The Book Of Visions: Where We Find Ourselves

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 a range of individual and collective practices, approaches and artworks that speak to this question. 

‘Where We Find Ourselves’ is the manifestation of a participatory form of attention-giving that I term ‘co-listening’. The practice arises in part from Pauline Oliveros' invitation towards Quantum Listening as “a manifesto for listening as activism, foregrounding compassion and peace as the basis for our actions in the world” and in part from Vanessa Machado De Olivera's calls towards ‘co-sensing with radical tenderness’. 

Co-listening is an exploratory collective practice that focuses on transformative listening by freeing participants from the need to respond, a key principle of which is to listen for understanding rather than agreement. The phrase 'where we find ourselves' emerges from Dougald Hine's (Dark Mountain, A School Called Home) response to my work 'The Book Of Visions: Pilgrimage', describing it as ‘an act of weaving, stitching together the torn fabric, starting from where we find ourselves.’ The phrase calls us into dialogue with our surroundings and each other. It calls us to behold our relationships with the living world, to hold space for the joy, grief and trauma of our entangled realities, and for that which does not make sense right now.

The first iteration of this work took place at New Bridge Project, Newcastle in summer 2021. The second phase took place as part of a year long 'artist-in-resonance' role with Dancing on the Edge, a festival of movement based in Amsterdam. Participants were invited into a year-long co-enquiry, which was continued due to demand and ends in July 2024, after over two years. A third iteration of the project was commissioned by Festival Of Debate, Sheffield in May 2024. A fourth iteration is planned for Transmitter Festival, St Leonards-on-Sea in September 2024.

I keep an irregular journal of the practice as it developed. Here is an extract:

"19.10.22

We listen to each other speaking and we listen to each other refrain from speaking. We listen together to sounds from our individual environments that punctuate our shared silence: children playing in Amsterdam, birds in a tree in Alexandria, a coffee being delivered to a cafe table in Palermo, the dusk falling in Paris, a laptop overheating in Sheffield. We listen to the silences that we build together, which have something of a healing quality for the knowing that we have built them together.

We have now been developing this practice together for six months, with new and now familiar faces arriving each time, and what I have been most struck by as the sessions have progressed, is how each time is so markedly different. The rhythm and feel of each session is distinct, held by the growing experience within the group, and also invigorated by those experiencing it for the first time.

One recent session began to feel like a magical séance, as multiple synchronicities curiously wove themselves through the fabric of our shared space, so that all we could do was to laugh together. The last session took place over dusk for many of the localities on the call, and as our windows darkened, we listened to each other speak in shared and native languages. For some this meant casting words into the void, not knowing if they were being understood, and for others it meant listening beyond language to what else is held in the voice.

We continue with our experiment."

A more extensive journal can be found in Dancing On The Edge's online magazine . An article based on these journals will be published in late 2024.