In dialogue: Katrina Niebergal & Andrew Wilson respond to the Call Centre prompt via a series of isolated segments from transcribed conversations.
3.
Hey, I have a question for you, do you think I am the least text based, or least intellectual of the Call Centre group?
I don’t know – I’d never thought about it in those terms.
But the reason I invited each of you is because of pre-existing conversations. Ours for example, was already happening, we were already doing it.
The others perhaps needed an excuse to get going, and I thought this could be an opportunity, or an excuse, to do more of it.
This was my thinking, my approach. It had less to do with text or intellect, and more about a
thirst for dialogue.
I mean this is something that you and I keep visiting, we are already doing this.
We have been doing this in fact. But how can we find some sort of form?
That’s the challenge.
Yeah, I keep folding it over but, as yet, haven’t broken through.
I enjoyed reading your 4th entry today. When I first mentioned it, I said synthesis because it tied in with the work that I’d seen you do before, the flat earth stuff, right over into this episode of things. It is conspirational as well and speculative, and It made a lot of sense to me.
I like these little episodes and I think of you sifting through all of this information, mostly informally, the stuff you are attracted to and amused by. And that attraction can be about repulsion too, the push and pull of where your interest goes. Taking these little tiny nuggets, lining them up and painting a broad setting of things.
Basically, what you are saying is this happened, and this happened, and this happened …
This Call Centre thing is a hub where people are contributing to a place – there is a locale. I'm seeing the diagram with the dots, and i'm thinking I’m one of those dots.
I'm asking - What am I doing? What am I feeling and experiencing?
How can what I’m doing find place in this?
What’s the potential of something I could contribute?
What’s the potential of something Andrew and I could do?
I think there is lots of potential in both of those places,
but also what’s the potential with the other two correspondents (Julie and Zahra)?
Yeah, I think that’s the way to approach this really.
Options of potentiality everywhere.
What am I offering, or gathering?
How will it live? Digitally?
Does it land somewhere?
What is it?
I don’t know.
I’m thinking of the David Kishik text What is the Contemporary? The Contemporary as this thing that is ahead of time, just enough, so that it is out of time with the present. I feel like what I’m trying to say, what I’m trying to reflect on, is that this time feels funny. And I still feel like I’m coming to know what it is.
Needing, or allowing space to feel it first?
Yeah.
This time (Covid-19) has been episodic too.
Like, remember when there weren’t any people on the street?
A good friend of mine has been writing short observations, almost daily, and publishing them online. Some are banal, some funny, some really quite touching and profound.
It feels like these also reflect episodes, where the early ones have a very different flavour.
Maybe he found a form for himself very quickly.
But there is still the question of how do they live? How do they reach people?
One of the things I’ve been sceptical of is when art institutions, now finding themselves without an audience, thrown into an existential crisis, and then saying of course we will respond to Covid-19.
In Vancouver I was asked to be part of a publication, a book of what people were working-on during the pandemic. So, I sent some pictures of the garland that I’m making, as a work in progress.
I don’t know where I’m getting to, but I do have a little scepticism.
What are the expectations on artists to reflect on this already?
I don’t mean we can’t, and I do think it’s an interesting challenge.
Perhaps throughout this process nothing is produced. I mean, maybe its these conversations, these Correspondences?
Perhaps this is it?