Sgôr boced
Scores for miniature thought experiments
“scores as performance texts allows us to see how writing can activate art/life works that writing cannot contain or control… those works that somehow contain (if that’s the word) the performance in the text itself — not as a document or as performative utterance per se, but in the way that poetic writing can make something happen in the world, even if that ‘in the world’ is only in the reader’s brief imagining of potential enactments”
Proposition:
Next time you sense silence, stop. What might appear when other, more prominent sounds are absent? Let your attention wander. Outside, within.
Julie Upmeyer
“Lie down with one ear to the floor and listen carefully. Who and what do you hear? Even if separated by walls and floors, we all share a common ground”
“Next time you see an insect, take a moment to observe it. Follow it wherever it goes and keep a record of your discoveries.”
Gan Seran Arianwen
Archwiliwch ac unwch â gorffennol, presennol a dyfodol o le : Explore and meld with the past, present and future of a place
“Use your wildest imagination and embrace peace through play”…
Prompts
· Dance with a tree.
· Talk to a flower and write its response.
· Sing with a bird.
· Splash in a stream.
· Draw an imaginary, unseen world that is under a stone, in a tree, at the end of the river.
· Invite the spirits of place to your picnic.
· Sculpt with mud.
· Breath in the air and breath out sound.
· Daydream of a flight with a butterfly.
· Make rose petal perfume.
· Create a collage of how you feel when in nature.
· Create bark rubbings with wax crayons and paper.
· Write a poem to a tree or a bird
· Thank the worms for creating fertile soil and plant a seed.
· Make a nature-based crown.
· Make a bee hotel.
· Draw with a stick.
“Surrender, without being defeated, to the pleasure of giving back, of right relationship to place, of redemption, of reparations, of maintenance, care and attending to”
— Bronte Velez
“Move around your home. Or outside.
Think of, greet, and relate to everything you meet as a person
- human person, plant person, tree person, weed person, bird person, stone person”
It is so easy to forget that we still live amongst species so numerous we can barely imagine them. And just one of them is human. Could we start to think of ourselves as a ‘keystone’ species, living amongst others in positive, symbiotic, loving relationship?
What if we started to relate to all these species as relatives rather than resources or as problematic interlopers? Might this new (to the predominant ‘’human-centric’ way of thinking) but also ancient way of thinking might be part of the new story we need, to repair our separation from ‘nature’?
So instead of thinking: Resource, crop, quarry, manage, control, study, conserve, boundary, demarcation, competition… we could start thinking: Relatives, flourishing, joy, play, storytelling, making kin, entanglement, uncertainty, rhizomes, connection…
Lindsey Colbourne - Bwystori/Bestiary
Minor Walk Manifesto
“Often I get asked ‘is it too late?’ The question I have started asking myself is: What would it be like for me to become a human being that causes all other life to thrive? What have I come here for? What is my reason for being here now? What can I do?”
No more waiting.
No more hoping.
No more letting ourselves be distracted, unnerved.
Break and enter.
Put untruth back in its place.
Believe in what we feel.
Act accordingly.
Force our way into the present.
Try. Fail this time. Try again. Fail better.
Persist. Attack. Build.
Go down one’s road.
Win perhaps.
In any case, overcome.
Live, therefore.
Now.
Lindsey Colbourne (2020)
A year of Fluxus-inspired mini-invitations, inspired by lockdown:
10. Hydrefoct
“Throw a ball from your front door.
Use this
to measure the radius of a circle.
Draw a circle.
Find a way to make
the lives of all beings
within that circle better”