The Book of Visions: Pilgrimage

The Book Of Visions project takes its name from a nearly lost 1973 publication of the same name, which collected around 300 responses to a callout for ‘ideas for an alternative society’, gathered under headings like education, housing, ecology, alternative technology, the arts etc. In working with this manuscript, the question arose: WHAT WOULD A NEW BOOK OF VISIONS LOOK LIKE? The project is a container for individual and collective practices, approaches and artworks that speak to this question.

In April 2020, I was about to set out on a 220 mile walk on foot, “collecting and sharing acts towards and visions of a positive future society”. In the deep uncertainty of those moments, I found myself embarking on unexpected inner trajectories. As time went by, I began to wonder how to hold space equally not just for positive futures and collective yearning, but also for the grief and trauma of our entangled realities, and for that which does not make sense right now. 

With these shifts came the need to examine the original proposal in the light of a raft of more destabilizing questions: What does a positive future look like right now? Is it possible to be visionary any more? Are there practices or ways of being that might be useful in order to live well with insecurity and precarity? 

The Book Of Visions is a framing for the work of collectively addressing these questions – a living publication, an evolving handbook for staying with the trouble of our times, a pilgrim space of fugitivity and sanctuary.

The pilgrimage, when it finally happened in stages between Summer 2021 and Spring 2022, was very much an inner trajectory. The following is an extract from my pilgrim journal writing:

“The work of the pilgrimage has been to take me out of my daily existence over a period of time long enough to witness in myself an unfurling transition towards an understanding of what it means to be human amongst the growing debris of collapsing systems, ecologies and environments. It is a place and a practice to hold the relationship between ancient and modern, to consider the shift towards a more ancient future, and to explore the question of how to honour our entanglement with the more-than-human world, that we might better inhabit the ancient future to come. It allows me to place the vital object that is me into the sublime of the hyperobject that is the slow collapse of modernity. It is a field experiment in how to become fugitive from a culture in which speed is the overriding factor. It is a test bed for how that work lands in a single human body.”

Fundraisng and planning for phase two of Book of Visions: Pilgrimage is underway. This next phase will shift the focus outwards, disseminating the learning from phase one and gathering community around the subject matter. It will alos take the form of a pilgrimage on foot.