By Frances Williams, Participant Observer, Utopias Bach

Introduction

How do you recount or reflect on an art project, conducted over zoom, without just pressing the record button? In this blog - the first of three others planned across this year and next - I will attempt this tricky, potentially pointless task. Previously, working as a curator for a London University, I tried to document the reflections of nurses and doctors on the topic of utopia by way of a booklet and exhibition made in 2015. ‘How do imperfect people embody utopian ideals?’ we had asked, responding to this large question by creating a Secret Society for Imperfect Nurses.

I came to be involved in Utopia Bach in a new role as ‘participant observer’ while going on to study for a PhD at Manchester Metropolitan University. This is a term taken from the field of knowledge known as anthropology. While it allows for the usual kinds of learning we do in groups - ‘what it means to be members of our own families, our ethnic and national cultures, our work groups, and our personal circles and associations’ - it markedly differs from these too. One must formalise and organize fluid processes through ‘taking notes; recording voices, sounds, and images; and asking questions that are designed to uncover the meaning behind the behaviours,’ a sage paper on this topic explains.

Being in North Wales didn’t feel so strange or unknown to me. I was born and raised in South Wales before I lived in London. In fact, ‘being Welsh’ became part of how I was able to fit and relate to my chosen topics of place and belonging. Over three years between 2016-2020, I hung out with artists, poets and and publics undertaking projects here that aimed to promote health and the public good through various forms of community or socially-engaged art.

My scholarship was focussed was the inter-disciplinary field of ‘arts in health’ and how this might relate to new local government roles being forged through regional devolution introduced in the Greater Manchester in 2015. Council leaders were offered the chance to run their own local affairs by (then) Chancellor, George Osbourne. They were keen to take this offer up after ‘Devo-Max’ had also been offered to Scotland, in part to assuage anxieties about independence, a possibility staged (and lost) there in 2014. They mounted their own successful demand for fiscal autonomy dubbing the drive for devolution in the greater region of the city, ‘Devo-Manc’. While holding exciting potentials for some, there were drawbacks. The bottom line would have met - part of Osbourne’s wider project of austerity and the shrinking of the Big State by way of the creation of a ‘big society’.

Tough choices presented themselves, then, as much as the chance to dream utopian visions. A short film produced at this time neatly illustrates the point – complete with a money-bank morphing into an impossible piece of performance art – a pig that flies. So much for the devolved political utopias of our day. But what’s all this got to do with art-making in Wales, I hear you ask?

Well, these recent political histories reveal something about our understanding of the scales of government and civic life we operate within, either as member of a ‘big society’ or citizen of a small nation. Common feelings I detected in these years, across the border between North Wales and the North West of England, were a sense of distrust and powerlessness in authority, national or local. Little faith was held by people in their leaders to enable meaningful change, whose promises of ‘better’ futures were most often met by weary scepticism.

Byd Bach

As the pandemic took deadly hold in 2020, small forums of friends and family became the only trusted lifelines to hold onto as ‘normal’ ways of living put on hold At this dystopic time, all social connections were thrown into question. As our physical worlds shrank into the hyper-local, I found local inflections amid fear of infection. ‘Bach’ is a word I know as term of affection alongside others, like ‘dwt’ or ‘cariad’. My granny understood how punishment can belittle us. (We ‘recoil’ in fear.) From her, I learnt an early lesson that being over-sized need not necessarily mean being over-bearing. We can be large without making others feel small.

One of the things that sustained me over the pandemic lockdown was my friendship with founding member of the Utopia Bach project, Wanda Zyborska. Like me, she was also studying for a PhD but we only found that out about each other’s existence when a mutual tutor in Manchester put us in touch. One of our daily pleasures – and vital supports through these strange days was taking a walk around Church Island. Here we could stop to listen to curlews as we discussed the work of Deleuze & Guattari, criss-crossing lines of desire. ‘There are no desiring-machines that exist outside the social machines that they form on a large scale; and no social machines without the desiring machines that inhabit them on a small scale’. We discussed such academic propositions, I should quickly add, amongst other more prosaic topics; how to make plum chutney, de-flea a cat or zap a virus on an apple mac.

Amongst theories of well-being, forged through ideas of political economy, I found the simple pleasure of finding someone else to share my phd topics. Academia is often presented as being an out of touch zone, set amid ivory towers. But in Porthaethwy, I found ideas happily tangled up in my habits of living, set between pebble-dashed bungalows and my rented flat. These ideas took on a form that Wanda and myself could use as useful props in a time of great anxiety and fear.

So, I was sad to leave this place to return to the big city of London in November 2020, when Wanda gave me a parting gift, a small jug to water my many house plants. I very reluctantly accepted the need to travel from a world of expansive natural beauty (and poor employment opportunities) to one of potted plants placed at the centre of financial capital.

Online world

Since shrinking resentfully into my London flat, I’ve attended Utopia Bach meetings over zoom where silences were allowed to take-up space, a refreshing change from other work calls more typically full of crammed agendas. A grant, awarded by ACW in 2021 has since resourced the project, marking a change from informal grouping to funded ‘doorstep art’ project. Coming back into this new online forum, I was delighted to take a place as participant observer, half in, half out of the flow of the project’s life. The wider group told me what they wanted: an outside ‘critical eye’ to help understand the dynamics at play amongst this small, if not immodest, set of collaborations.

We agreed that I could try and focus on different types of knowledge exchange: the collaborative meeting, the funding review, the public event, the exhibition. In sync with the emergent and generative nature of this project, I’ve invited the group to scribble notes on this text - see/contribute here. I am open to new ways of writing, doing things too. I’ve refrained from making this blog too neat, while trying to weave a useful opening…

Future sprawling reflections might refer to the structural issues that shape any arts for well-being project, their impetus and scale, process and possibility. The Welsh government has produced its own policy frameworks to ensure the well-being of future generations (with odd lego-like illustrations of a perfect Welsh town to match).

As the wide window in which to imagine ‘doing things ‘differently’ through the pandemic begins to fade, these will be fascinating subjects to chart as Utopia Bach grows its own tentative visions, small gestures, between the impossible and possible. I invite you to follow me, as I follow them, to Watch This Space.

September 2021