exile. a while

recently i participated in a wikipedia edit-a-thon. this was part of the Art+Feminism project, which aims to improve the representation of women artists on wikipedia. it was the first time such an event had been organised in munich, and there was a very good turn-out, with about 20 participants and 4-5 people from Wikipedia Mŭnchen.

i have been a small-time wikipedia editor since 2008, when i discovered that someone unknown to me had created an article for cyberformance, which had then been flagged for deletion due to not being important or verified enough. this was quite a bruising introduction to the world of wikipedia editing. it's one thing to make text edits on an article, and quite another to navigate the circular paths of guidelines and pedantic admin users. it seemed that the fundamental strategy of wikipedia admins is to drive new editors to frustration, breakdown even, so that we eventually simply give up on trying to correct whatever article has been slated for deletion. i am pretty persistent, but i was nearly at my wit's end trying to meet the complex requirements. it took hours of my time and left me feeling exhausted, disrespected and as if i was trying to perpetrate a crime against knowledge.

i had a similar experience a few years later, when someone, again unknown to me, created an article about me as a student project; apparently their class was given an assignment to create a wikipedia article about an artist they admired, and this student chose me. naturally, the student subsequently forgot about this assignment and never maintained the article once it was created (i wonder if the teacher proposing this assignment included the need to remain responsible for their articles FOREVER ...); probably they forgot how to access their wikipedia account, and no longer have the university email address that they used for it. so the admired artists' articles languished, incomplete and out of date. when, purely wishing to set the record straight, i edited it, the problems began. like sharks attracted by the blood of a wounded fish, wikipedia editors with nothing better to do delight in slapping notifications on such pages; not enough verifiable sources! someone close to the subject is a major contributor! or, most demeaning, this person is NOT NOTABLE ENOUGH!

who decides when someone is "notable enough" or not? and notable to whom? wikipedia prides itself on being "neutral", on sticking to facts and written in a neutral tone; the project "strive[s] for articles that document and explain major points of view, giving due weight with respect to their prominence in an impartial tone." but - "major points of view" from whose perspective??? when you click on the "major points of view" link, it brings you to an article about "neutral point of view", which is something entirely different. a "neutral" point of view is one that sticks to simple verifiable facts, without expressing an opinion, whereas a "major" point of view is presumably one that is shared by a majority. that doesn't mean it's neutral - in fact more often than not it is anything but neutral.

since wikipedia was initiated by well-resourced white men living in the developed world, it is inherently biased to the point of view of privileged white men. it's no wonder that women are underrepresented, since we have long been underrepresented in patriarchal history and are still so in the contemporary patriarchial world. the "major points of view" that are documented and explained on wikipedia are predominantly the points of view of privileged white men. Their "neutral" is not the same as mine, which is not the same as billions of people in different parts of the world. the munich edit-a-thon had begun with a lengthy panel discussion featuring a selection of interesting women invited to give their opinions about why women are underrepresented on wikipedia - which struck me as being rather a waste of time. we were there because we already knew this to be a fact, and wanted to change it, not talk about it; the "why" is obvious - we live in a patriarchy and wikipedia is a part of that too. no need to discuss it anymore, let's get on with changing it!

most of the other participants at the edit-a-thon had never edited a wikipedia article before and didn't have log-ins. while they were logging in and learning the basics, i and a few others got stuck in to editing. i created a page for the digital artist and researcher Gretta Louw, and after a couple of hours work i published it - only to be immediately slapped with a copyright violation. it hadn't occurred to me that using slightly altered text from Louw's own artistic statement would constitute a violation of copyright; however as the text was on the web (on her own website), the copyright-checking bot found it immediately, and deemed my slight editing of it insufficient. never mind that the artist had herself given me permission to use it! so, i deleted the offending text and followed the necessary protocol and the copyright violation was removed - to be replaced almost immediately with demands for more citations.

how many citations do you need? wikipedia has "no rules", just guidelines. so, if you are a living woman artist, it would appear that 15 citations (of which six are the artist's own website or publications, and nine are from third party sources) is not enough. if you're a living male artist, on the other hand, a single reference will suffice (here's one example - at the time of writing with just one reference - no reflection or judgement on the artist himself).

another participant at the edit-a-thon offered to help bring the article about me up to standard, and she made quite a bit of progress, but the tags haven't yet been removed. meanwhile others were also discovering that their work was attracting criticisms. it's somewhat ironic that wikipedia has a page in its guidelines titled "Please do not bite the newcomers", encouraging experienced wikipedians to be gentle with newcomers and assume that they are in good faith. the article warns that nothing scares newcomers away faster than hostility. yet several of us left the wikipedia edit-a-thon feeling deeply frustrated, having voluntarily contributed hours of our time and energy only to have it thrown back at us, be told it's not good enough, and expected to devote even more time to improving it.

attempting to get involved with wikipedia feels like putting yourself through some kind of bootcamp initiation where you don't know the rules because there are none, and the guidelines are designed to confuse and exclude. i can't help but wonder how differently a women's wikipedia might operate ...

and yet: wikipedia exists, our information is there, and if we don't participate we can't complain about underrepresentation or incorrect/poor information. the edit-a-thons are raising awareness, bringing more women into the project, and providing opportunities for upskilling and collaboration.

having not posted since october last year, and being an irregular blogger at the best of times, i do have to ask myself what is the point of this blog? i am sure that nobody reads it, except myself when i need to remember when i did something or a link that i know i posted here. so if the only real function of this blog is a personal memory aid, then i have no responsibility to anyone but myself for the regularity or not of my posts. or even the accuracy.

so, for my own personal record, since i last posted, "Magdalena München - In Between" has been and gone, and overall was pretty successful. the performances were great, everyone who participated was for the most part happy and inspired, and the group is continuing with further plans (more on that in another post). there were a few points where the organisation could have been better, and our publicity and audience numbers could have been better - but there is always room for improvement.

i had a couple of weeks to tie up the loose ends and finances from the magdalena event and then i was off to coventry for "We have a situation, Coventry!" which you can read about by following that link. this was the first time i'd lead a "situation" in a university context, which had its advantages and challenges. after the cyberformance and networked discussion event on 24th november, i went with three Coventry staff members to the "In Dialogue" conference in mottingham, where we gave a presentation about the project. In Dialogue is a biennial conference around arts and research projects that are based on dialogic practice, and it brings together some really interesting artists, researchers and projects. i'm now writing a book chapter with katherine wimpenny from the Disruptive Media Learning Lab which was the part of the university responsible for "We have a situation, Coventry!", using it as an example of disruptive pedagogies and learning possibilities in online environments.

so with these two projects, october and november were pretty intense. but i didn't have much time to catch up after them because in mid-december i flew to new zealand. yes, this was a holiday, and at least the first couple of weeks - spending christmas and new year with family, in the cool quiet of the deep south, was relaxing. but my trip was a fairly hectic schedule of visiting friends and family all over new zealand and australia, with very little down time and the added work of selling my beloved car. when i moved to munich in 2010 i didn't want to sell lucy the valiant, and didn't have to as i managed to find a little car museum who was willing to take care of her for me. every couple of years i went home, took her out of the museum, and had a wonderful road trip around new zealand. however, as the years stretched on, it became hard to justify the cost of keeping a classic car on one side of the world when i lived on the other, and only used her every couple of years. i was aware that things like rust needed regular attention, and while the museum people were great and did get some things done, obviously my car wasn't their top priority and they had a lot of other vehicles to maintain and work to do. i had to accept that lucy needed to be with someone who would drive her regularly and be able to keep on top of the maintenance that she needs. so during 2016 i began to prepare myself for the emotional wrench of selling her.

i know that one of my faults is that i let myself get emotionally attached to things like cars (i cried when i learned that the young guys who bought rosie, a 1964 morris 1100, from me had smashed her up); but lucy the valiant wasn't an ordinary car. i bought her in 1993, moved from dunedin to wellington in her a month or so later, and travelled around much of the country in her during various trips over the years, accompanied by different friends and family. she very rarely had any mechanical problems, and she was really a pleasure to drive (as long as it wasn't raining - i never managed to discover the source of a leak on the front passenger side). it was with mixed emotions that i listed her on trademe. almost immediately i began to get enquiries about her, and the number of views went up and up and up. in the end, two possible buyers came to look at her, and one of them offered me the price i was asking without any haggling. and so she was sold. the new owner kindly agreed to me holding onto her for a further two weeks in order to do a planned trip to visit my brother in gisborne, and on 26 january after a perfect road trip from welllington - via otaki, levin, gisborne and ohope - i delivered lucy to her new home. on the flight from taupo to auckland i felt a bit teary and expected that i'd feel sad and regretful the next day - but i didn't; i woke up feeling fine, sure that i'd done the right thing. letting go is hard, but it's amazingly liberating. i really must do it more often!

my antipodean journey lasted nearly three months and took me around new zealand then to australia, where i visited friends and family in brisbane then met up with andy in sydney. we stayed with my aunt, and went to the blue mountains for two days with my cousin gina and her daughter ashley; andy and i hadn't seen them since they'd been in munich two years earlier for borelliosis treatment, and it was amazing to see how much better ashley is. gina has been busy writing a submission to an australian senate inquiry into borelliosis, which will hopefully accept that the disease exists in australia and make it possible for other sufferers to get the diagnosis and treatment that ashley should have had years ago. in the blue mountains we stayed at rostherne, the wonderful old holiday house belonging to family friends. the house has been in that family for over 100 years, and our families have been friends for most of that time, so it's a place rich in memory and history. we did touristy things like going on the scenic railway and bush walks. andy and i also went to coffs harbour for a few days to visit family there, and had a weekend in melbourne with friends before heading back to new zealand for the last two weeks of our holiday.

i had little time for work while travelling, but i did do the final bits of reporting for the magdalena münchen weekend, taught an UpStage workshop at the university of south wales, and kept on top of emails as best i could. now back in munich, i've punged into organising things for the next magdalena münchen event, looking for opportunities for "Unaussprechbarlich", researching and buying a new Linux computer (finally! i was given money towards this at my birthday in july last year, but hadn't managed to make a decision about it), quite a lot of work on the magdalena project site, and quite a lot of wikipedia editing - more about that in a separate post. and many other things, social and networking and work and home stuff, like getting the balcony garden going again.

i feel about ready for a holiday already ...

herbst (autumn) has come and gone too quickly this year. one day i was enjoying riding my bike in the warm evening air, the next day i was getting out my winter coat, boots and umbrella. the leaves are still clinging to the trees but temperatures have plummeted, and today i cut down the tomato plants on the balcony. some still had green tomatoes on them, so these have gone into a paper bag in the kitchen, to ripen there. the lovely physalises (physalii??) at right are from nicki's mother's garden.

i am currently completely busy with the organisation of "Magdalena München - In Between" - a long weekend of performances, workshops, installations, discussions and more; part of my efforts to establish the Magdalena Project network in munich and germany. it's not an easy task to organise something like this in a city where i am not only an outsider, an auslander, but also where i don't speak the language well and am not so au fait with the peculiarities of the arts community - the personalities, relationships, and so on that are different in every cultural ecosystem. i have to navigate all of this, with limited language ability, and sometimes it's pretty challenging. of course, i'm not doing it alone - i'm working with a team of great women, but our project is new and not easily communicated to people who have a vast selection of arts and culture to choose from. first of all we have to get across the concept of the Magdalena Project - that it is an international network, and that it is not only about "theatre" (germans have a very narrow definition of "theatre") but it encompasses a great variety of live performance work. and then we have to promote the individual women artists, who are all amazing in their own ways. we have to promote Violeta Luna to the spanish-speaking community and to people who are interested in political performance; Sandra Pasini should be of interest to the Italian community, as well as to musicians, singers, and so on. for Kordula Lobeck de Fabris, i'm trying to find out who in munich is interested in art projects inside prisons. and so on ... most people in munich haven't heard of the Magdalena Project, let alone any of these individual artists. so it's a big job!

as if it wasn't already challenging enough, annie abrahams & i will perform "Unaussprechbarlich" again on the opening night, friday 14 october. we created this performance last year, based on our experiences of learning another language as adults to live in a foreign country (annie moved from the netherlands to france 30 years ago, and i moved from new zealand to germany six years ago). i admit to being a little bit nervous about performing as well as organising - it's something many magdalenas seem able to do without difficulty, but as i'm not really a performer myself, it's more stressful. i'm doing my best to prepare in advance!

immediately after Magdalena München, i'm off to Coventry for the next iteration of "We have a situation!". this time the project will explore the university-city social relationship, something that should have resonance for many other university towns around the world.

meanwhile in other news: while at the Transit Festival in june, i was interviewed by the wonderful zoe gudovic for her series of inspiring feminist artists. the interview is now online here, and that's us talking together in the photo at the right. i recommend checking out the others who zoe has interviewed - read the interviews here and get inspired!

a few weeks ago, an extraordinary thing happened to me: i turned 50 years old. it's bizarre to have reached this age, when i don't "feel" it - but what's 50 supposed to "feel" like, anyway? when i was a child, 50 was something impossibly distant and old, older even than my parents (and my parents were old in comparison to my friends' parents), something that i simply could not conceive of ever being. 50 belonged to people who came from another time (another planet?), a time that was not and never could be mine. and yet: inexorably, time marches on and here we are - i have existed on this planet, in this form, for half a century. today's children must look at me as something impossibly old, from a time they can only imagine.

at the same time as i want to shout, "i don't feel 50!", and wonder whether a mistake of 10 years has been made with my birth date, i find myself enjoying the sense of perspective as i look back over the last half century. it's filled with amazing adventures and achievements as well as, naturally, a few disasters and disappointments; but generally i've been incredibly fortunate. for some unknown reason, i've never been one to follow well-trodden paths or approach conventional milestones in the expected order. rather, my life has been somewhat haphazard and serendipitous, with huge amounts of learning along the way. i hope that's how the next half century will continue to unfold.

ageing is deeply personal, even though it happens to all of us, no matter how old or young we get to, and it's happening all the time, just like life - in fact, it is life. hitting 50 brings an interesting new perspective to it. i think this next phase is going to be fun!

The Transit Festival has come and gone once again. This was the 8th Transit festival, organised roughly every three years since 1992 by Julia Varley at Odin Teatret. It's one of the high-points of the Magdalena Project festival circuit, as it is the most regular ongoing event as well as the biggest - this year encompassing 12 days. As usual the programme was packed, with early morning training and three performances most evenings, as well as workshops, work demonstrations, presentations and discussions during the day. My contribution included a presentation about "We have a situation!", speaking on a panel about the festival theme "beauty as a weapon", and creating the installation "her light stretches".

Also participating in the festival were two from the Magdalena München group, Henrietta Beyer and Cecilia Bolaños; as we are organising our second weekend meeting this October, with a view to hosting a festival in 2018/19, it's important that others from Munich experience a Magdalena festival, to network and learn what it is that makes a "magdalena". They met Violeta Luna, who will perform at our weekend in October, and Gilla Cremer from Hamburg, as well as many others in the network. We managed to have dinner together one evening along with Violeta, Gilla, Jana Korb (who will also come in October) and Barbara Luci Carvalho who is based in Frankfurt with Theatre Antagon. It was good to make connections and continue to build the network within Germany.

The installation occupied most of my time - more than I'd anticipated (as often happens with such projects!). I had hoped to participate in Deborah Hunt and Madeline McNamara's workshop "Droll Skirmish", but after the first morning I had to drop out as I needed all available time to create the installation. "her light stretches" is inspired by Helen Chadwick's performance and album "Fragments of Love" - songs that Helen composed from fragments of Sappho's poetry. I created text animations for each of the seven songs, and projected these into a space created from large, angled mirror panels. The idea was a development from an installation I made in 2010, with the Austrian artist Eva Ursprung, and I was able to realise it at Transit thanks to Odin Teatret allowing me to use mirror panels from the performance "Andersen's Dream" and financial support from Munich City Department of Art and Culture.

As there was not enough space at the theatre for my installation, the festival found a space nearby - in a former slaughterhouse. The Slagteriet, as it's called in Danish, had been decommissioned a year or two before and is now used for performances and other arts events. In some areas there are established projects, but most of the space remains almost as it formerly was, even with some of the machinery still in place; some rooms are still cold, damp and stinky. As a vegetarian, I was apprehensive about working in such a place, and needed to do some sort of cleansing ritual before I began. Many at the festival helped me with this: Suzon Fuks volunteered a Reiki cleansing, Ana Wolf gave a stick of sandalwood to burn, Maria Porter went to find sage, and Amaranta Osario bought salt. After some walking, visualising, sprinkling and burning the space began to feel better; and once we started setting up the mirrors and playing Helen's beautiful songs, there was a definite shift in the energy.

With the help of two enthusiastic technicians (Tomas Lindström and Gutto Basso) and my glamorous assistant Maria Porter, we managed to get the mirrors set up and the space blacked out over a couple of days. Then we had fun finding the best position for the projector. During this process, I realised that if there were more than about 5 people in the space, the effect of the reflections would be greatly reduced. The installation had been given a 40 minute slot in the festival programme, during which some 80+ people would come. The video loop was 11 minutes, and even if people didn't stay for the whole loop, they still needed several minutes in order to adjust to the darkness and take some time in the space (and many people wanted to see it more than once!). It was clearly impossible to even attempt to get everyone through in 40 minutes. So I did some quick organising, roped in more helpers, and managed to get more than half of the festival participants and artists through during two of our lunch-breaks. In the end we managed to get everyone through, even if occasionally there were 6 or 7 in at once and many people only had about 5 minutes in the space which wasn't really quite enough. I did not enjoy having to break the spell with a whispered request for someone to leave! However, everyone really liked it, many commenting that it was beautiful, and peaceful, and quite a few wanting to spend more time in it. It was great to be able to make this first step in the project, which I hope to continue by working with Helen to add a live performance element.

My presentation about "We have a situation" and the political aims of this project was well received, and in the panel on "beauty as a weapon" I talked about how beauty is a social construct and asked what "beauty" means for different people, for example what is "beauty" to a terrorist. There were several sessions on this theme, but unfortunately I missed all except the one I was speaking on, due to being preoccupied with my installation.

Performances that stood out for me included: Ledwina Constanti's visceral and surprising "Carnage", which combined physical and visual techniques in a powerful performance; the beautiful and inventive use of light and projection in Teresa Ruggeri's "Rovine del Tempo"; Jana Korb's delightful new aerial work "Frau Vladusch"; Madeline McNamara's hilarious and provocative work-in-progress about colonisation and racism; and the fantastic festival finale - "Babayaga" in masks, puppets, costume and the wonderful "crankies", by Deborah Hunt and Sugeily Rodriguez. The lunchtime "Poetry Menu" performances by Camilla Sandri and Roberta Lanave - where we could select a poem from a menu and have it deliciously recited at our table - was also a delight. And there were "old favourites", new works from Magdalena regulars, others presenting work at a Magdalena festival for the first time, works-in-progress and more.

There were two other personal highlights for me in this festival. One was early morning trapeze training on Jana's trapeze, which was set up outside at the edge of the theatre's lawn. This took me to the limits of my physical ability; how is it that as a child I could effortlessly swing myself up onto the playground bars and spin around without any problem, but now I can't even get my legs up without help? Admittedly the bar is higher up, and I'm a lot heavier than when I was 10 years old. With a bit of help from Jana I got there, and once up it was a great sense of accomplishment to sit, stand and do some very modest moves. To be continued, I hope!

The other highlight was the spontaneous opportunity to drive the forklift. The day after the festival ended, the Odin techs were busy moving things around - loading up a truck with the set of "The Chronic Life" to head off the next day to Romania, and putting things back in the storage area that had been our festival dining room. At one point I came out of the theatre and there was the little forklift, standing in the courtyard. I'd seen Fausto driving it at the end of the previous Transit and had expressed my desire to have a go one day - and this day my wish came true! Did you know that forklifts don't have a break pedal? Just one pedal to go forward and one to reverse. The lever for raising and lowering the fork at the front was a bit more complicated, so I just concentrated on driving. It was a great way to end my fifth Transit experience!

Thank you Julia, Nathalie, and everyone who makes Transit happen!