its entirety – a baroque protestant drape over half the body – has given us a letter. The letters spell a phrase:

TWICE LOST GLOVES

The story of the performance by the man in the towel at the party at 3AM has been omitted from these minutes. All his work is about testicular cancer. We chased a convoy – was it Obama? – convinced our gloves were inside. We were reassured in our failure by a man who gave us fruit and tea and lowered our bicycle seat so we could ride under the convoys that were everywhere blocking free passage through the city. Everything was nice. We were all reassured by the unfamiliarly close proximity of our knees and chin.

The agreement takes shape: We wash our hair, and sort audio files, and lose some more gloves and insist the floor be mopped. We love mopping followed by a multi-bird roast. But this 10 bird monstrosity could be deal breaking so we must be more concrete:

(a) WHERE WE ARE NOW

The lack of gloves focusses delegates attentions on the hand. An argument is made for focussing solely on The Finger. The Finger is its own delegating bloc: it points where it wishes, appearing in photographs of climate change activists and world leaders alike. Nothing about COP15 must be without the finger.

(b) SOME CONTEXT

Individuals highlighted or obliterated by The Finger find me on the internet afterwards and write to complain. I explain it is a Writers Finger, “saying” more about me than about them, a way of saving time by laughing at my writing and my finger together, a confessional trumping-perspective moment. Usually they are reassured enough not to email me again.

(c) OUTSTANDING ISSUES TO BE RESOLVED

(1) I am learning the comic timing of The Finger.

(2) I think the agreement is fine but The Finger should be in bigger type.

(3) The Finger had its third night of terrible sleep.

(4) A shaman called Angelica from Peru.

(5) The Finger gave itself the excuse not to do anything because it was so tired

(6) Drawn there by the food? No, it was more ephemeral.

(7) A sinister finger presence. A device to distract finger people.

(8) The guilt of doing finger and the guilt of not doing finger.

(9) This is the finger for me ( fear of circles).

(10) You can’t repent you just live with The Finger.

(11) We’ll give you this meaningless finger.

(12) Re-define it once The Finger is here.

On 12/12/09 I had forty five minutes to wait in Copenhagen airport. I wrote:

Early on – both with Question Time and with New Life Copenhagen – the phrase “social sculpture” was used. We placed it on one of our interview cards, but all found it too confusing to actually ask anyone.

At the first of our daily summits – when words and questions can be re-placed and re-written – “social sculpture” became “solidarity” – a phrase used by one interviewee – and through discussion this was then edited further to become “solid.” Or as I prefer to write it:

Social Sculpture

Solidarity

Solid

But the phrase Social Sculpture still has some currency for me in how I think about Question Time. Waiting at the airport 12/12/09 I thought I would make some notes to try an improvise a definition and a use. A definition:

Social Sculpture is the application of sculpture derived process(es) to broader processes by which societies are created, maintained and transformed.

Different Kinds:

(1)The working with/ shaping of a fixed amount of material to find a form within/ out of.

(2)The combination of a potentially infinite amount of material to create a (new) form.

(3)The translation into social forms of broader (gestural) notions of sculptural processes – shaping, moulding, carving – both as actual gestures and as (immaterial) metaphors.

In all of these instances social sculpture = seeing materials as active and continuous and therefore changing

The Practice of Social Sculpture

The practice of social sculpture can be language based and/or non-verbal.

Social Sculpture seeks to find a balance between verbal and non-verbal means within an expanded economy of exchange. Maybe any resultant social formation is proposing how these two forms of communication can relate.

CASE STUDY: I associate the invention of the term with Joseph Beuys. Beuys was very verbal but also developed an alternative (silent) economy of fat, honey and iron. For Beuys the two were connected by charisma.

The reason we removed “Social Sculpture” from our cards was that it seemed to lack any currency outside of an art context. It is a phrase adrift. Amongst the Question Time group, who had all heard and used the phrase, it had different histories and etymologies, including an association with art as non-spectacle and links to relational aesthetics.

There are several ways of responding to “social sculpture”:

1.Reject the phrase.

2.Embrace the phrase.

3.Make it common currency.

I think (1) would necessitate an immersion in physical processes of moulding, sculpting, carving and shaping towards the emergence of new words and phrases that do figure in a common currency.

I think (2) involves an embrace of the state of exception. “Social sculpture” as a private language, unsaid, but whose implications and meanings are unfolded, almost non-identified by myself,  in my work.

I think (3) involves billboards, television adverts, the authorship of successful pop songs, or maybe a quieter insertion of “social sculpture” into a whole range of social situations.

Yesterday, in one interview, somebody responded to “solid” through talking about “solidarity.” I wonder if “social sculpture” might also re-enter our discussions as a way of understanding how this project is unfolding.

Certainly, the interviews are scripted and shaped in a very particular way by our cards. I am unsure how that shaping/ sculpting relates to a sense of the “social.”

Despite these notes I am not yet able to put “social” and “sculpture” together in a way that constructs.

Barack Obama is arriving tomorrow.

DATE: 11/12/09

LOCATION: FotoKaffe

PRESENT: David Berridge, Rachel Lois Clapham, Alex Eisenberg, Sara Seerup Laursen, Sarah Wingate.

MINUTE TAKERS: David Berridge and Sarah Wingate.

STATEMENT 4: “Boring Rhetoric Your Question”

Boring rhetoric destroying the house of cards. Destroys questions. Destroys the room of space. Destroys music.

Boring rhetoric binds non-verbal actions. Boring rhetoric the action of now. Boring rhetoric not lived out yet.

Boring rhetoric can get weird. Boring rhetoric “with my mind.” Boring rhetoric pledge mimics boring rhetoric.

Boring rhetoric magic of choice. Boring rhetoric utopia becomes two statements: “Boring and “Rhetoric.” Begins with ending. Refuses to answer question. Boring rhetoric turn over. Let’s all jump up and down at the same time.

Boring rhetoric meets one person and everything changes. Boring rhetoric self publishing. Boring rhetoric more important than the interviewee. Boring rhetoric New York.

RIP UP BORING RHETORIC! EVERYONE! PLAYING! WITH! DECLAMATORY! STATEMENTS! BORING RHETORIC THROUGH ABSENT MINDEDNESS DESTROYED!

WE SAY: THE BORING RHETORIC EMERGENCY COULD BE A BORING RHETORIC CRISIS! RHET YOUR CONFIDENT BOR AND TOR AND IC AND ING!I CAN’T MAKE OUT IF YOU’RE HAVING A TERRIBLE TIME. IS EVERYTHING OKAY?

WE SAY: BORING RHETORIC THE MOST CRYSTALLISED! TAKE A PHOTOGRAPH! DESTROY! BORING RHETORIC WHAT PEOPLE TAKE IT AS! WE SAY:

BORING RHETORIC WHAT IS YOUR QUESTION?

DAVID BERRIDGE: I’ve been asking people what role the artist can play in debates on climate change. To think through what people told me I juxtaposed responses to this question and a quotation from the Peoples’ Protocol on Climate Change. I wonder if  the idea of the artist that emerges will satisfy any of the demands of the protocol.

First here is an extract from the protocol:

“We, the people need a platform that raises real solutions, registers our voices, and articulates our demand for social justice. Real solutions go beyond “business-as-usual” technology – and market- fixes along which powerful interests have set and confined the climate agenda. Real solutions require the reallocation of the world’s resources between and within nations for equity and social justice; the reversal of neoliberal globalization; the restoration of people’s sovereignty over resources, economies and institutions; and the compensation by the corporations and the Global North of the poor and peoples of the South for the losses they are forced to bear as victims both of climate change and the social system that is behind it.

Socially just solutions also make for scientifically and ecologically sound ones. Using natural resources equitably and democratically , and supplanting the drive for private profit with the fulfillment of social needs as the principal economic goal will reset human society’s relationship with the environment on a far more sustainable path.”

And here are some things I was told about  the role of artists:

They are like mirrors of society they present different angles of climate change

Well [the responsibility of artists is to] use paint that is er not poisonous (laughs)

How artists well mmm by doing events in the way that artists are innovative and sometime they have some ideas that might provoke people

Because I think that in one way or another people need to be provoked because you think this is something that will not have an effect on me

Because by making events or exhibitions or whatever and trying to show it effects all of us…

Artists they have this obligation, so to say, that they should use their artistic skills to show other people that we have a problem yeah

I  tried to transcribe something of the speakers rhythms because these, too, tell about the artists’ role in climate change debates. A certain stuttering and hesitation towards efficacy  -  I write after taking part in today’s climate change march through Copenhagen – also  an intertwining sense of utopia and cliche.

So, trying to distill from these insights, here are seven artistic strategies. Check any art work for how it fulfills all seven:

(1)  Mirrors

(2)  Poisonous paint

(3)  Innovative

(4)  Provoke

(5)  It effects all of us

(6)  We have a problem

(7)  Laughs

Summit Date: 8 December 2009
Attending: David Berridge, Rachel Lois Clapham, Alex Eisenberg
Location: Red Cross Cafe Zusammen
Minute Taker: David Berridge

Tuesday 8th December 2009

We chance encounter. We design. We subject to change. We smallness and the individual voice. We social. We ambition. We abandon. We aim for higher emission targets. We post-global meltdown universe. We writing machine.

We embrace the uncertainty of our position – participate or die – within a community of hosts and guests in Copenhagen, within economies and governments and global climate systems. We collective voice. We minute. We proliferate.

We never ask a question we know the answer to. We work as artists, reclaiming the interview as about more than information or jobs, politicians or celebrities. The interview is about encounter and conversation as ecological systems on the edge of collapse, but full of suggestions towards prosperity.

We social sculpture. We propose categories holding clusters of related ideas, ever adaptable to any particular situation. These categories are: (1) START; (2) COP15; (3) SOCIAL SCULPTURE; (4) HOSPITALITY; (5) ACTION; (6) PERSONAL KNOWLEDGE; (7) HOME; (8) ENDING; (9) CHANCE AND FUTURE; (10) WILD CARD.

We graphic continuity. We draft. We disaster. We turn thought into manifesto. We New Life. We globe. We guilt. We science fiction. We don’t know. We host. We tone. We light up through pedal power. We wild card. We deal with urban development. We preparatory.

Photo:Greenpeace/Åslund

DAVID BERRIDGE: Copenhagen or Hopenhagen; images of an elderly Barack Obama and Gordon Brown saying “We could have stopped catastrophic climate change… We did NOTHING”; special lines for COP15 delegates at passport control. Arriving in Copenhagen and exploring, Alex and I bought pizza and were asked straight away if we were here for the climate change conference. Were we representatives of the British government, said the proprietor rolling pizza dough. Or were we protestors?

A pair of possible identities to choose between and we hesitated before saying “Er…we’re artists” which seemed to cause some confusion, and some urgent translation and word checking in the kitchen. In Frederiksberg we went into the Zusammen Red Cross-run cafe. We chatted about our project, and about New Life Copenhagen. This time talking about it as an art project generated a sense of interest: “ Oh, so you’re not journalists then.” No, we’re not journalists, but quite what the difference is is also something we want to explore.

Our project starts today: 1000 interviews for Copenhagen. In between all the practical things of being in a new place – finding the flat, food, working out how the public transport works – I’ve been looking back at the Question Time project description. It’s a press release, a summary, but it’s also a minute from a day spent in London at Mary’s flat thinking through what the four of us might do here, and a score that we will perform again and again and possibly change over the next two weeks:

Question Time is a series of 1000 interviews, conducted throughout Copenhagen during the UN COP15 conference, towards an alternate statement of the way forward on Climate Change. In a context of inter-governmental debate and negotiation, Question Time explores an alternative approach to climate change based on anecdote neurotic behaviors, misunderstandings, and gossip.

Curious to now think through these terms in Copenhagen itself, and the unusual relations of local and global that COP15 sets up. A particular city transformed by a global event; a natural phenomenon encountering the micro- weather systems of diplomacy. To talk of gossip or neurotic behaviors is to try and map these debates as they interact with our everyday emotional landscapes, to find out how we relate to climate change across our personal and professional lives.

Mary Paterson will be in London for the first week of the project. In many ways, I imagine Mary has more access to how COP15 is being broadcast and understood internationally than we do here. In Copenhagen itself there’s more the physical landscape thrown up by such events: the welcoming stalls at the airport; the COP15 bus taking its long, slow, free route through the city; tonight’s launch event for Hopenhagen.

Mary has proposed the following score to get us started. We ask each of our interviewees the following questions. In the questions themselves – and in the manner of asking and answering – we’ll be testing those identities: journalist, diplomat, artist? What’s the difference?

1. Am I making you nervous?
2. What does it feel like to be part of a social sculpture?
3. Using 5 words, can you describe what COP15 means to you?
4. What do you think this place [i.e. the room, café, street where the interview is taking place] will be like in 50 years’ time? In 150 years’ time? In 1,000 years’ time?
5. What do you feel nostalgic about?
6. What have you learnt today?
7. Where were you and what were you doing 10 days ago?
8. Would you describe yourself as ‘a political animal.’
9. How old are you, and where are you from?
10.Who are you here with, and why?