A performance of poetry, spoken word, music and dance, to talk about a lived experience of pregnancy with the disease of hyperemesis. How to remain connected to life and motherhood, when death feels very near?
In this story, I fall under the spell of hyperemesis to be left undone. Layers after layers, my shields are retreating: first my clothes (what was I naked); then my strength (could I ever walk again?); then my pride (my guts inside out, even my skin was gone). All what is left are bones. We meet in the corner. I first thought they were death, but what they carry is life. Between us, no words. Only sounds remain. As the days grew lighter, their whisper became song. Bearing witness, they guided my breath to find a language to speak of a space where the gods come to life, taking on many shapes and wearing many names.
Social Dreams, Social Matters: Artistic Affluence in Social Dreaming
Image credit: Bongsu Park, Dreamscape
Join us on Thursday, 17 November, from 5-8pm GMT/UTC, for the Opening of this new art exhibition!
The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, London
In this exhibition, a range of art works critically explores the generative and performative nature of dreaming. Connecting the richness of artistic responses with the theory and practice of Social Dreaming – a radical exercise in sharing, associating to and working with dreams – this exhibition is not to be missed.
Come to the opening to speak to artists, researchers, academics, Social Dreaming practitioners, and Group Relations consultants. Come to think and enquire about the power of dreams and their potential to change how we think about ourselves and the wider world.
During the pandemic, the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations held weekly online Social Dreaming matrices. Why were they so popular and what did they offer to those who came to them? Join us to find out and to experience the meaning of Social Dreaming yourself… What is the societal unconscious trying to tell us? Listen, see, feel, and sense… Think, envision, imagine, free-associate…
The event is open to all. If you would like to see the exhibition but can’t make the Opening, get in touch with Maria at m.markiewicz@tavinstitute.org to see the artwork another time. We look forward to dreaming with you!
Artist bios:
Bongsu Park is a London-based, multidisciplinary Korean artist and long-term collaborator with the Tavistock Institute. Her recent work is founded on how our innermost thoughts may connect with other people’s and how these can then be shared publicly through dreams. She has exhibited internationally including at Zona Maco Arte Contemporáneo, México, FIAC, France, and The Moving Image Istanbul, Turkey. Her performance work was shown at Camden Arts Centre, Gallery Rosenfeld, and The Coronet Theatre in London.
Marie Beauchamps is an Amsterdam-based poet, creative entrepreneur, and an academic working across humanities, social sciences, and law. She has published extensively on affective politics, national identity, and the politics of movement, now engaging with questions of pedagogy and knowledge-writing practices in their relation to knowledge production. She is an Associate Researcher at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, and one of the pioneering practitioners of the Deepening Creative Practice programme.
Juliet Scott is a visual artist with an interest in still life and object relations, and a social scientist interweaving between these disciplines through her studio research. She oversees organisational curation projects and the creation of dynamic learning environments including as programme director of Deepening Creative Practice with Organisations at the Tavistock Institute.
The event will take place on Thursday 17 November, from 5-8pm GMT, in person, in the Tavistock Institute’s office on Gee Street, London (3rd floor, 63 Gee Street, near Old St tube).
No-one gives shit a word of praise, as if shit wasn’t precious. As if shit wouldn’t relieve bodies from toxins and skeletons, brown cores, white bones, orange beaks, and blue feathers. As if shit wouldn’t teach children that stickiness is best when avoided with a sidestep, a jump, a stop. As if shit wouldn’t stage equality between shepherds and wolves, queens and beggars, tyrants and peasants. As if shit wouldn’t seed green trees in grey cities, bringing oxygen to the streets. As if shit wouldn’t release amber smells of other times, feeding silvery flies while flirting with the gods, bringing flowers the strength to burst with pink, lilac, and lavender. As if shit wouldn’t invite life into decay, drawing poets to look at a blank page with the nuances of the nothing that illuminates the day. As if shit wouldn’t bring in patience there where speed was in focus, requesting attention there where habits stiffened. Shit is a wonderous waste, but no-one gives it a word of praise.
Script: write a list of 10 abstract nouns, then a list of ten concrete nouns. Match them to create metaphors and similes to use in your poem.
Understanding
Knowledge
Freedom
Idea
Beauty
Feeling
Experience
Whish
Fear
Derision
Skin
Eye
Hand
Bird
Water
Mouse
Pen
Table
Ladder
Lamp
I’m so tired I feel my entire body ache like a machine that stood for too long in the cupboard. I embarked on the metaphor exercise but the metaphors seem to work like this unbearable weight upon my body. So I switch gear, thinking I’ll go for the pattern exercise, but the patterns are like a ball of wool rolling down the stairs. What can I follow when there is no energy left to see? Perhaps it’s the metaphors that are still working. Knowledge like a skin that envelops your senses, ready to be shaken off in the midst of a good crisis. Understanding that comes as a hand, leading through the meanders of your own narrative, holding tight then letting go again for you to experience the ladder of your wish. See, I already managed to tell you three of them, and I feel the energy coming back little by little. No longer this eye of derision looking upon my shoulder as I try to craft sentences on the go. Did you notice the fourth one? Perhaps, when we are blocked and shattered by the pen of fear, it is because we don’t allow ourselves to just watch the bird’s beauty, by which I mean: to just stay by the words. In my first draft, bird was linked to feeling as in, it comes and it goes, but the bird’s beauty has the adventage to remind me of the simplicity of colours and the extraordinary expertise of nature to create just the right ones in the right order. I’m not sure which prompt I’m following anymore, but I know that many of my nouns have been matched. The remaining meeting time is one minute and nine seconds and already less than a minute. I’m going to have a cup of tea.
Ode to the eggsafter Pablo Neruda
Fields,
beaches,
ponds,
and trees
sing
as you
fall
on twigs
and bridles,
feathers,
moss,
sludge,
and sandbanks.
You hug
in groups
of seven,
thirteen,
or fifty-three.
Fragile
and immobile,
you lie
side by side,
defying
your
hungry
predators.
Brown
patches
or turquoise
patterns
become
a soft
embrace,
an act
of camouflage
that protects
your
burgeons
of life
from
our greedy
hands
and
growling
stomachs—
nothing
can stop
our appetite
for
the
vital
protein
running
inside
the elliptical
shape
of your chalky
beige
shells.
In the protected
space
of your
nesting
nature,
your viscous
substance
creates—
a
beating
heart,
followed
by
blood
vessels,
a tail bud,
wings and legs,
eyes,
brains,
beaks and claws,
feathers and scales.
After days
or weeks
or months,
you crack—
in the fields,
and in the trees,
on beaches
and in the reeds,
creatures
crawl,
squawk
and walk
tasting
the air
and the
nourishing
juice
of
food.
Now
rack
and ruin
you stay
behind
as little
dirty
white dots,
composing
compost,
sand
and soil.
Carried
along by
flowing
water,
you become
fertile
ground,
sediments,
and the source
of a new
cycle
of
life.
Morning glory
For K.P.
I was queuing this morning to buy bread
at the boulangerie, when I saw a
man dragging his dog; he had done a shit,
the man grabbed it, and I watched how he
absorbed his disgust as he felt the waste’s
warmth come through the thin plastic layer shielding
his skin from the shit, which now stunk
inside the blue bag. Further down the street,
I saw the man stop by a tree. It seemed
tired, its leaves already in free fall,
leaning against a brick wall covered in
moss. Now the man looked around
anxiously, his brown eyes staring but not
seeing me nor the tree; his hands shaking
faintly in his khaki jacket too big
for his body. He dropped the blue plastic
bag full of shit on the ground, looking around
one more time. I wished he had left the shit
alone. Now it was our own blue shit
that I saw, soiling
the earth by the copper beech tree.
