Time has changed, clocks went forward, summer time has began…
(in the beginning there was time, and then it changed)
Lockdown continues…. – – – downtime anybody? – – – Spacetime? – – – how
might things relate in a different way?
Covid, how much we would like to cut it: and I am thinking how nice it would be to take the ‘C’ out: then we are left with Ovid! Ovid was a Roman philosopher – if we could have him instead of Covid, if only…
It’s been over a pandemic year now and still no end in sight. The virus is virulent, causing more havoc than we think we ever did to the environment – but didn’t we? Not us individually of course, but we are part of the same world where we have to endure what is being done to us. Now we are trapped, and are we learning from it? Did you know that deforestation can cause a virus like that? And factory farming?
Are we offline?
It’s time for a change then and ‘downtime’ says it all: on wikipedia its definition reads: “The term downtime is used to refer to periods when a system is unavailable.
The unavailability is the proportion of a time-span that a system is unavailable or offline. This is usually a result of the system ‘failing to function“. How well this applies to the virus then, and the problems it has caused for our system not to function as it normally does.” (end of wikipedia quote)
And how are our little personal systems coping? Those inside ourselves. Time has played a big role for me, This period has brought not only the present into focus but it has brought up my past for me – and imaginations of the future. Things I have done in the past, and how surreal it sometimes now feels, which is augmented for me by my relocation. Much of my past is in London – and the beginning in Germany, so there is a melange of times and spaces, and now here at the coast, where I am now, is my third spacetime (and not always on a continuum…).
Art projects I have been involved with and things I have done. It feels now that it’s time to bring this all together. Things I haven’t followed up, when I should have done. Now that we are our public life has been so reduced, and public spaces are so empty, it all becomes more urgent. Hence my steps into film-making and tiny theatre. A way of telling the story even beyond words. In the telling new stories arise too, and lost stories are found.
World Days make their appearance on my stage once again. There is International Women’s Day of course, and then this year I got very involved with World Poetry Day – with a poem network of my ‘Poem up to the Edge’ which went over edges and the border, by starting in its German version ‘Gedicht bis an den Rand’ and hung up, along with other poems, on the market square in Weiden, Oberpfalz, an initiative by the ‘Landestheater Oberpfalz’. Responding to this, I had the poem in English hung up at my local theatre, the Kirkgate Arts Centre in Cockermouth, and also I hung a copy out in the’wild’ on a lamp post on my local town square here in Maryport. It’ the same square where I had done my tiny film for International Women’s Day, shown below – with film link to follow.
There is more news: the launch of the Ukraine exhibition in Westphalia – East-West (!), and before that my publication of on of my an egg-story for Easter! To be continued…
ColourCirclesite 