Reading over the papers from the exhibition, How to Live Together, at St Paul St Gallery has been useful. I’m curious about how galleries approach ideas around creating an authentic sense of community and collaboration. Galleries are still places of exclusion, even in striving to apply inclusive methodologies, it’s impossible to be all things to all persons, at all times.
Terms and concepts that stood out for me;
Ritual, in relation to one’s own rhythm, in connection with others, in lifestyle.
Intimacy and distance, and how these are negotiated in the way we draw connections with others, forming the basis of community, how one retains a sense of self while feeling close to another.
From the text on Brook Andrew’s work, I consider the idea of archives of images, specifically how one may form a sense of self from old family photographs and stories, how such images or stories inform or are still relevant in contemporary life. While Andrew’s work speaks to narratives around colonisation, my interest lies in the power of such images in forming identities, the stories one may foreground in response to a visual, text, or oral archive. These responses also seem to connect and reinforce social bonds.
Sometimes it was beautiful, Christian Nyampeta’s work, I thought more about drawing together threads of commonality, and how in relation to others, shared interests and experiences and concerns form community. The introduction of the paper, asks in part, ‘Whom do I live with?’ So, who do I chose to live with, to walk with, to talk with? Those I share time and space with, ‘our lives become what we put our time into’, so what are you, what am I creating? Which relationships do I foreground?
On the smallness of things 