By Frances Williams, Participant Observer/Observant Participant

The light of a sunny morning breaks at different angles inside the living rooms of people across North Wales (and in South London, Devon, Bristol and Mid Wales too!) Through ‘unmute’ controls, the sound of birdsong reaches us. A blackbird, perhaps, or is it a thrush? A dog barks in Nant Peris and is heard in Crystal Palace.

The miniature movements of other people - reaching for a coffee, crossing legs on a sofa - animate our laptops as we ponder how to respond to the question posed a moment ago. The silence is held for a good long time… One participant (Sara) swings gently in a hammock, birch trees stretched our behind her. (‘I couldn’t bear to be online indoors’). Another person (Kar) holds her little dog on her lap, stroking it ears.

Many of us, like myself, simply peer over the rims of our glasses into the chequerboard shapes that comprise today’s Utopias Bach ‘Collaboratory’ (a made-up word to describe something between ‘collaboration’ and an experimental ‘laboratory’). We watch each other, yes, but also let urgency fall away. We sit and absorb the ambiance of this spring day together. A voice breaks through, eventually, to respond in her own time to the question I had originally thrown out to the group: ‘How do we value what we do through Utopias Bach?’

+++

The companionable silence, described above, was a valuable moment for me. It taught me a lesson that perhaps I needed to learn. It arrived on the back on my having overshot a ten-minute slot, within which I presented on the topic of going ‘Beyond Evaluation’. This workshop aimed to explore the value of the Utopias Bach (UB) project through articulating our collective sense of value(s) in relation to it (whatever ‘it’ was).

Evaluation frameworks usually respond to funder’s criteria. Often, they enlist reductive methodologies. In my line of work – Arts in Health – one measuring tool that is emphasized as being especially useful is that of Social Return on Investment (SROI). This method ascribes the social value of any given project through calculating the amount of money saved through every pound spent. Such mathematical formulae are designed to encompass human values usually left out of the logics of stringent economics. SROI is deemed to pass the test for public funding required by cash starved councils. This is the case in Gwynedd, for example, where I was informed by one local council representative that:

The main distinction of SROI to other measurement approaches is the ability to identify monetary values for our stakeholders’ outcomes. It is this monetisation that allows us to speak a common language where we can compare the benefits created to their costs of production (my italics)

Putting to one side this neoliberal (austerity enabled) norm, I was keen to pilot an alternative at the collaboratory to arrive at a more relational assessment of the value of UB.  The session began with a meditation by Samina. In order to value what you have, you first must notice it, she suggested. She invited us to ‘drop-in’ to the session through paying attention to our bodily sensations, not merely thoughts and words which taken alone can ‘narrow our range of noticing’.

Mindful meditation is derided by some as an all too convenient form of self-care that’s been adopted (and co-opted) by corporate culture. Its take-up here does indeed suggest that this understanding of its use – to ameliorate legitimate complaint - has proven a factor in its uptake. One Buddhist critic memorably described mindful meditation’s proliferation in such working contexts as ‘McMindfulness’ (Purser, 2019).

In a nuanced paper titled Can Mindfulness really Change the World? Will Legget charts explores various traditions of ‘consciousness raising’, those that lie at the heart of interpersonal and social transformation. ‘Mindful self-monitoring enables a crucial pause’, he writes, ‘before habitual, often conflict-generating behaviours kick-in’. He further speculates, by way of Foucault, how such practices might also facilitate a ‘deliberate agency’, one whereby ‘prefigurative social relations’ might find an outline. Such relations act as ‘holding spaces’.

Following the invitation to notice from Samina, we pondered the image of the strawberry plant as a metaphor for the UB project – one of rhizomatic growth, punctuated by fruitions. She noticed I was going on a bit and interrupted me to draw me back from my ‘slide fugue’, inviting the group to reflect. We moved into a discussion of language and wider sense of belonging within a group over zoom, with (Sara) interjecting to correct (mis)understandings of the Welsh word ‘hiraeth’.

What is the Welsh context for this type of work? One which pays as much attention to the How of working together, not merely the What... A particular context is perhaps beginning to be developed around this type of work as the demands of capitalism become not merely unsustainable, but personally unbearable too (offering precarities that cause of mental and physical illness). While the pandemic served to disrupt and discredit the market ideal, no immediate alternative or replacement was provided.

Hope emerges, perhaps, through small initiatives that strike new shapes. A London grouping, Healing Justice, seeks to ‘create the capacity to do transformational work, led by people of colour and lived experience, working at the intersection of oppression, health, healing and liberation practice’. They deploy ‘participatory practices’ to move towards this goal, seeing these forums as those best suited to ‘undo harms, repair, vision and sustain futures free from intimate, interpersonal and structural violence’.

While in Cardiff, the arts organisation Gentle Radical, similarly attempts to imagine a radically different arts ecology forged through close relations of exchange and shared experience. ‘Seeding and growing an “imagination infrastructure” from the roots of communities is one way we can close the distance between the global challenges we face and the equitable and regenerative world we know is possible.’ (Rebab Ghazoul). These groups conduct some of the most responsive, attuned and emotionally literate zoom meetings one would wish to partake in.

A global perspective was offered by Seran who posted word of a ‘kinship course run by artists, scholars and activists’ after the March collaboratory. Alienated ‘within our own bodies’, the current sense that ‘we don’t belong’ demands that we form relationships that ‘enable us to step forth into being and enlivenment’, this group affirms. I liked this last word – enlivenment - one that might remedy our ‘zombie’ capitalist existences. That said, Seran dryly noted in her email to me, that she didn’t have either the time or the money to attend’ (tickets cost between £200-250 per person).

Such are our predicaments. To reject neoliberal capitalist norms while having to embrace them, a polarity negotiated in day-to-day interpersonal exchanges. UB has served to make me more aware of my distributions of attention relative to time and money: how I prioritise paid work even while it may be less worthwhile. These are struggling, as much as juggling acts: they do not comprise either/or choices.

As the session turned out, value was not a matter to debated abstractly. It was a quality, a substance, an ambience we held together in our ‘room’ of many rooms. The groups was assured enough of its own value not to feel it had to immediately articulate it. The silence was itself an expression of collective value, one worthy of attending to and indeed, savouring.