[MUSIC INTRO]

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[BECKAH]

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Hi! And welcome to this series – Who Cares? We are a collaboration between four students from the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama – otherwise known as Bandobast Theatre Collective, and Camden Carers – a service for improving the quality of life, health and wellbeing for all carers in the borough of Camden.

With the help of Claudia, Chris, Mekhled, Berni, Fionnuala and Jacky, we have compiled a series of episodes each – using their creative content, and curated by us to hopefully celebrate the fact that there is no single story when it comes to carers – each person being a unique creative in their own right, with the only single narrative applicable being that each one of these fantastic persons is brimming to the top as an inspiration of love.

Each day, for the seven days of this Carers’ Week, we will release another specially made episode. Each one focusing on one person we’ve worked with for this project.

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For episode 6, we have a special episode where our own Bandobast member, Samira talks about her experience as a person being cared for and speaks honestly with the persons caring for her – her parents.

In this first episode we visit Chris. Due to being so busy at the moment with caring responsibilities, Covid, working and a child, Chris was far too busy to get 100% involved. She did, however, kindly pass us to her blog frictionfilms.net, and I must say I spent a very large amount of my morning reading the posts there.

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One that particularly caught my eye was entitled My Practice. This post was written during Covid-19 and resonated so strongly with me on a personal level.

How can we be creative...productive...insightful? How can we create at this time when the world is grinding to a halt? When we are all mourning for our collective energies and experiencing the global grief of life as we know it possibly ending?

Alas, for many carers this isolating world we are now experiencing is not a new phenomenon, and yet they managed to move through it with love. As a collective, they are already one step ahead,and yet, still not given the respect and reward they deserve.

Here is a piece of Chris’ story – just a piece of a jigsaw of a many-coloured life.

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[STORY MUSIC]

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[CAMERON] Honestly! Writing about ‘my practice’ at this time doesn’t come easily. It feels out of place, and so far away – almost unimaginable...when I’m up to my neck in hands-on caring, domestic logistics and working out how to pay the bills and rent over the coming months. Like, who am I kidding that there is anything more important than the wellbeing of my nearest and dearest...and keeping house and home together? It’s weird – like there is actually a part of me pushing my practice away!

Okay, I’m pushing through and promising myself to get somewhere today in this post.

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[BELLS TINKLING]

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[STORY MUSIC]

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[BECKAH] Like I mentioned a couple of days ago, I realised I hadn’t written the blog for 19 days – it really didn’t feel like 19 days.

Hands and head were so full that [I] had to get into a bubble at home to work out a more functional daily routine to get more work done.

The work is really interesting (gender equality) so I’m familiar with some of these dynamics at least, and I know I have to resist and re-examine these feelings, and somehow get out of the vicious circle.

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[BELLS TINKLING]

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[CAMERON] Initially, I wasn’t writing because my practice didn’t feel important , it was more that the daily routine didn’t feel interesting enough to write about. I suspected that this was somehow significant although the words never made it onto the page...i.e. that daily life of ‘social exclusion’ (or whatever is a better word) is drudgery, repetition, ‘not interesting’ and somehow that’s partly how it works. It grinds you down, makes you (feel) uninteresting to others, builds up walls, keeps you isolated.

So I can see how that could lead to feelings of even rejecting your own agency or practice.Along the lines of: remembering there is another way – another you, makes the drudgery harder to bear.

I read other woman talk about the grief of lost work during confinement due to caring responsibilities. It kind of makes sense that you could also get to the point of wanting to push that grief away.

I was pushing myself to write today because I need to get these thoughts down. It feels essential to integrate an intersectional dimension into my work, and if I can try and articulate these aspects of my experience, maybe I can be more empathetic and sensitive to others’ experiences and knowledges too.

There have been some good developments. Some more (paid) work coming in. Building connections to other carers and trying to tune into or build a better understanding of how these social dynamics work. Some lovely times with little one and older one as well. Some lovely little growing and flowering plants in our home.

So, my practice! In the darkest times over these past weeks, literally the work of Jo Spence has kept me strong and kept my connection to my practice alive. I guess because her work, and the creative collectives she worked with, very overtly and very strongly incorporated the female experience, caring, drudgery, work, politics and art together, creatively in struggle and the collective coming together; and this body of work took place in London in the 1970s and 1980s which were the formative years and place of my youth.

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[BELLS TINKLING]

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[BECKAH] My practice has this very visceral embodied side (a la Jo Spence), combined with hugely transformative experiences I had in multi-scale networks and collectives from around the turn of the millennium (online and offline); in particular when living in Spain, with the Indignados movements that emerged after the 2008 financial crisis.

These movements combined face-to-face practices and cultures (e.g. public assemblies, local associations linked in networks and platforms) with similarly structured online networks, groupings and technologies. A very potent mix of the embodied and a range of digital sensations, tools, spaces with a different kind of ‘body’ (suggesting but not actually being immaterial).

The constant use of digital space yielded a lot of large scale data, which allow us to see the collective body – and ‘the Collective Intelligence’ – through data visualisations...all of which was very visceral, as people’s guts, hearts and minds were all out there – online and face-to-face.

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[BELLS TINKLING]

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[CAMERON] The idea of Collective Intelligence came out very strongly in the Indignados experience and broader technopolitical international networks. I’ve been researching this for some time, and I feel the term ‘Collective Intelligence’ is the most intuitive way to express a complexity of creative, analytical, active and distributed practices.

For example, there are ideas like ‘The Hivemind’ of social media and the ‘Wisdom of the Crowd’ seen in Wikipedia which are already out the[re in daily life. Working from these most intuitive points, the first video piece in my Collective Intelligence project will be coming out soon, entitled La Colmena – Spanish for ‘The Hive’.

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[BELLS TINKLING]

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[BECKAH] So...my practice...I love all the technopolitical work with data visualisations and big processes, but I guess my take on it will always bring me back to the micro-practices of how do we do it? What are the hands-on embodied practices to make Collective Intelligence happen?

How does the individual relate to the collective? How does the micro interrelate with the meso and the macro and vice-versa? How can I as an individual work within a collective? How can we as a collective work within an even larger network?... [MALE VOICE] How do we ‘do Collective Intelligence’?

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[BECKAH] Remembering the full body of practice: the culture, creativity, analysis, the data, policy, community, life and politics altogether.

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[BELLS TINKLING]

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[BECKAH] Many thanks to carer and poet Kamryn Houston for her help in this episode. We really hope you enjoyed listening. Tune in next time for Part 2.

In the meantime, if you’re still asking yourself that question...Who Cares? Till next time...

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[PODCAST MUSIC OUTRO]

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