Time Carriers: Dreaming Reciprocal Relations Through Arts-Based Inquiry

• In Event: 32.077 - Contemplative Approaches to Transforming Education: Engagement in Awake-Dreaming, Spiritual Activism, De/colonial Perspectives, and Mindfulness

Abstract

Presentation Summary

As an artist, researcher and teacher, I work relationally with humans and other-than-human beings through arts-based inquiry (Barone & Eisner, 2012; Cahnmann-Taylor & Siegesmund 2008, Irwin & de Cosson, 2004) grounded in connective aesthetics (Gablik, 1995) and matrixial (Ettinger, 2006) dialogic processes. Working with matrixial interconnected aesthetics we can potentially recognize that which requires attention, uncovering what has been repressed to engage in restorative and healing processes. This paper and video presentation delves into an inquiry undertaken in London, England in Greenwich Village Park, home of Greenwich Mean Time.

As part of the arts-based methodology, I work with a practice of awake-dreaming (the use of trance and altered states) as a co-conscious inquiry on the land with the other-than-human realms. This practice has roots in, among others, modernist surrealist art (eg., Dali, Kahlo) through their practice of automatism, and Indigenous Peoples through trance-based learning. Of trance-based learning Four Arrows (in press) wrote, “Changing from normal consciousness with the intent to better gain access to living in harmony is about connecting to and rebalancing subtle energies that surround and fill us. Trance-based learning is, in its various forms, how we bring such energies to a level of consciousness (n.p.).”

According to integral dream scholars, Bogzaran and Delauriers (2012), dreams “reflect the traces of alienation and fragmentation as well as recovery and remembrance of our state of interdependence” (p. 165). Employing the language of dream through arts-based inquiry invites a “curriculum of improvisation” (Aoki, 2005/1990, p. 369). William Pinar wrote, “Whatever language we employ, we “become” the language” (Pinar, 2012, p. 35). Working with the language of dream I “become” the dream, and enter a form of embodied ecological democracy.

Shifting into the language of art following the awake-dream, I improvise an aesthetic inquiry. After transcribing the awake dream, I transform it into an involuntary poem. Crafting and editing the poem and video footage gathered on site leads to historical and scientific research into the land and its community of humans and other-than-humans. The resulting video reveals aesthetic findings and teachings combined. Below is an excerpt from the “involuntary poem” and still image from the video.

(pic in main document)

Slide down the steeple tip
return to the source the tree
knowing pulsating hearts and historia are mended
by songs of birds
stitched and mended stitched and mended


This presentation includes a short paper along with an invitation to the audience to aesthetically experience the video, entering what geologist Henry Hess names “geopoetry,” which allows us to “gain the gift of de-familiarization, becoming other to ourselves, [as] one expression of the ever-evolving planet” (McKay, 2013, p, 53). With much of contemporary Western “civilization” caught in a ‘bad dream,’ this work can potentially inspire us to dream in educative ways, re-storing reciprocal relations, and thus co-nourishing ourselves and the earth for future generations to come.

Author

• Barbara A. Bickel, Southern Illinois University - Carbondale