Re-Visioning #2: A conversation with gobscure
This is the second of a roving and open-ended series of conversations in the context of the interruption of everything by COVID-19. For me, I was about to set out on a 220 mile walk on foot, collecting and sharing acts towards and visions of a positive future society. In the deep uncertainty of the present moment, I find myself, like many others, embarking on different trajectories of unlearning, destabilizing and re-visioning. These conversations are part of that process. They begin through some convergence of ideas or space. Transcribing them is not making art but a way of temporarily living inside the ideas they contain, an act of deep listening. Publishing them is not exhibiting them but extending the invitation.
gobscure are self-taught, writing and performing their own material. Based in the North-East of England, they seek out gaps in which to make and show work, reclaiming spaces for and with other marginalized and silenced people. They are artistic associate with Museum of Homelessness and have just been made artistic associate with Disability Arts Online. Homelessless and disability are both parts of their lived experience. Their next touring show — ‘provoked to madness by the brutality of wealth’* — is supported by BOOST: the Third Angel mentoring scheme in association with Sheffield Theatres, and will be staged by Slung Low in Leeds in September. I was introduced to their work by Newbridge Project, out of a shared interest in the future(s).
IN: So, just to retrace steps slightly, you responded to my sharing of a piece that I wrote, in which I invited responses to the prompt ‘the future is…’. You immediately responded with the suggestion that we should be talking about a plurality of futures, which I absolutely agree with, by the way. Through the conversations that have followed, I know now that this multiplicity is something that goes far beyond talking about the future and runs deep through your sense of self. So I wonder if we can start there, with what the notion of rewriting futures means to you.
g: We’d like to first talk about re-framing narratives, if that’s ok, which is sort of the same thing but in a wider context. Trans peoples’ great gift to the world is to have introduced the fundamental question of how a person would like to be addressed, as opposed to how they are named and categorized. It just absolutely changes our way of thinking and gives us greater autonomy.
If you compare that to the changing language of care that’s been happening in relation to disability in this country, since the beginning of this crisis, you start to see something very interesting. You may not have noticed but in terms of public health, there’s been a lot of talk about underlying health conditions and almost no mention of disability. If we talk about being disabled that means we have what are known as protected characteristics, which means that under the 2010 Equalities act, we can’t be discriminated against because of those characteristics. Now if, instead, we are talked about as having ‘underlying health conditions’, that subtle shift of language means that we are no longer protected from discrimination in the same way. So the new narrative is ‘Now there is no ‘disability’. You have to accept you’re ‘vulnerable’, and you need to take responsibility.’ As far as we’re concerned, this is a policy of eugenics in action.
So there you have two opposing ways of re-framing narratives — the oppressive language of the state and the constant pushing against that which goes hand in hand with the emancipation of minority groups.
IN: So how do these dynamics of language come into play when we’re thinking about the future, or futures, as you say?
g: First let’s challenge the language of a single future, because it’s a nonsense. Judaeo-Christianity gives us this bi-polar notion of heaven and hell and that’s where this idea of a monolithic future comes from. There’s this sense of the absolute throughout our culture — are you here or are you here, left or right, for us or against? Prime minister or leader of the opposition? The idea of a spectrum of possibilities is quite recent and comes through struggle. In theatre, which is our main media, we look to Augusto Boal’s ‘Theatre Of The Oppressed’ as a place where, through struggle, that monolithic narrative of what is presented to the audience as a script, becomes broken down and renegotiated through interaction with the audience themselves into a whole range of new directions.
IN: I think that’s actually a great metaphor for how we as a people connect to the orders and directives that are handed down to us via government briefings and the like during this period. I want to bring this closer now and ask you about your use of we/us as a pronoun in relation to you as a person and gobscure as an entity. Is gobsure you? Are you gobscure? Also, maybe you can tell me about the use of lowercase, because I think people reading this will wonder.
g: Well I can send you a short bit of writing I did about the lowercase**, rooted in an experience from our childhood related to religion. It connects back to thinking about ourselves as plural, which we use because our mind got fucked growing up in the 1980s. Our mind got broken due to personal circumstances, and then Thatcher drove us over the edge. And now I’m in bits that I’ve spent decades trying to piece together. So ‘I’ became ‘we’. But also talking about ‘us’ also means that by not limiting this conversation to our own personal conditions, we can talk about the conditions of ‘we the people’. And the condition of us right now is as the expendable subjects of an emerging policy of eugenics. We spoke about this recently in another conversation with Northern Broadsides theatre company.
IN: So when I wrote previously about experiencing the pandemic as the absence of possibility to consider the future, here you are, in exactly the same moment, experiencing a very real and very grim taste of what the future might hold in terms of neurodiversity, disability, and, as you say, expendability.
g: Well, apart from of course eugenics having been declared against us personally (did I mention that??), actually there’s been no change. Because of various aspects of mental and physical health, this is usual to us, and to most disabled people. There has been no difference to what we have experienced for decades. So there’s that. If anything, we are more relaxed and less stressed because the regime of fit for work tests has been interrupted and those brown envelopes aren’t landing in the hall. In terms of what we can take from what’s happening, let’s just not go back to business as usual. Doctor Who talks about fixed points in time and space and this is one of those moments. So , for example, rather than subsidising airlines, let’s use that money to create structures for listening to old people, disabled people, minorities, and children to see what’s best for them. Rebecca Solnit writes about this brilliantly and beautifully.
IN: When we first started speaking, you sent me a lot of material relating to your projects, and it seemed clear that you haven’t stopped working or taken time out or anything like that but you’ve actually been spurred on to make more work in different ways. You’ve sent through an almost dizzying array of work that you’re making so I wonder if we can just take a bit of time to chart a course through some of that.
g: Sure, so just before all of this we were working with Third Angel from Sheffield on a touring work called ‘Provoked to Madness by the Brutality of Wealth’, which will be shown in September by Slung Low in Leeds, all being well.
IN: Wow. What a title.
g: Yes! It’s from Engels’ ‘Condition of the English Working Class’. Another piece of work we’re making is in memory of our friend Marty, who was killed by austerity in the NHS. She was an amazing lady, a self-taught botanist, she knew all about plants, and edible things and folklore. The work is about the Voluspa myth from Norse mythology. Voluspa is a wise woman, a seeress, and from a trance, she tells the story of the Norse Gods from their creation to their destruction — Ragnarok. She tells of how Yggdrasil — the ash tree, or the ‘world tree’ in the myth — shelters humans and all kinds of animals, who she then leads to this beautiful regreened world. We’ve remembered this story since childhood, and what’s interesting to us is that it was written originally in a time of real change, when the old religions the myth describes were very much giving way to Christianity. So it’s a kind of re-creation myth, trying to find explanations and ways beyond this cataclysmic cultural shift, which feels so reminiscent of the current questions of climate change and extinction and, of course, pandemics.
IN: I keep going on about this book I’ve been reading. It’s by Jonathan Lear and it’s called “Radical Hope: Ethics in the face of cultural devastation”. It’s rooted in conversations recorded with Plenty Coups, who was chief of the Crow, and who shared his story with a white trapper before he died. It’s kind of about how Plenty Coups led the Crow, through a series of dream visions, to adapt to the cataclysmic cultural change when the tribe moved from a nomadic hunter-gatherer existence onto a reservation. The central point is about how it might be possible to have ‘a hope that is directed towards a future goodness that transcends the current ability to undertsand what it is’. In short, it feels like a book that has a great deal to tell us about the situation we find ourselves in on a global scale, and I’m interested to ask if you have a similar relationship with this Voluspa myth?
g: Well that’s definitely in there, for sure, but what’s important to us is that while that’s what you take from it, there are all sorts of possible interpretations. We’ve always loved the Norse myths, to us it goes back to that idea of pluralism and multiplicity, you know, there were loads of Gods! Isn’t that just so much more interesting and fascinating an idea?
IN: And how does all this connect to Marty?
G: Yeah, so the work we’re making is in the yard at home. We’re not at all natural good at growing, but Marty taught us so on one level it’s a tribute to her. We’re re-growing a bit of oxalis, which is a woodland plant, that we took with us from our council flat in Byker, when we were made homeless ten years ago. There are Welsh poppies, referencing not our glorious war dead but pain relief. There are roses and various other things growing that Marty gave to us before she died, so we keep tending them in her memory, and they’re all regreening the yard here. In lockdown, because we’re shielding so haven’t been allowed outside the bounds of our council flat, we’ve turned it into a film set and we’re writing scripts for three films which are partly about our experience, partly about re-greening, and partly about the government’s policy of eugenics. Marty used to say why is it always men up on these podiums telling us what to think and how to act. She always said how she’d love one day just to see a display of flowers up there instead, and for us to make our own minds up. She was an extraordinary ordinary person. Marty is Voluspa. Even now, after her death, in lockdown, she’s leading us out of this terrible destruction to a greener world, telling us that the future can be different and we don’t have to repeat the same mistakes.
https://gobscure.wixsite.com/info
*Museum of Homelessness review of ‘provoked to madness…’: “Dizzying and hypnotic, cutting edge social commentary, part creative resistance and part performance. From austerity politics to the callous indifference of so-called systems of care, gobscure’s lived experience powerfully shows how the personal and political play out. Spellbinding.’’
** ‘age ten the local bishop wz due to visit our (non-religious) state school. wall ov multicoloured sugar paper gets pinned up — our rectangle wz dead-centre. all had to write a page describing the sandal-wearing god — fair-haired, blue-eyed, cleanfrocked. told teacher we’d write another essay but after all we’d been thru we couldnt describe god as they werent real. got armtwist-detained each & every break / & after school as that god-wall filled, our central rectangle still bare, punishments worsening. us cracked day before visit, pinning up essay — tho ending on god is made up, story, fairytale. bishop exploded reading ours — specifically cos we’d spelt god lowercase — & so got beaten with metrestick. but aint god lowercase same as flower / dog / car? specific dog / flower / car needed capital but ‘god’ wz category only. we’ve been lowercase ever since.’ — gobscure
