MECO: A research network for critical and creative practices.
The following were generated as a result of the first MECO Research Camp, held at the Bundanon Trust Arthur and Yvonne Boyd Education Centre, Riversdale NSW from July 2 – 5, 2015. Research Camps are opportunities for members of the network to focus on intensive research-generation. Rather than being performance or outcome focused, camps are spaces where ideas are teased out collaboratively, and core concepts are analysed through participatory research structures.
MECO manifests
1.
MECO is/ is not a retreat
Practice thought.
Thinking-making doing.
MECO manifests patience.
What are the methodologies of retreat?
Moving towards personal encounters
Value progress
Loss / gain
How do we take action?
MECO local encounters
Practice is a method and technique
How do we use retreat as a manoeuvre?
How do we negotiate / navigate encounter?
Operating in the space between retreat and conflict
MECO makes/ enacts spaces
Speculative frames
We are just practicing?
Share and support
Research community.
MECO fosters
MECO resists
What kinds of resistance can we undertake?
MECO manifests urgency
Thinking making doing tethering
Local patience
MECO manifests
2.
Retreat Spread Entangle
MECO enacts an ecology of practice
The Anthropocene retreats
Retreating from the Anthropocene
The anthropogenic retreat
Moss = Anthropocene
How can we be the voice of the Anthropocene?
How can we be like the moss?
Do we need to confront to retreat?
Slowness.
Wait for another time
Find hopeful paths
Consumption is not waste
Multiple practices that are not competing
The agency of moss
Moss proposition
Indeterminate scale
MECO evolves
But is not ‘like’ evolution.
What would a human version of moss look like?
How can we retreat?
MECO as an evolution will continue to change.
To impact with posterity.
How can a retreat move us forward?
Pulling back under pressure
What trace will MECO leave?
MECO manifests
3.
Mossy resistance
Pick enemies make them smell
Dogma = constraints
Different
What we do
Who we are
Retreat as a step towards something else.
Imagine a set of stratagems that create spaces of effective engagement.
Do, play, think, make
Bring an idea or exercise that has evolved from your specific practice to a larger group setting in order to think/ engage with a particular problem/ concept/ material.
Thinking art.
Energies
Ecologies
Practices
Imagination family
Community network
Studio lab
Critical creative practice
House
Thinking practice
Practice thought
Rivers flow
Motion
The rituals of home
MECO manifests
4.
to build an ecology of practice that celebrates entanglement.
think pause (paws) make do
retreat is productive
sometimes it is better to hold your tongue
not acting is an action in itself
be hyperlocal
hyperlink the hyperlocal
holding ground
present to the in-place encounter
refuse belonging
collect
extract
love
assume a space for exchange/ encounter/ slowness
listening
saying no is important
she did not ask
Abstraction without extraction.