Here are 3 of our cardboad “gods of our time” featuring last week at Wellbeing Economy Cymru Day at Swansea Arena. We took along Death, Meritocracy and Lady Luck each with a question they wished to ask the audience. People’s responses, particularly to Meritocracy, were fascinating. I will reflect on the responses and ensuing conversations in a longer blog in due course.
Note that our gods now have their own (cardbaord) pillars to make them feel more at home in their own pantheon with the pillars representing existing or decaying institutions of our time. Kirsty pointed out that we often encounter pillars as the only remnants in the ruins of past civic institutions.
Next adventure for the gods is a trip North to Fay Andrews-Hodgson’s new community discussion forum, Peosis in York
We, the Larks & Ravens, and our cardboard gods are delighted to be taking part at the Wellbeing Economy Cymru Day at Swansea Arena on November 12th. We hope our life size gods of Justice, Death, Luck, Meritocracy, Balance & Growth will help stimulate discussion about the unseen powers which shape our systems, behaviour and thinking. Come & meet them (and us) on the Day. Find out too how making (even out of cardboard!) can stimulate new thinking.
Last week we had an impromptu get-together of the various cardboard ‘gods of our time’ which we’ve so far made. A few of the original ones are looking a bit tatty round the edges as a result of their various adventures. Poor old Lady Justice now has to travel in two halves. But hey, that’s the natural process of ageing – human or cardboard.
Seeing them all squeezed together in my dining room, we wondered what they might chat about with each other if left alone so we had a go at some improv dialogue which always results in surprising insights.
Here’s just a snippet of a sofa chat between Death and ‘Convenience’ – one of our modern gods who has overstepped his useful boundaries and become a dominating force in our lives and our society. What could counter his largely unquestioned force?
Death: What’s all the hurry Convo? What exactly are you saving time for? Having ‘saved’ it, what do you actually do with it? You do realise you have NO idea when I’m going to show up.
Convenience: That’s bloody inconvenient of you!
Death: It certainly is. I am the ultimate inconvenience.
Convenience: Ah, but these days I can call up an online service who will collect the dead body, cremate it without me needing to be there and then deliver the ashes back to me in a nice pot… maybe even on the same day. Death done and dusted without me moving from the sofa. Pffff.
Death: I’m really regretting that I contracted out the post dying stuff which I used to look after myself – it’s the deep learning of the universal mystery of death and finding oneself outside earthly time for a while remembering, respecting, mourning and laughing together. Some people don’t even bother with flowers any more… even plastic ones. I hate plastics because they don’t die – big mistake. But, you know Convo, however quick and convenient these contracted services are, you can’t actually dodge death or even ‘make more time’.
The most recent god to emerge from sheets of cardboard on our cutting table is ‘Convenience’ – a concept inspired by a random conversation with an American lady complaining about its dominance in our lives today.
In making new gods out of cardboard, it’s not the case of thinking about an abstract concept and then illustrating it. Instead, it’s letting a previously unknown god emerge through drawing, cutting up cardboard and browsing magazines for words and images which happen to call out for some reason. Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of “dialogism” in art shows how meaning is never fixed but in constant flow through context, interaction and exchange. This, for me, captures how it feels when creating one of our conceptual gods. It certainly feels like a dialogue.
This a post-hoc narrative but hopefully captures something of the random walk which gave rise to this particular instantiation of a god of convenience! There will be others as we unpeel this concept further.
Somehow, Convenience’s head emerged as one very large and very shiny push button – his instant access to an entire world of information, news, ideas, relationships, meetings, everyday tools or a fresh pizza delivered to his door or flowers to a friend. As long as he puts his tie on, he can even conduct work meetings from the comfort of his chair.
As his character emerged, it became clear that the big pulls this god exercises over us are: independence, control, choice and the promise of an everyday life which is easy, simple, low effort (both physically and cognitively) and time saving.
But, Convenience surprised me by revealing himself as possibly our first ‘fake god’. Unlike some of our other handmade gods: Death, Growth, Justice. Luck, Nuance, it’s only the relentless adverts selling Convenience’s values via endless consumer products and services that give this god the extraordinary power over our thinking and behaviour which he now exercises.
And the adverts hide the effects of our subservience to Convenience that we often fail to recognise.
We aren’t independent, instead we are ever more heavily dependent on the ever growing complexity of systems which are outside our control.
Lack of activity leads to the atrophying of both muscle and brain activity and their embodied skills. Are we also missing out on art, individuality, creativity and quality – things that can’t be either simplified or speeded up.
And as to the time saved, what are we actually spending that saved time on – is it time that enriches ours or others lives?
Finally, the convenience myth fails to recognise all the major aspects of life that will always be messy and never reliably convenient or controllable… relationships, emotions, other people, climatic forces and, of course, our physical bodies.
I’ve written a short piece about my experience of unravelling what the concept of “nuance” might mean in our conflicted world through physically making a cardboard life sized Nuance goddess.
Our primary motivation in creating life size ‘gods of our time’ is to make visible and conversable the concepts which shape our lives, cultures, politics and thinking.
Last summer, we had an improv dialogue between 2 of our ‘gods’ – Lady Luck and Lady Justice – (see above), the context being their joint appearance on a TV Chat Show. They disagreed on a lot of things but the two discovered a shared scepticism of the fairness of a society based on meritocracy.
A recent article by Will Snell of the Fairness Foundation reminded me of their conversation. Will’s question was: ” Could encouraging successful people to acknowledge the role that luck has played in their lives help to challenge our collective self-delusion about living in a meritocracy?”.
He described a recent interview with the comedian, Trevor Noah who, when asked what he wished for in this context, suggested “At regular intervals, say every 17 months or so, everyone’s bank account would be randomly swapped with someone else’s. Every time I say this I can guess the rough size of my audience members’ accounts based on whether they cheer or squirm in response to this idea. But jokes aside, I imagine we’d live much differently because this shuffle would force us to grapple with how much of our lives are determined by sheer luck — depending on when and where and in which skin and to whom we are born. Too often wealthy people are praised as innovative and scrappy. A grandmother in an African village who manages to feed her entire family with so little is the most innovative and scrappy, but we rarely hear her story. It would do us all well to avoid wearing our luck as our achievements.“
Ah… but would Lady Justice view that as a ‘just’ suggestion?
Our original cardboard goddess ‘Lady Justice’ has become a bit battered over time & has lost some of her body parts but she still has a powerful presence! We took her along with Lady Luck and a god of Growth on a walkabout in Bristol last Thursday. We were curious about placing one or other of the gods in locations we happened to encounter.
Here’s Lady Justice defending the rights of an Oak Tree
For a while, Larks and Ravens have been creating cardboard ‘gods’ as characterful instantiations of concepts which shape our culture. We’re intrigued by this question: “what are the ‘gods’ which led our society to where it is today and what might be counter ‘gods’ who could take us somewhere different?”
We find the creative act of personifying abstract concepts (e.g. justice, inequality, meritocracy, progress etc) in physical form helps us unravel and explore their essence. It also generates tangible, relatable characters to trigger thinking and conversations. Rightly or wrongly, we loosely call them ‘gods’ in recognition of their invisible power (or, more accurately, the power we humans gift them with) to shape our cultural and political thinking and the narratives we tell ourselves.
With the above questions in mind, we invited 4 Bristol artists to supper suggesting each create a ‘god’ to bring to the table and join the conversation. Co-hosting our gathering were 2 of our own more recent characters – a Nuance goddess and alongside (a work in progress) a Growth god inspired by the UK government’s obsession.
Having prepared the supper, opened some wine and started nibbling crisps, we waited in eager, if slightly nervous anticipation, for our guests to arrive… and soon they did carrying (to our delight) bags and boxes containing guest gods.Once seated, bags and boxes were opened one at a time and a diversity of gods and concepts emerged and were duly introduced … sometimes through interactive performance.
Our conversation around the table was fascinatingly wide ranging often triggered by the complexity of everyday concepts brought physically to life all around us – who are these ‘gods’? is god even the right term? is it offensive or unhelpful? how do they relate (if they do at all) to God or to the ancient gods of Greek myths? What did the things we had created say about us? Do they reflect back to us who we are? And how did they relate to each other? I was particularly pleased when ‘Mother Earth’ (above right) smothered Growth in his rocking chair rather than the worrying reverse.
Sadly, I had to leave the evening to drive home to Wales (along with cardboard Nuance as company) but clearly the discussion around the table wasn’t going to stop for quite a while.
We’d like to thank artists: Jo, Lou, David and Emma & their ‘gods in bags’ for a wonderful evening of exploring with us through art, good food and conversation, the bizarre world we all inhabit.
“World is crazier and more of it than we think, Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion A tangerine and spit the pips and feel The drunkenness of things being various.” ― Louis MacNeice
5 artists from diverse practices and perspectives joined Larks & Ravens for 2.5 days at the Centre for Alternative Technology in October to imagine, explore, play and create together in response to this question: “what gods have shaped our current world and what counter gods could we imagine and create who might challenge and help us reshape the narrative?”.
So… what happened?
… discovering gods through drawing…
A new god theory emerging
…discovering gods through making….
…puzzling & exporing together….
How does a ‘god of binary’ manage the tension between conflicting perspectives and find balance?
What do you call an angry god of disruption and fake information?
Could a tiny but happy wild swimmer be a counter god to the macho, polluting (but small brained) god of relentless progress?…..
and plenty more to digest over the coming weeks…
Our thanks to Tamsin Shasha, Jan Davies, Rosa Nasr-Butler, Arran Stibbe and Staffan Gnosspelius for joining us in such a rich collaborative experiment and to the Centre for Alternative Technology for their friendly welcome, great facilities and delicious food for god making energy.
We decided we hadn’t made any new gods for a while …..
So…Welcome Rubi, the goddess of UBI (Universal Basic Income) – a non discriminatory distributer of equal financial resource to every individual in respect of their birthright as a citizen of earth. Through the act of creating her though, it became clear that Rubi is not without controversy and potentially conflicted motives.
We then took Rubi into an improvised dialogue with Lady Luck – a long experienced and somewhat cynical operator of randomly distributing fortune. It certainly emerged that their fundamental values were strikingly different although both were highly dismissive of any resource distribution based on meritocracy.
We are discovering that improvising a situational dialogue between different pairs of our gods brings to light deep and complex aspects of the abstract concepts each god personifies.
PS. The pans are not necessarily significant. Rubi just needed something to sit on and rest her back against.
On Saturday, we took 2 of our cardboard ‘gods’ – Death & Growth to London for a session with writer and Improv performer Susan Harrison on ways we might create more animated dialogue with the gods we have made.
The Improv training session was inspiring, fun and useful. Once we’d got over the hurdle of relinquishing control, we surprised ourselves by generating a series of wild and whimsical conversations triggered by varying god combinations in different ‘real world’ scenarios proposed by Susan.
For a start, Growth & Death were involved in a couples counselling session where the therapist was encouraging the pair to talk out the tensions and incompatibilities in their clearly fraught relationship. Next came Lady Justice and Lady Luck (two of the gods we’d left behind) as guests being interviewed on a TV Chat Show. The Chat Show host and Lady Luck were both challenging a somewhat defensive Lady Justice on how she could be so absolutely certain on right versus wrong. She had to admit she wasn’t but needed, for the sake of society, to portray that the difference matters. On the other hand, the two Ladies discovered a shared scepticism of the fairness of a society based on meritocracy. Finally, Death and Lady Justice found themselves on holiday idly chatting whilst lying on adjacent sunloungers. While Justice was suffering from guilt at not being in post on top of the court buildings ensuring justice was administered, Death was alarmingly cheerful about the fact that no-one could die whilst he was on holiday! But they both agreed they needed a break from their extremely stressful lines of work.
The big learning for us from the day was that we didn’t have to ‘act’. Given a simple structure of 2 or 3 characters and a recognisable scenario, then compelling and enlightening conversations readily flowed without us consciously thinking about what to say. Each conversation created intriguing narrative threads revealing the character of each ‘god’ as well as surprising insights into the abstract concepts they stand for which can otherwise remain elusive.
We were delighted by the enthusiastic response to our invite for a small group of diverse artists from different practises and perspectives to join us for 3 days at the Centre for Alternative Technology in mid October to work together on imagining and creating ‘the gods for our time’. The really hard task last week was selecting a diverse mix of only 6 from the many really interesting artists who applied. Thank you everyone for the response to the invite and the interest in the topic shown. We look forward to sharing some of what happens on this experimental collaboration.
‘Creating gods for our time’ – 3 day residential workshop https://larksandravens.com/an-invite/ 14th-17th October 2024. Centre for Alternative Technology, Machynlleth, Wales, SY20 9AZ
We are looking to bring together 6 diverse creative practitioners and thinkers to playfully address the question “what gods have shaped our current world and what counter gods could we imagine and create who might challenge and help us reshape the narrative?”. Over the 3 days, we will think, eat, imagine, share ideas and practices and co-create a panoply of lifesize gods with different transforming narratives.
Applications from artists & philosophers, to story tellers & puppet makers welcome – closing date for applications is 02/09/2024 https://larksandravens.com/an-invite/
After experimental pie suppers with a mix of guests and gods around the table, we decided that we needed to find more powerful ways of animating our gods and ways of interacting with them.
In March, we enjoyed presenting our work to an online audience courtesy of Dougald Hine & his Long Table network – a group of people from all parts of the world who, in their own ways, are exploring how to regrow a living culture in the ruins of modernity. We gave them a chance to experience a sample of our practice of drawing as a way of knowing and their questions and thoughts stimulated our thinking in some new directions.
We are now exploring ways to bring together a small group of creative practitioners from different interests and backgrounds to collaborate in identifying the gods and forces who shape the world we find ourselves in today and then imagine and co-create a collection of ‘counter-gods’ who can help us challenge and evolve a world of different values & narratives.
And, as we face a General Election, what would be a Trickster move that could unexpectedly topple the all powerful god of economic growth?
The Larks and Ravens 