By Jonathan Spejlborg Juelsbo and the LungA School crew
We are a young place. That is a good way to launch this text.
Emerged in 2014, we have, as I write, just celebrated our fifth birthday. Like stellar nebulas in which material condenses and things gain clarity, we have experienced a form of gravitational pull as internal and external pressure to find our boundaries. What are we? What are we not? How do we do things? How do we not do them? What are we for? What are we not for? This pressure, this movement, expresses itself as structures, language, actions – some arising from necessity, some from desire and most as a result of a chance interplay between all the parties involved in this condensing narrative. Fortunately, it is not up to us alone to discover what we are. Nor to become it.
This pressure, this movement, expresses itself as structures, language, actions – some arising from necessity, some from desire and most as a result of a chance interplay
LungA School crew
Being called, and calling ourselves, a school is tied to a certain powerlessness. It is something that – to express it in rather grandiose terms – feels both like an elevation and a debasement of the dream from which it took shape and the everyday lives that live it.
In what follows, we will attempt to give some insight into both – the dream and the daily life. In particular we will be looking at the use of language and the practices concerning the relationships that arise and live through them.
A loosely woven tangle
We will start with an alteration: nothing is so simple that it has grown from an ambition – a dream brought into living reality by enterprising individuals. That kind of narrative has a way of forgetting the subtle, anonymous and invisible (inter)actions and (co-)existences that weave the structures in which and on which something can take place. Let us start by renaming ‘the dream’ as ‘the hope’, a word that more accurately reflects the dependence on other people and other things determining the coming into being of anything at all. And a word that conveys humility as regards to the actions performed by all those involved, in becoming and maintenance – the constant becoming, if you will. At the same time, hopes never have any particular delimitation. We involved live out our hopes differently, as a plethora of overlapping forms, which can give the impression of being a whole; a school.
What, then, was the hope? A loosely woven tangle made up of separate existences, places, materials, histories and ambitions; a more or less coordinated co-existence of varying intensity, solidity and cohesion; a movement towards the creation of para-integrated pockets. Not (only) for resistance but also for the care and maintenance of possibilities for speculative futures. In brief, a polyphonic mess, which is held together by everyone and everything that is part of it; on everyone’s initiative and for everyone’s well-being, whatever that might mean from one day to the next.
The loosely woven structure is related to the fluidity of language where the meaning of words is always alive, open to negotiation and subject to change.
LungA School crew
In this there are three significant elements that are reflected in our pedagogical practice:
- Rejection of the idea of the individual as being sufficient unto themselves. Of the individual functioning at a remove and cut off from their surroundings, both material, cultural and historical.
- Acceptance of the influence – and therefore the partial responsibility – each of us has for everything we come into contact with, either directly, indirectly or at several removes.
- Impossibility of achieving complete insight or oversight of the consequences of our actions or the space in which we act
Our daily practice, the togetherness/interweaving with the living world, exists as an artistic and material exploration of the above. This is a powerful cohesive force, maybe even a shared skin.
The ‘loose weave’ of all this is an important detail. The loosely woven structure is related to the fluidity of language where the meaning of words is always alive, open to negotiation and subject to change. Ambiguity, temporality and self-contradiction are essential elements. In addition, we have chosen to use the word tangle, which makes, of course, a mess; the kind of thing that resists theorisation and is loosened from purpose or direction. Through this language, an image forms of a place that is ok with being a mess and that tries to resist the temptation to tidy up, to clarify, to perform, explain, systematise. A place in constant disturbance.
Interlude/comment
The language used about these things is important. Well aware that changes in language in themselves do not change practice, we are dedicated to the potential for infinite implications, that such changes can contribute to in time. The relationship between language and practice is as delicate as it is unpredictable.
The daily mess
We have no students and no teachers. We have and are only participants. The school is the responsibility of all and exists through the initiative of everyone. This does not mean that there are not different roles, but the relation between role and participation is conceived in reverse. Participation is not made possible by assuming or being allocated a role; on the contrary, it is through participation that roles are enabled and actualised. This loosens up the weave. My participation can change during the course of a day. I can be student and principal and caretaker in the space of a few hours. The same goes for everyone else. Roles and identities fade away and come into existence in a play of chance and transience. Participation is the (groundless) ground, not only for the development of roles but for the very existence of the school, its extension, its cohesion and its tone.
This is not that simple in practice. There are many factors working against the fluidity, both from within and without. One thing is the interaction with structures around us, of which we are a part and with which we partially overlap. As an independent institution, we have to have a board, and the board has to appoint someone to have legal responsibility, and so on. In addition, some of us are here all the time, while other participants come for a matter of months and others for a few weeks. All of us arrive with varying expectations of the structures, roles and distribution of responsibilities. Gradually, the temporal limitations of participation erode as well; even after (and before?) the programme, participants participate; co-creators at a distance, shuttling weft through warp. Management and oversight remains a futile tendency.
These factors are not something we work against but is a landscape in which the hoping exists and is lived. It is, so to speak, all part of the mess.
Washing up, in itself a true mess, is also part of the shared responsibility. The management and structure of this shared responsibility is directed by the participants and not decided in advance.
LungA School crew
Let us take a look at the everyday mess and the relationships that materialise in it. Several times during the course of a programme, we invite practising artists to come and be part of the school for a week or so. The invitation is not about coming to teach but about bringing their practice with them to Iceland and inviting the other participants to join them in what they do – in their practice, in their doubts and (un)certainties, in the queries and experiments that they are engaged in at that particular moment. The invitation also goes the other way and facilitates the opportunity for their practice to rub up against all other participants and allow it to be disturbed.
They are accommodated in the same house as everyone else. Our way of living and the responsibility for the house is communal. They are given a room close to the common living area and the kitchen. They stay at the heart of the life we share together.
Participants take turns to prepare breakfast for each other, and the guest artists join this rhythm. Washing up, in itself a true mess, is also part of the shared responsibility. The management and structure of this shared responsibility is directed by the participants and not decided in advance.
Rhythms relating to cooking, cleaning, the social sphere, conflicts and so on are developed along the way through more or less painful, tiresome and encouraging processes and experiences.
The days starts, a practice is opened, a shared language develops. Interaction with the material and with each other proceeds.
It is simple. A process is under way which, to a greater or lesser extent, influences and alters all those involved.
No one simply submits to a programme while others facilitate. We are all exposed to all of it, and that changes us.
Often, the guest artist’s participation extends beyond the time planned for their workshops. They hang around a bit longer. Their formal participation is over, their role partially falls away, but they are still there. They continue working on their things. Sharing their study with other participants. The process continues, we are still changing. Any one situation is rich with opportunities for collaboration, conversation, friendships and conflicts.
When they leave, they are still part of it. In references and correspondences. Threads are woven.
As I have said, there are a couple of us who are here all the time. From one programme to the next, we are here. We have had the great pleasure of meeting everyone who has taken part over the years. We are the ones who send out the invitations, write the letters, welcome the other participants at the airport. This means that, reasonably enough, certain things are expected of us and of our roles and responsibilities. It calls for time and being-present to get to the heart of such expectations, so that during the course of the programme they are loosened and we can practice other ways of taking part. For we are not teachers. And we would also like to do the dishes.
None of this takes place in straight lines. The movements are fumbling, the factors involved are infinite. We can only try, through our own participation, to qualify the situations that arise.
This is the position from which the present text has come into being. From here, all this is an everyday process with everyday thoughts, situations, challenges. Everyday tedium and everyday enthusiasm. A listening, chattering, thinking, doing everyday, where contribution is a practice that exists somewhere between doing something and not doing something.
In this process, we remind ourselves that everyday life is not a tool to be used to carry out an ambition. It has more than enough to offer in itself. Much at stake, held with care.
We are a young place. That is a good way to launch this text.Emerged in 2014, we have, as I write, just celebrated our fifth birthday. Like stellar nebulas in which material condenses and things gain clarity, we have experienced a form of gravitational pull as internal and external pressure to find our boundaries. What are we? What are we not? How do we do things? How do we not do them? What are we for? What are we not for? This pressure, this movement, expresses itself as structures, language, actions – some arising from necessity, some from desire and most as a result of a chance interplay between all the parties involved in this condensing narrative. Fortunately, it is not up to us alone to discover what we are. Nor to become it.Being called, and calling ourselves, a school is tied to a certain powerlessness. It is something that – to express it in rather grandiose terms – feels both like an elevation and a debasement of the dream from which it took shape and the everyday lives that live it.In what follows, we will attempt to give some insight into both – the dream and the daily life. In particular we will be looking at the use of language and the practices concerning the relationships that arise and live through them.A loosely woven tangleWe will start with an alteration: nothing is so simple that it has grown from an ambition – a dream brought into living reality by enterprising individuals. That kind of narrative has a way of forgetting the subtle, anonymous and invisible (inter)actions and (co-)existences that weave the structures in which and on which something can take place. Let us start by renaming ‘the dream’ as ‘the hope’, a word that more accurately reflects the dependence on other people and other things determining the coming into being of anything at all. And a word that conveys humility as regards to the actions performed by all those involved, in becoming and maintenance – the constant becoming, if you will. At the same time, hopes never have any particular delimitation. We involved live out our hopes differently, as a plethora of overlapping forms, which can give the impression of being a whole; a school.38 What, then, was the hope? A loosely woven tangle made up of separate existences, places, materials, histories and ambitions; a more or less coordinated co-existence of varying intensity, solidity and cohesion; a movement towards the creation of para-integrated pockets. Not (only) for resistance but also for the care and maintenance of possibilities for speculative futures. In brief, a polyphonic mess, which is held together by everyone and everything that is part of it; on everyone’s initiative and for everyone’s well-being, whatever that might mean from one day to the next.In this there are three significant elements that are reflected in our pedagogical practice:•Rejection of the idea of the individual as being sufficient unto themselves. Of the individual functioning at a remove and cut off from their surroundings, both material, cultural and historical.•Acceptance of the influence – and therefore the partial responsibility – each of us has for everything we come into contact with, either directly, indirectly or at several removes.•Impossibility of achieving complete insight or oversight of the consequences of our actions or the space in which we actOur daily practice, the togetherness/interweaving with the living world, exists as an artistic and material exploration of the above. This is a powerful cohesive force, maybe even a shared skin.The ‘loose weave’ of all this is an important detail. The loosely woven structure is related to the fluidity of language where the meaning of words is always alive, open to negotiation and subject to change. Ambiguity, temporality and self-contradiction are essential elements. In addition, we have chosen to use the word tangle, which makes, of course, a mess; the kind of thing that resists theorisation and is loosened from purpose or direction. Through this language, an image forms of a place that is ok with being a mess and that tries to resist the temptation to tidy up, to clarify, to perform, explain, systematise. A place in constant disturbance.39Interlude/commentThe language used about these things is important. Well aware that changes in language in themselves do not change practice, we are dedicated to the potential for infinite implications, that such changes can contribute to in time. The relationship between language and practice is as delicate as it is unpredictable.The daily messWe have no students and no teachers. We have and are only participants. The school is the responsibility of all and exists through the initiative of everyone. This does not mean that there are not different roles, but the relation between role and participation is conceived in reverse. Participation is not made possible by assuming or being allocated a role; on the contrary, it is through participation that roles are enabled and actualised. This loosens up the weave. My participation can change during the course of a day. I can be student and principal and caretaker in the space of a few hours. The same goes for everyone else. Roles and identities fade away and come into existence in a play of chance and transience. Participation is the (groundless) ground, not only for the development of roles but for the very existence of the school, its extension, its cohesion and its tone.This is not that simple in practice. There are many factors working against the fluidity, both from within and without. One thing is the interaction with structures around us, of which we are a part and with which we partially overlap. As an independent institution, we have to have a board, and the board has to appoint someone to have legal responsibility, and so on. In addition, some of us are here all the time, while other participants come for a matter of months and others for a few weeks. All of us arrive with varying expectations of the structures, roles and distribution of responsibilities. Gradually, the temporal limitations of participation erode as well; even after (and before?) the programme, participants participate; co-creators at a distance, shuttling weft through warp. Management and oversight remains a futile tendency.40 These factors are not something we work against but is a landscape in which the hoping exists and is lived. It is, so to speak, all part of the mess.Let us take a look at the everyday mess and the relationships that materialise in it. Several times during the course of a programme, we invite practising artists to come and be part of the school for a week or so. The invitation is not about coming to teach but about bringing their practice with them to Iceland and inviting the other participants to join them in what they do – in their practice, in their doubts and (un)certainties, in the queries and experiments that they are engaged in at that particular moment. The invitation also goes the other way and facilitates the opportunity for their practice to rub up against all other participants and allow it to be disturbed.They are accommodated in the same house as everyone else. Our way of living and the responsibility for the house is communal. They are given a room close to the common living area and the kitchen. They stay at the heart of the life we share together.Participants take turns to prepare breakfast for each other, and the guest artists join this rhythm. Washing up, in itself a true mess, is also part of the shared responsibility. The management and structure of this shared responsibility is directed by the participants and not decided in advance.Rhythms relating to cooking, cleaning, the social sphere, conflicts and so on are developed along the way through more or less painful, tiresome and encouraging processes and experiences.The days starts, a practice is opened, a shared language develops. Interaction with the material and with each other proceeds.It is simple. A process is under way which, to a greater or lesser extent, influences and alters all those involved.No one simply submits to a programme while others facilitate. We are all exposed to all of it, and that changes us.Often, the guest artist’s participation extends beyond the time planned for their workshops. They hang around a bit longer. Their formal participation is over, their role41partially falls away, but they are still there. They continue working on their things. Sharing their study with other participants. The process continues, we are still changing. Any one situation is rich with opportunities for collaboration, conversation, friendships and conflicts.When they leave, they are still part of it. In references and correspondences. Threads are woven.As I have said, there are a couple of us who are here all the time. From one programme to the next, we are here. We have had the great pleasure of meeting everyone who has taken part over the years. We are the ones who send out the invitations, write the letters, welcome the other participants at the airport. This means that, reasonably enough, certain things are expected of us and of our roles and responsibilities. It calls for time and being-present to get to the heart of such expectations, so that during the course of the programme they are loosened and we can practice other ways of taking part. For we are not teachers. And we would also like to do the dishes.None of this takes place in straight lines. The movements are fumbling, the factors involved are infinite. We can only try, through our own participation, to qualify the situations that arise.This is the position from which the present text has come into being. From here, all this is an everyday process with everyday thoughts, situations, challenges. Everyday tedium and everyday enthusiasm. A listening, chattering, thinking, doing everyday, where contribution is a practice that exists somewhere between doing something and not doing something.In this process, we remind ourselves that everyday life is not a tool to be used to carry out an ambition. It has more than enough to offer in itself. Much at stake, held with care.Translated by John Mason