I think the group would do the following:
- commit to a ‘program’ of regular reading and reflection on books, articles, videos etc
- be involved with intentional conversations exploring how transformation happens in public spaces, focussed around questions like this:
what kind of events create spaces where transformation might happen
what kind of transformation can ‘art’ effect?
how does transformation happen?
- share practical ideas and wisdom, building up a database of knowledge

The intention of the group would be to have fun, to network people with the intention of collaborations, shared imagination, action / reflection, and to create a bank of wisdom and resources

Some of those who participate in the group may also want to be part of the UK transformative spaces trip in August / September 2011. Last year we re-shaped the UK trip so that we could focus more on transformative spaces, and I think this year’s trip will be refined even more to think specifically about curation, rather than art – in particular, what spaces invite people in, and let them be different within them. The trip will include conversations with artists / curators; visits to galleries and spaces; participation at greenbelt festival.

The only cost for those being part of the learning group would be for any reading material that needs to be bought… and obviously for the UK trip should people go on that!

Send me an email if you’re interested. You don’t have to know anything or be doing anything to be part of this – just have an interest and commitment to learning together. if things go to plan it will be beginning in march.

edited to add: no, you don’t have to be australian to be part of this!

Before I went away I had a flurry of alt worship workshops, where I finally put together some coherent statements about how I design stations. These are my tips:

What makes a station a station?

Spaces for people to put their story next to another

Self-directed participation: people can ‘choose their own adventure’, or decide the ending for themselves

Full participation: the space is different because each person has been there

Multi-sensory: inviting the active participation of people’s minds, bodies, hearts, souls, senses

Secrets to successful stations

Be contextual: use the ‘things’ of the culture you live in

Reframe: invest the ‘things’ with multiple meanings

Use different words to invite people of different intelligences into the space: ‘think’, ‘feel’, ‘imagine’, ‘describe’

Allow different interpretations: don’t prescribe the outcome, or make blanket generalisations – remember that what gives one person peace will make another confused

The advanced class: my guesses as to what makes a station transformative

Don’t repeat: don’t have an image and words that say exactly the same thing. Leave space for people to need to invest themselves to make sense of something

Don’t worry if things ‘don’t make sense’: take a risk – the best spaces aren’t straightforward

Trust your people: take them one step further than you think they can go. People [almost] always rise to a challenge.

A final note:
Aesthetics matter! You’re inviting people into a space to ‘lose themselves’ a little, and become vulnerable. Make it easier for them by making the space safe physically and emotionally. Don’t let them be distracted by clutter…

I was in Adelaide on Tuesday, just for the day, doing some planning for the February event that Jonny Baker and I are curating. Craig Mitchell flashed a book in front of me, and the page I read included this quote that’s been reverberating in my thinking since:

‘Faith isn’t faith unless it involves a significant risk of failure…’

Which may mean that if we aren’t failing, we aren’t acting enough in faith… after all, success isn’t the primary result we look for; acting faithfully is.

And from Monday’s trip to Marysville and Kinglake, in the fog and hail:

But given the nature of the days and the work at the moment, things will be sporadic for the next little bit. If you are looking for something to read, go read Jonny Baker’s blogposts about curation. His last one is here, and there are links to the earlier posts there. I’m loving them. It makes what we are trying to do here, randomly and non-strategically, feel much less random and a little more strategic… I love this line that jonny quotes in his last post: ‘a museum director’s first task is to create a public – not just to do great shows, but to create an audience that trusts the institution’ [pontus hultén]. That’s been bouncing round my head all week as i think about the responsibility of what we’re doing with our spaces, and whether we’re living up to it…

We are heading to Greenbelt and the UK in just over two months… Nic and I are organising two groups again this year, each with a slightly different focus. My group will be heading to Telford [we love Telford!], then Liverpool [a first for me], to meet with Dream, and then on to Brighton to meet with the Garden and Beyond, before heading to London to meet with Jonny. It’s a different trip to last year, mostly due to the transient realities of the communities that we visit… I realised last night that I have only scheduled one day off… here’s hoping my group are as resilient and tough as i think they are… Nic is organising the group that will be meeting with church / diocesan strategic thinkers and leaders. I’m staying on for a week or so after, in order to do some research for next year’s trip, which will be focussing on culture / art / spirituality – more of a curation focus than a community focus. i can’t wait.

(Do you think all the good names for groups have been taken? We don’t have a cool name for the basement spaces. We just call what we do ‘the basement’ by default. Perhaps we’ll keep doing that. All these other names seem to evoke landscape and vision and far horizons… which seems a little incongruous when you’re suspending projectors from sewage pipes, and kicking the rat poison out of sight in order to put a slide projector in its place… while hoping the rats don’t seize the opportunity to gnaw on the cord instead of the poison… [reminder to self: buy bleach to get rid of the urine smell at the doorway for next weekend...]. I quite often get told that what we’re doing is pretentious and dressed up. I so wish people would see the reality.)

And just to finish a blog post that’s all over the shop… Do you ever have one of those weeks [years] where everything is too big to write about? writing a blog post or an article feels like you’ve got an elephant to describe, but only the words to speak about the front left leg, and that does no justice to the elephant at all, and in fact the leg makes no sense without the rest of the elephant, but to start on the whole elephant is impossible and unrealistic, and downright silly, because the words haven’t been created yet to make sense of it? I’m in one of those years, i think. Maybe I’m also really aware that when i start to describe the elephant, i’m going to disappoint a lot of people, and they’re all people i quite like, and don’t want to do that to. Who knows. It’s not an angsty thing. Silence is good.

I started studying at the beginning of the year – professional writing and editing. Somewhat ironically, since i started studying writing I’ve stopped writing. It’s not that i haven’t had time, it’s that I’ve become aware of the bigger picture… spending every wednesday night looking around at a lecture theatre of incredibly talented people, who are all so confident and articulate, thinking that we’re fighting for the same column space in the newspaper, metaphorically speaking, and that they’ve all got something brilliant to say that i want to hear… Where do they get that confidence from? So the only possible response to that is to quit study, which i have just done. I don’t like quitting, and normally i stick something out to the bitter end out of stubbornness. But this time? It’s pure liberation. And here’s hoping imagination is born from liberation [which sounds like something brueggemann would say, kind of, although he'd say it more poetically]…

Must get back to working on the budget – which is, of course, just another expression of vivid imagination…