Two-Way Peking Duck, a Smelly Transcription Part 1
Transcribed by Amy Pickles (AP)
Transcribed by Clara Balaguer Lobregat (CB)
AP: [Laughs]
CB: How do we begin? Ok so how do we begin
AP: Umm Umm
CB: Do I ask you questions? Do I ask you questions? Or do you ask me?
AP: I already asked you a question
CB: um? Which one?
AP: [Amy reads smelly email she sent to me, to begin the session]
NOTE TO DESIGNER: HYPERLINK / FOOTNOTE LEADS YOU TO FIVE SENSES EMAIL
CB: [Pause] You imbibe a source with a body. It’s your first point of contact.
I think about the erroneously called visual anthropology, overlooking a group of people through the gaze of their binoculars. How could you only use your sense of sight for anthropology?
They tend to educate like a glorified film and photo course. While we also hold the idea that if we make more traditional aesthetic film or photography, then the more sensorial form is ethnographic.
[Pause] At University College London I met a student who was blind on their visual cultures course. We are too obsessed with the ‘visual’ artist when we should be appreciating broader sensorial artistic methods.
AP: Um..
By demanding yeah, but do you imagine that when your body experiences through sight your body in the background of that experience? Whereas to use the other senses such as taste and touch you would have to be more present, a much more direct experience with your research, as an observer, cos you can be far away but with binoculars?
CB: It’s the oblique experience in art schools. There is an over emphasis and over valuation on the visual, and this is ableist. The Anthropology courses at The Massachusetts Institute of Technology they have a sensorial ethnography lab, which is more or less like an experimental documentary programme. I prefer the term sensual, but sensorial is useful too, in thinking about what can be changed in art school.
AP: I like the term sensual
(think about binoculars)
CB: Visual brings a sense of detachment, like using a camera, especially with the camera, you are looking through a disassociated eye that is not your own. You can use this to make a divide between yourself and the horror you are photographing. Sometimes they need to do this to have the presence of mind for what they need to do. To have a barrier.
(think about an image of a corpse, or an attempt to image it)
CB: [Pause] If you use all your other senses as well, like a gathering of knowledge, where each sense is just as important but not placed on the same plane of importance. Like working muscles. We move without knowing how to move them, there is too much emphasis placed on what you see. When we pass this judgement there is no contextual information.
(think about what your muscles are doing now, do you know how you speak to them?)
I am not walking about in a pith helmet. NOTE add footnote description and image of pith helmet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pith_helmet (pictures I have uploaded separately)
When you are working in a social manner you are conducting sensual work.
This type of work is also needed for creating some sort of aesthetic object or experience.
[Pause]
When you work with people it is impossible to not contaminate the sample.
Anthropology, it’s not the field for an idiot savant.
AP: Not an ethnographer?
CB: I am an amateur ethnographer. Though the qualities of an ethnography base you can discuss the trust that you can generate with your subject. You can’t be watching from afar.
(remember binoculars)
You need to get dirty.
You must share sweat.
There is in this the qualities of eroticism.
You have to use all of your bodily senses to activate an effective environment.
All of your senses are in use when you build trust.
AP: When I did the master we discussed whether you had an erotic relationship with your students. Everyone was like no no noo but then I think that you do because eroticism is a desire and the imaginary. You need to see something in your students that may not be present but you feel something, that may or not be there, and your desire and animated teaching can bring that out of them. [Pause] I just wonder if there is a time where we can use that word in the same sentence as education.
Between you and I for sure that’s fine but taking it out into, other systems, who could interpret that in other ways … (breath in) … yeah because I think some would feel nervous to use the term erotic pedagogy in a broader social setting for fear of it being misinterpreted. In the same way that I am wary to introduce experiences in the classroom that refer so overtly to the senses because of an anxiety that they’re as perceived as a waste of time. Maybe not by participants, but maybe by administration or by bodies looking at the overview, bodies doing the anthropology with binoculars. So then I wonder, if you don’t have experience with sharing sweat and getting dirty can you have a how can those bodies have an appreciation for that kind of work?
CB: Wait let me read through
Split the text here, to have Part Two conversation below appear later / in a different place?
Two-Way Peking Duck, a Smelly Transcription Part 2
Transcribed by Amy Pickles (AP)
Transcribed by Clara Balaguer Lobregat (CB)
We are returning to questions of how bodies could appreciate other types of work.
CB: You have to be very careful
REDACTED through REDACTED
REDACTED artist, had to REDACTED each other
it’s a sensuous act, to REDACTED somebody
[ OFF THE RECORD ] play with redacted and off the record in design
We talk about hair. We talk about textures of bodies.
AP: I’ve been thinking about hair a lot lately
I want to chop off my hair REDACTED
[ OFF THE RECORD ]
CB: partners REDACTED pick a partner and REDACTED something to them. There are no words for sensorial experience. REDACTED not a driving force, partnered with an REDACTED as if you didn’t want to transgress limits. REDACTED without forcing our bodies on one another REDACTED asked how your encounter went. We had just REDACTED. REDACTED was disappointed REDACTED hadn’t entered the exercise. I felt I had done something wrong. That I was not radical enough, I was closed off. You need to set boundaries, those I am happy to have. That is part of being careful.
In pedagogy, when thinking about how much of the body we use, we must ask for consent. When you go into a space where bodies will be touching then we need a clear picture of what’s going to happen. We can get carried away by a precondition of surprise because it can be useful. But to enter and trust and be open, and in order for the environment to be created when you can keep trust and openness, you need to tell people what’s going to happen. You can tell them, we are going to transgress our physical boundaries, then everybody in the room knows.
AP: Because in that earlier situation it was erotic but it was also sexualized. Though you can have erotic encounters without sexual feelings, in that setting it was imposed upon you. You know it’s also something that was hierarchical, the educating body came towards you and didn’t give you a choice on REDACTED then that makes for an imbalanced setting. Your form would shrink away from that moment. In that situation there was an unequal power relation established from the very beginning.
CB: It can also be the way things are framed and exploited by others. Like the Women’s Liberation Movement. This was more power and autonomy for women, but changing the ways in which we persued heterosexual relationships often meant more sex for men.
Now I’ve been working with embodied learning in sport, in bodies in motion, and I’ve been working through ableism and challenging team building according to individual excellence. This is another type of embodied learning, here the body is a tool. In sport we are learning from experience, by feeling it deeply in the body, without reading it in your mind.
AP: It’s hard because anything [Pause] all these things that we know through the senses are things often hmmm [Pause] we don’t know them in our heads. We don’t know how we will respond until someone encourages you to participate in something in a certain way. Before, you don’t know what memories will be raised. There is a lot of stuff held in the performance of your body and the senses. You don’t know what an experience will pull from you. Like the sense of smell, it’s so powerful but you don’t know what the smell can evoke in someone else.
CB: It can be dangerous. Once I took part in a workshop in a summer school called A School A Part (add a hyperlink) For the school I organised an organic troll farm for five days. I facilitated exercises to build up to it, ways to get a sense of belonging to a team when we had never worked together before. The build up was for us to learn how to collaborate. Then we collectively ran the troll farm together for 8hrs.
What you eat directly affects your mood and how you react with other people. It can be the cause of toxic conversation and online discussion. With that in mind, I said we could consume no coffee, no stimulants, sugar or carbohydrates before we began work in the morning. By noon I fed everyone fatty foods, and we could drink coffee. At 17:00 we could have beers. At 18:00 REDACTED.
There is a lot that happens when you troll, but the most difficult thing to learn is extraction. You have to know when to stop. REDACTED to confuse them, so they are not in their tunnel vision anymore.
We learned what’s it’s like to be a troll by actively engaging with the commentary. We thought about how can we counteract toxicity through experiencing it. It was great but at the end I had to leave the room because I was beginning to hyperventilate, I felt like I was the leader of some kind of ayahuasca (add in link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayahuasca) trip. Because I was responsible for that trip.
When you are bringing people into an emotionally charged environment, as a facilitator you have a huge responsibility. The framework I made gave me room to explore and adapt. But in an institution your set of responsibilities are made by the institutional environment and they are less mind bending.
(think about hugs)
AP: And in the institution there’s also this on limit the care you can give, I can imagine in the summer school you could give participants a hug if they had a negative experience, there are many more informal ways to care for a person that we don’t perform in an institution. There are more restrictions in how you can interact with a student and show intimate forms of care. But then [Pause] I suppose that’s where I had this question of how do you incorporate these kinds of exercises in a way that’s not totally superficial. In a way that goes deep enough but can actually be carried out.
CB: You have to cultivate a professional distance that is necessary and useful. How to make sure that students know that the distance is not a hierarchy is the hard part. It’s respect that goes both ways, it’s not you enforcing a hierarchy. My problem is that I’m an empath and I dive in with all my heart. In the Philippines, we are an emotionally intense society. In all the workshops and community building activities I did there, I shared things that were very personal. There it’s something you need to share because people just don’t trust you if they don’t see your vulnerability.
Here in the Netherlands I am more classified as a person of colour, whereas in the Philippines I am white, I have to make an extra effort to be relatable. I am not going to impose a barrier, as an anthroplogist might.
AP: Now that you’re a person of colour in the Netherlands do you think people expect you to be a relatable character and provide the personal things that you were sharing in the Philippines?
CB: That is part of my character anyway. For me it takes more effort to hold back and be a professional than a detached person. I recognise though that you need to know where your limits are as well. The balance of intimacy is a tricky subject. When I am working with fisherman in a rural area of the Philippines my behaviour would not include anything close to eroticism and I wouldn’t bring in so much literacy about feminism, though I can still embody these values. Communities are not asking you for a moral lesson when you work on a social project. You have to establish forms of trust in a way that is natural.
And to answer your question of expectation. No, they expect me to be like them. Contained. Friendly. But not direct. In the Netherlands there is a certain distaste for people who share the way I do, but that in itself is a strategy. I am going to ask basic and stupid questions!
AP: It’s hard for people because your openness is something that others have held in their body forever but they haven’t been raised to behave that way. I imagine it’s like a physical shock to hear such intimate and personal things. It’s much easier to not interact with it. Not that I want to make than an excuse, to try and imagine why you get a distasteful reaction.
CB: I feel like as an outsider I can better hold a subjective position. I will always have this “she doesn't know the customs” that I can use if there is a backlash. If you go against a polder decision or you voice the elephant in the room right there on the table. As an outsider I have a certain leeway. People contest less for fear of being racist.
I am direct but no aggressive. That is something that I am careful with. I make sure it never feels like a personal attack.This can be avoide through body language, expression, bodily cues. The problem is more when you put the questions and the elephants on the table. You can never guarantee that people don’t react aggressively It’s uncomfortable in general. But it must be done.
AP: I also wondered how long can you be an outsider, like can you live in that position forever or will eventually you be consumed by the machine? Because this is also something that I ask myself...
(think about the machine)
CB: I ask myself that every time I enter this building ! I try to remember that I am in a privileged position and I must resist the lull of this position. I must not get comfortable, and think that resources, time and space is normal, because it isn’t normal for the rest of the world. This is institution is not normal. You can’t fully resist it because you are inside it, but how you can protect yourself is a constant concern.
How can I keep the bodily memory of these experiences from another place, how can you keep those bodily muscles alive? That’s why I think about muscle memory. I’m developing a strategy in social practices, for us to develop muscles intuitively. You try to think about, oh there was a movement I was doing over and over again, the more you do it the more you can control how it moves.
The context of the memory is also important. That was something I noticed as I changed the cities in which I lived. In terms of moving around, it takes about four years until I have the feeling of belonging. As a cross cultural kid I like that feeling. I want a sense of relief when you see the city that you live in. This feeling, I think it comes from people. I remember distinctly in Barcelona, six years ago when the city felt like a neighbourhood.
I was running into people often enough but not too often.
AP: Which is a feeling that we should aspire to create in educational places so the people that you’re teaching or working alongside would be more willing to talk about elephants and their bodies! Well [Pause] I was trying to go back to two things we talked about, elephants in the room and earlier about using the body in pedagogy. Because now I realized we talked for an hour and I don’t want to take too much of your time!
I like this sense of relief you mention, maybe that’s another sense it would be good to think about when we are trying to create trust. How to make people feel relieved at the beginning, so we can then work together.
Transcribed by Amy Pickles (AP)
Transcribed by Clara Balaguer Lobregat (CB)
AP: [Laughs]
CB: How do we begin? Ok so how do we begin
AP: Umm Umm
CB: Do I ask you questions? Do I ask you questions? Or do you ask me?
AP: I already asked you a question
CB: um? Which one?
AP: [Amy reads smelly email she sent to me, to begin the session]
NOTE TO DESIGNER: HYPERLINK / FOOTNOTE LEADS YOU TO FIVE SENSES EMAIL
CB: [Pause] You imbibe a source with a body. It’s your first point of contact.
I think about the erroneously called visual anthropology, overlooking a group of people through the gaze of their binoculars. How could you only use your sense of sight for anthropology?
They tend to educate like a glorified film and photo course. While we also hold the idea that if we make more traditional aesthetic film or photography, then the more sensorial form is ethnographic.
[Pause] At University College London I met a student who was blind on their visual cultures course. We are too obsessed with the ‘visual’ artist when we should be appreciating broader sensorial artistic methods.
AP: Um..
By demanding yeah, but do you imagine that when your body experiences through sight your body in the background of that experience? Whereas to use the other senses such as taste and touch you would have to be more present, a much more direct experience with your research, as an observer, cos you can be far away but with binoculars?
CB: It’s the oblique experience in art schools. There is an over emphasis and over valuation on the visual, and this is ableist. The Anthropology courses at The Massachusetts Institute of Technology they have a sensorial ethnography lab, which is more or less like an experimental documentary programme. I prefer the term sensual, but sensorial is useful too, in thinking about what can be changed in art school.
AP: I like the term sensual
(think about binoculars)
CB: Visual brings a sense of detachment, like using a camera, especially with the camera, you are looking through a disassociated eye that is not your own. You can use this to make a divide between yourself and the horror you are photographing. Sometimes they need to do this to have the presence of mind for what they need to do. To have a barrier.
(think about an image of a corpse, or an attempt to image it)
CB: [Pause] If you use all your other senses as well, like a gathering of knowledge, where each sense is just as important but not placed on the same plane of importance. Like working muscles. We move without knowing how to move them, there is too much emphasis placed on what you see. When we pass this judgement there is no contextual information.
(think about what your muscles are doing now, do you know how you speak to them?)
I am not walking about in a pith helmet. NOTE add footnote description and image of pith helmet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pith_helmet (pictures I have uploaded separately)
When you are working in a social manner you are conducting sensual work.
This type of work is also needed for creating some sort of aesthetic object or experience.
[Pause]
When you work with people it is impossible to not contaminate the sample.
Anthropology, it’s not the field for an idiot savant.
AP: Not an ethnographer?
CB: I am an amateur ethnographer. Though the qualities of an ethnography base you can discuss the trust that you can generate with your subject. You can’t be watching from afar.
(remember binoculars)
You need to get dirty.
You must share sweat.
There is in this the qualities of eroticism.
You have to use all of your bodily senses to activate an effective environment.
All of your senses are in use when you build trust.
AP: When I did the master we discussed whether you had an erotic relationship with your students. Everyone was like no no noo but then I think that you do because eroticism is a desire and the imaginary. You need to see something in your students that may not be present but you feel something, that may or not be there, and your desire and animated teaching can bring that out of them. [Pause] I just wonder if there is a time where we can use that word in the same sentence as education.
Between you and I for sure that’s fine but taking it out into, other systems, who could interpret that in other ways … (breath in) … yeah because I think some would feel nervous to use the term erotic pedagogy in a broader social setting for fear of it being misinterpreted. In the same way that I am wary to introduce experiences in the classroom that refer so overtly to the senses because of an anxiety that they’re as perceived as a waste of time. Maybe not by participants, but maybe by administration or by bodies looking at the overview, bodies doing the anthropology with binoculars. So then I wonder, if you don’t have experience with sharing sweat and getting dirty can you have a how can those bodies have an appreciation for that kind of work?
CB: Wait let me read through
Split the text here, to have Part Two conversation below appear later / in a different place?
Two-Way Peking Duck, a Smelly Transcription Part 2
Transcribed by Amy Pickles (AP)
Transcribed by Clara Balaguer Lobregat (CB)
We are returning to questions of how bodies could appreciate other types of work.
CB: You have to be very careful
REDACTED through REDACTED
REDACTED artist, had to REDACTED each other
it’s a sensuous act, to REDACTED somebody
[ OFF THE RECORD ] play with redacted and off the record in design
We talk about hair. We talk about textures of bodies.
AP: I’ve been thinking about hair a lot lately
I want to chop off my hair REDACTED
[ OFF THE RECORD ]
CB: partners REDACTED pick a partner and REDACTED something to them. There are no words for sensorial experience. REDACTED not a driving force, partnered with an REDACTED as if you didn’t want to transgress limits. REDACTED without forcing our bodies on one another REDACTED asked how your encounter went. We had just REDACTED. REDACTED was disappointed REDACTED hadn’t entered the exercise. I felt I had done something wrong. That I was not radical enough, I was closed off. You need to set boundaries, those I am happy to have. That is part of being careful.
In pedagogy, when thinking about how much of the body we use, we must ask for consent. When you go into a space where bodies will be touching then we need a clear picture of what’s going to happen. We can get carried away by a precondition of surprise because it can be useful. But to enter and trust and be open, and in order for the environment to be created when you can keep trust and openness, you need to tell people what’s going to happen. You can tell them, we are going to transgress our physical boundaries, then everybody in the room knows.
AP: Because in that earlier situation it was erotic but it was also sexualized. Though you can have erotic encounters without sexual feelings, in that setting it was imposed upon you. You know it’s also something that was hierarchical, the educating body came towards you and didn’t give you a choice on REDACTED then that makes for an imbalanced setting. Your form would shrink away from that moment. In that situation there was an unequal power relation established from the very beginning.
CB: It can also be the way things are framed and exploited by others. Like the Women’s Liberation Movement. This was more power and autonomy for women, but changing the ways in which we persued heterosexual relationships often meant more sex for men.
Now I’ve been working with embodied learning in sport, in bodies in motion, and I’ve been working through ableism and challenging team building according to individual excellence. This is another type of embodied learning, here the body is a tool. In sport we are learning from experience, by feeling it deeply in the body, without reading it in your mind.
AP: It’s hard because anything [Pause] all these things that we know through the senses are things often hmmm [Pause] we don’t know them in our heads. We don’t know how we will respond until someone encourages you to participate in something in a certain way. Before, you don’t know what memories will be raised. There is a lot of stuff held in the performance of your body and the senses. You don’t know what an experience will pull from you. Like the sense of smell, it’s so powerful but you don’t know what the smell can evoke in someone else.
CB: It can be dangerous. Once I took part in a workshop in a summer school called A School A Part (add a hyperlink) For the school I organised an organic troll farm for five days. I facilitated exercises to build up to it, ways to get a sense of belonging to a team when we had never worked together before. The build up was for us to learn how to collaborate. Then we collectively ran the troll farm together for 8hrs.
What you eat directly affects your mood and how you react with other people. It can be the cause of toxic conversation and online discussion. With that in mind, I said we could consume no coffee, no stimulants, sugar or carbohydrates before we began work in the morning. By noon I fed everyone fatty foods, and we could drink coffee. At 17:00 we could have beers. At 18:00 REDACTED.
There is a lot that happens when you troll, but the most difficult thing to learn is extraction. You have to know when to stop. REDACTED to confuse them, so they are not in their tunnel vision anymore.
We learned what’s it’s like to be a troll by actively engaging with the commentary. We thought about how can we counteract toxicity through experiencing it. It was great but at the end I had to leave the room because I was beginning to hyperventilate, I felt like I was the leader of some kind of ayahuasca (add in link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayahuasca) trip. Because I was responsible for that trip.
When you are bringing people into an emotionally charged environment, as a facilitator you have a huge responsibility. The framework I made gave me room to explore and adapt. But in an institution your set of responsibilities are made by the institutional environment and they are less mind bending.
(think about hugs)
AP: And in the institution there’s also this on limit the care you can give, I can imagine in the summer school you could give participants a hug if they had a negative experience, there are many more informal ways to care for a person that we don’t perform in an institution. There are more restrictions in how you can interact with a student and show intimate forms of care. But then [Pause] I suppose that’s where I had this question of how do you incorporate these kinds of exercises in a way that’s not totally superficial. In a way that goes deep enough but can actually be carried out.
CB: You have to cultivate a professional distance that is necessary and useful. How to make sure that students know that the distance is not a hierarchy is the hard part. It’s respect that goes both ways, it’s not you enforcing a hierarchy. My problem is that I’m an empath and I dive in with all my heart. In the Philippines, we are an emotionally intense society. In all the workshops and community building activities I did there, I shared things that were very personal. There it’s something you need to share because people just don’t trust you if they don’t see your vulnerability.
Here in the Netherlands I am more classified as a person of colour, whereas in the Philippines I am white, I have to make an extra effort to be relatable. I am not going to impose a barrier, as an anthroplogist might.
AP: Now that you’re a person of colour in the Netherlands do you think people expect you to be a relatable character and provide the personal things that you were sharing in the Philippines?
CB: That is part of my character anyway. For me it takes more effort to hold back and be a professional than a detached person. I recognise though that you need to know where your limits are as well. The balance of intimacy is a tricky subject. When I am working with fisherman in a rural area of the Philippines my behaviour would not include anything close to eroticism and I wouldn’t bring in so much literacy about feminism, though I can still embody these values. Communities are not asking you for a moral lesson when you work on a social project. You have to establish forms of trust in a way that is natural.
And to answer your question of expectation. No, they expect me to be like them. Contained. Friendly. But not direct. In the Netherlands there is a certain distaste for people who share the way I do, but that in itself is a strategy. I am going to ask basic and stupid questions!
AP: It’s hard for people because your openness is something that others have held in their body forever but they haven’t been raised to behave that way. I imagine it’s like a physical shock to hear such intimate and personal things. It’s much easier to not interact with it. Not that I want to make than an excuse, to try and imagine why you get a distasteful reaction.
CB: I feel like as an outsider I can better hold a subjective position. I will always have this “she doesn't know the customs” that I can use if there is a backlash. If you go against a polder decision or you voice the elephant in the room right there on the table. As an outsider I have a certain leeway. People contest less for fear of being racist.
I am direct but no aggressive. That is something that I am careful with. I make sure it never feels like a personal attack.This can be avoide through body language, expression, bodily cues. The problem is more when you put the questions and the elephants on the table. You can never guarantee that people don’t react aggressively It’s uncomfortable in general. But it must be done.
AP: I also wondered how long can you be an outsider, like can you live in that position forever or will eventually you be consumed by the machine? Because this is also something that I ask myself...
(think about the machine)
CB: I ask myself that every time I enter this building ! I try to remember that I am in a privileged position and I must resist the lull of this position. I must not get comfortable, and think that resources, time and space is normal, because it isn’t normal for the rest of the world. This is institution is not normal. You can’t fully resist it because you are inside it, but how you can protect yourself is a constant concern.
How can I keep the bodily memory of these experiences from another place, how can you keep those bodily muscles alive? That’s why I think about muscle memory. I’m developing a strategy in social practices, for us to develop muscles intuitively. You try to think about, oh there was a movement I was doing over and over again, the more you do it the more you can control how it moves.
The context of the memory is also important. That was something I noticed as I changed the cities in which I lived. In terms of moving around, it takes about four years until I have the feeling of belonging. As a cross cultural kid I like that feeling. I want a sense of relief when you see the city that you live in. This feeling, I think it comes from people. I remember distinctly in Barcelona, six years ago when the city felt like a neighbourhood.
I was running into people often enough but not too often.
AP: Which is a feeling that we should aspire to create in educational places so the people that you’re teaching or working alongside would be more willing to talk about elephants and their bodies! Well [Pause] I was trying to go back to two things we talked about, elephants in the room and earlier about using the body in pedagogy. Because now I realized we talked for an hour and I don’t want to take too much of your time!
I like this sense of relief you mention, maybe that’s another sense it would be good to think about when we are trying to create trust. How to make people feel relieved at the beginning, so we can then work together.
