Multiple Voices and the importance of ‘Point of View’

In this essay, Susanne Burns gathers reflections from participants, academics and the wider company on being in a Fevered Sleep process. She considers what it means to be a collaborator on a Fevered Sleep project, from their diverse viewpoints and experiences.

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“Expert eyes and untrained eyes. An expert eye in one field sees differently through the expert eye in another. Expert eyes being opened by untrained eyes.”

— Dr Laura Cull O Maoilearca, 2018

“In a chilly concrete warehouse in Peckham, South London, a line of humans sits outside a makeshift pen; legs crossed, attentive, self-conscious, vertical. Waiting politely for a thing to begin. Stamping and blowing from behind a door, the muffled bleat of a sheep. Silence, waiting. The door opens and 3 young goats step delicately out into the pen. 30 pairs of human eyes follow them as they investigate the space, pale eyes bisected by horizontal black bars. Prey eyes, capable of wide and wary peripheral vision. I try to narrow my focus, adjusting my predator’s pupils, watching their movements and searching for signs of intention and attention. I try to look at them kindly and wisely, to restrain any pheromonal gusts that might cause fear, to make no sudden movements. They are oblivious to my presence.”

— Ruth Little, 2018

The work that Ruth Little writes about, Sheep Pig Goat, raised some important questions about what we see, about who is watching whom, about point of view and about the very notion of ‘seeing’. Laura Cull O Maoilearca writes:

“Fevered Sleep have invited me to offer a ‘series of reflections’ on the project, Sheep Pig Goat, from my ‘point of view’. The question of the nature of that ‘point of view’, though – and the relationship between ‘my’ point of view and those of others, including animals - is at the heart of the project itself. More than anything, perhaps, Sheep Pig Goat invited me, pressed upon me even, to take the time to attend to – or take stock of - what constitutes ‘my’ point of view and to what extent that perspective might be produced or transformed by, not merely imposed upon, the other bodies it encounters (who also have their own points of view). “What do animals perceive, when they perceive us?” the project asked – so from the start, the invitation was there to consider myself an object of perception as multiple, rather than as the privileged subject of perception per se.

In the first instance, most obviously perhaps, it asked me to attend to my point of view ‘as a human’. It asked me – explicitly – to consider how I look at animals, but also to reverse my focus and consider how animals see us, themselves, and each other.

But this idea, this practice of attending to point of view extends beyond sight and the visual, beyond the assumption that my gaze is The gaze, in order to include other modes of perception, but also nonhuman eyes. It is also a question of ‘seeing’ in the political sense – of attention and perception in the political sense – where we consider the ways in which ideas and habits of thinking (as well as more physiological limitations) intercede to shape the ways in which animals appear and fail to appear to us. Much hope rests in the possibility that what it means to see animals as ‘as a human’ is not fixed. We do not know what it means to perceive the world ‘as a human’.”

— Dr Laura Cull O Maoilearca, 2018

Sheep Pig Goat, like all of the company’s work, sought to bring a multiplicity of perspectives – or points of view - to an area of enquiry.

“We always want to have multiple voices that contribute – partnership is at the heart

Even after 21 years we genuinely don’t know what we’re doing – this is creatively enriching and more exciting. Whilst we have a really strong vision – part of this is for the work to be porous. We are equally interested in talking to a world leading scientist, a three year old child or a grandparent. We make no value judgments about the different values of different voices. We are equally invested in every participant. What makes us successful is having the multiple voices because quite simply, it makes the work better.”

— David Harradine

The work of Fevered Sleep is therefore, in essence, collaborative. In the Fevered Sleep Business Plan 2017 -2012, the company state:

“The process of inquiry that drives our work inevitably leads to a desire for exchange, conversation, dialogue and debate. Each project we make in some way draws on the ideas, response, knowledge or expertise of external people.”

Collaboration with artists, with academics and with ‘audiences’ and ‘participants’. Different perspectives and different lenses are shone on the issues being explored and this cross disciplinary approach is pivotal to the company’s approach and ethos. It is crucial in exploring difference, in inviting people to ‘see’ things from different angles.

“the project … prompted me personally to consider my point of view ‘as a researcher’, as an ‘academic collaborator’. How do researchers who mostly write, like me, think alongside projects like Sheep Pig Goat? How do we even talk about the differences between my point of view and those of the company when the vocabularies we have used in the past – that distinguish between theory and practice, thinking and making, academic and artistic research, scholarship and performance - no longer sound quite right?”

— Dr Laura Cull O Maoilearca, 2018

The ongoing development of This Grief Thing was undertaken through a series of conversations with different groups of people able to inform David and Sam’s thinking. The resulting project was a space where further conversations could take place.

Fevered Sleep tackle serious issues headlong …

“We think it’s time to talk about grief.

We have some experience: one who is grieving, one who is not.

And neither of us feel confident in these positions, as friends, as a brother, sister, son, daughter, mother, nephew, niece, aunt, uncle, colleague, employer, employee, teacher, student, neighbour,,,

When death and therefore grief is the only certainty about being a human, a human who loves other humans, it is confounding when you start to think about our failure as a culture (my culture, I can only talk from this viewpoint for the time being) to know how to navigate IT. We don’t know how to talk about IT. So let’s not, OK? No, not OK. Can we please put everything else in our lives on hold until we’ve sorted through this, messy, horrifying, catastrophic, life changing thing which is both extraordinary and the most ordinary.

Can we talk to each other about it? Just say some words. Let’s start small. Let’s start with the words death, dying, died, dead.”

— Sam Butler, Blog 22nd February 2018

This may not always be straight forward or even comfortable. For example, the invitation to collaborators to take part in Sheep Pig Goat raised some interesting responses when people were invited to take part:

“At first I was absolutely not interested in being part of that project. I was very concerned about the animals’ welfare, I didn’t like the idea that they were going to be, essentially experimented on. I felt very uncomfortable with that, I felt uncomfortable with my, contribution towards that experiment, for want of a better word, as a vegan.

Essentially I was concerned with the issues that this chap Declan brought up, about consent.

But the response I got from you, pretty much immediately I think, was really well thought

through, and you explained the reasons you were doing it and that people would learn from

it and that reassured me that the whole thing was going to be done as respectfully as

possible, and it was done to learn things that were going to improve human animals and non-human animal’s relationships. So that changed my mind from my initial response.”

— Tom Jackson, Artist

“My first reactions were - What are these people on? These people are mad. I am a hard core scientist specialising in animal welfare and behavior. The idea sounded bizarre and I had welfare concerns but these were allayed and I became interested after we had spoken on the phone. Concern for animal welfare lay at the heart of the enquiry and I realised it was a chance to get some messages across to non specialist audiences, people we wouldn’t normally reach and have much broader influence. I wouldn’t have known where to start with this as an academic – my work does not reach the general public but this could and did.”

— Alan McElligot, Interview, 2017

Nor are the issues tackled comfortable and, when this is combined with the multiple perspectives, the collaborative processes and the strong artistic vision this sets the work apart from that of many other companies:

“There is something distinctive about the big questions our work addresses – the type of open ended questions and the big massive themes - using the art and the participation of others to scratch the surface and open the debate about the questions we ask and the themes we address and the way we open debates about huge issues. We address issues such as animal intelligence or intergenerational relationships and go into the process without knowing what the outcome will be …. there is an inquiry within the work which is overt. The process is a catalyst for thinking and exploration. We are not the only company who does this but one element of our distinctiveness is that Sam and David’s artistic vision is strong and is the key driver throughout – a lot of participatory art is a range of voices – but our work artist is led and has a single vision informed by multiple voices.”

— Sophie Eustace

The particular approach to work adopted by Fevered Sleep raises many questions about the meaning of the terms we routinely use to describe ‘collaborators’ or ‘participants’ in any artistic process. Ultimately, David and Sam make the artistic decisions but these are informed by the people who engage with the process. Collaborators take all forms – academics, artists, members of the public, audiences/ visitors/ observers – but what they have in common is they are contributing thoughts and perspectives:

“As a collaborator, my point of view on the project was something of a privileged one in comparison to an “ordinary” audience member. This point of view included: informal conversations over lunch with the company during the project, chances to observe more private or unseen elements of the company’s processes producing the publicly available dimensions of the project, a chance to extend the discussion about the project long after it concluded. But when I say privileged, I don’t mean that I, as (supposedly) the bona fide academic researcher, somehow know more about what I am looking at than the ‘ordinary’ audience member. What became very clear in discussions was that the audience included all kinds of knowledges: farming, training, breeding, owning, working with, living alongside, studying...”

— Dr Laura Cull O Maoilearca, 2018

This also challenges the notion of audience. Sheep Pig Goat opened a process of research and improvisation to the public and invited them to converse with the company afterwards. They were there to watch, to judge, to perceive …. They were ‘visitors’, interrogators or observers whose perception of what was happening was important to the research. But this placed the artists in a very vulnerable position.

For the artists this was challenging:

“The first few times, I was quite conscious of the audience – sorry … we shouldn’t use that term because they weren’t an audience, they were non active observers.”

— Kip Johnson, Artist

“I think after the first two conversations after encounters I really wanted to have a time as a huddle, as a group of creatives, to reflect, to safeguard ourselves, to nourish the experience together, and then go ‘okay, shields up, here we go’ towards those other observers who might have opinions that we need to kind of listen to. It was interesting, David that you said ‘I wasn’t able to really respond very well’, I thought you were both incredible at responding, I would have been a lot more fiery and angry. I wouldn’t have been so calm and collected. I thought you did brilliantly at showing the space, with all the words from the process that were on the walls, all that, with the books and everything and to just kind of… ‘okay, let’s calmly go back to explaining why what you’ve just said is not actually really necessary and taking into consideration everything we have been doing here thank you very much.”

— Sterre Maier, Artist

Fundamentally, Fevered Sleep adopt an approach to making work that is not genre specific but is ideas driven; that is accessible in a deep sense of the word, expressing an interest in the views and ideas of the people with whom they engage; that engages people through multiple points of entry and that is driven by the quest for ‘seeing’ and enabling others to ‘see’:

“How do we “make ourselves accessible” to people for whom art and culture are not matters of entitlement? How do we “make ourselves accessible” to people who do not feel invited to take part? How do we “make ourselves accessible” to people who think and feel that art and culture is not for them, whose unique and specific knowledges are in a different territory entirely? Is it perhaps, simply, by being interested in them. But to be interested brings another whole set of risks, because how do we remain interested if there’s a strong, strong chance we will disagree?”

— David Harradine, Blog October 2017

References

Cull Ó Maoilearca, Laura (2018) Reflections on Sheep Pig Goat

Little, Ruth and McElligott,Alan (2016) One an(d)other: Two reflections on Sheep Pig Goat