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S.T.I.L.L. A project for ‘Gentle Actions: Art Ecology Action’

‘Gentle Actions’ was a process based and interdisciplinary project curated by Anne Karin Jortveit and Eva Bakkeslett in collaboration with director Maaretta Jaukkuri and the gallery Kunstnernes Hus in Oslo, Norway. Gentle Actions explored inclusive and collaborative ways of working with an interdisciplinary and ecological approach to environmental issues, finding new methods to investigate the complexity and breadth of our environmental crisis from a cultural perspective. Participants included artists, activists and environmental philosophers from Norway, Sweden, Germany, Italy, Finland, the US, and the UK including: David Abram (US) David Rothenberg (US) F. David Peat (Italy) Alan Boldon (UK) PLATFORM artists collective (UK).

I was invited by the curators to make a contribution under the subheading ‘Metaphysical Space’, alongside US-based artist Ann Katrin Speiss and Norwegian ecophilosopher Per Ingvar Haukelland. The work I developed in response to this invitation and evolving from correspondence with Spiess and Haukelland, was a series of spoken word recordings which I uploaded from my home in Scotland during the period of the project as it unfolded in Olso. Listening stations were available for visitors to the exhibition, and a blog site with links to the Gentle Actions website provided online remote access.

My decision not to travel physically to Oslo but to participate by staying still, was motivated by the proposition that in response to ecological crisis, while our first instinct is to urgently think of actions we must take to try to fix the problems, in fact the most ecologically sensitive course of action may sometimes be to consciously refrain from action. Inspired by the Pablo Neruda poem ‘Keeping Quiet’, my own ‘gentle action’ was to refrain from travelling to Oslo but instead to write and record a series of meditations on stillness, slowness, silences, pauses and the breath.