Voice Notes: a dialogue

Over a number of weeks I have had the deep and significant experience of working in collaboration – the action of working with someone to produce something. This great pleasure came about from an invitation extended to me by the artist, curator and lecturer, Marion Harrison.

While I am in Scotland’s Orkney Islands, Marion is in Leeds in West Yorkshire, in northern England. Our dialogue has been happening in the form of recorded voice notes, sent each day in response to the ideas, thoughts, remarks, actions and references of the other.

What a joy, to be working in synch with another person whose daily areas of focus and practice are recognisable yet different to mine, are intriguing, generous and seeking contact and affect.

What has become a strong, playful and sparring friendship started when Marion came to Collemacchia, Italy, as a resident with The Museum Loss and Renewal.

Marion’s invitation extends work she is doing into open-ended forms of writing, notes, actions, our relationships with technologies and importantly, how kinship is formed in this digital sphere that we inhabit.

At its core it is also about revisiting and connecting conversations and thoughts first seeded in Collemacchia during the hottest recorded weather in the country’s history. Marion began to think more closely about heat and climate, and in particular, about shade. Shade as a space, not only as a place to shelter but as somewhere to pause, take stock and reflect, as a metaphor for in-betweenness while being. Shade as it relates to the personal, and as a consideration of how to possibly assist in navigating local-global concerns.

Marion started our voice notes by asking me to think about and tell her what shade might mean to me conceptually and contextually, and how the metaphor of shade can potentially be activated as a site for listening, learning, resilience and reflection.

Emerging from that shared place of protection and consideration we have decided to continue, by extending and developing our collaboration. We will each soon be in different parts of Italy. Starting with a double-page notebook spread, I will send an image of it to Marion who will respond to my visual and textual annotations about deep time, ageing, language, land, future(s) and bodily being.

Our chosen format means that from the outset, we will work with the idea of an eventual publication in mind. What that becomes will be determined by the content we generate, by what we feel a publication should be and do, about what paper in the hand can activate, and by who we hope to connect with through making.