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This small publication is the result of a year spent researching and responding to the town of Göteborg, Sweden. My initial interest in the historical uses of its canal system was heightened after experiencing the community’s protest of the United Nations Climate Change Conference. In fear of rising water levels brought on by global warming, huge crowds of people were screaming to their government officials, demanding stronger automobile restrictions. It sounds better in Swedish, but one of their slogans was, “Gas in the ground, his hand on the wheel! Soon Gothenburg is completely under water!”

This fear has been growing for the past four years. Göteborg is a coastal city full of canals and due to its low elevation level it has suffered from flooding caused by several severe rainstorms. I approached a city planning official and interviewed him about the relevance of this issue. He mentioned two of the town’s proposed precautions; building walls around the city and gates at the mouth of the canals. I thought that this was remarkable, because both of these precautions had been taken by the city hundreds of years ago, but for different reasons. Canals and water gates, which were once built to protect the community against invaders, were now being proposed to keep out rising waters.

The idea of using historical methods, to deal with current issues excited me, so I decided to look even farther back into the ways that this community has coexisted with water. And in Scandinavian mythology I found Skidbladnir.

“Skíðblaðnir was the ship of Freyr. It was big enough to hold the whole of the army of Asgard, and whenever the sails were hoisted, a fair wind followed. It could travel over both land and sea. Skíðblaðnir was made of so many parts and with such ingenuity that it could be folded like a cloth and carried in one’s pouch.”

If the Swedish government wouldn’t listen when mobs of protesters called for help, perhaps the army of the gods would listen when individuals took time out of work to pose as the figurehead for their mythological ship. Gothenburg might need this sort of help if the waters continue to rise.

Along with these figurehead portraits the book contains a proposal for the construction of a modern Skidbladnir, by Gregory Witt, as well as a prediction written one hundred years ago, by a sixteen year old boy. His prediction describes Gothenburg’s harbour in the year 2000, which after an industrial boom would deepen, widen and be full of ocean steamers. This once optimistic idea, given the negative impact of today’s oil barges, weighs heavy in hindsight.

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For four months I attended open public meetings in the Bay Area. (Being the progressive and vocal city it is, San Francisco has a lot of these.) I attended meetings where people generally weren’t paid to participate, but did so by their own free will and out of their own interest. Due to the cause or focus of the meetings, people were urgently drawn to them. They took this time to exercise their dreams of being part of an active public. These meetings were the places where people released a lot of their pent up energy.

I was always impressed by the amount of focus people had after an 8 hour working day. And to do this week after week, for no reason other than the belief that your dialogue was productive made me think, ‘What was the dialogue building?’ If people were speaking to each other on a consistent basis, in a shared context, there must have been something more than the practical tasks of the meetings. There must have been something in between. Something intangible and strong. A place that provided them the support and structure that the rest of their life lacked.

I would listen, watch and record everything that was said during the meeting into a text document. When it was over, I would approach the participants individually and ask them the same question, “If this meeting was a piece of architecture, what would it be?”

The responses weren’t always immediate. It took time and careful questioning.

“Could you describe the mood and activity of this meeting?”
“What was your role?”
“How did your role interact with other peoples roles?”
“If each person served as a different building element (window, stairs, pillar, wall, rug, moat, sail, booby trap, etc.) how would they all come together and what would they form?”
“How were things communicated?”
“Where did conversations come together?”
“Where did they stray?”
“What did this interaction look like as a whole?”

Whether rushed by the constraint of a timer (c/o Roberts Rules of Order) or rushed by sugar (c/o a pack of Twizzlers) different elements affect their structure and outcome. Roles, subject matter, and seating arrangements were all variables.

Sometimes the person who was most involved with the meetings conversation, wouldn’t be able to remove themselves from the exchange in order to see it as something else. When I asked the owner of Goat Hill Pizza to describe a recently convened meeting of Potrero Hill Association of Merchants and Businesses (PHAMB), for which he was the host, he said, “Buildings are so dead to me. This meeting would be a body. A living body.”

I wasn’t able to attend a particular parent-teacher meeting, because it was private and I was neither parent nor teacher, but I spoke to the teacher shortly after it finished and they described it very eloquently. I think that the clarity of his response had a lot to do with the small scale of the meeting and heightened interest for the participants. He said,

“Each person there is rather nervous about the meeting and worried that it will not work out, that the meeting will fail either due to his or the other’s not keeping his end of the bargain. Both of you must talk and pretend that the situation isn’t awkward or forced in order for it to hold up. Therefore, each person must do his part to keep the thing going. Essentially, I would liken this arrangement architecturally to one of those grand arches, like the St. Louis Arch, where there are more or less two halves reaching from across a divide and meeting in the middle. There is no adornment, no distraction from the surrounding environment- just the two halves meeting in the middle.”

The San Francisco International Socialist Organization had a very strict meeting method. (They followed Roberts Rules of Order.) There was a schedule, a person who kept time, sub-meetings following the group meeting, and an overwhelming sense of urgency throughout it all. The chairperson described it as,

“A market. A bazaar. Everybody brings in ideas. It is open. I keep thinking of this one in Oaxaca, Mexico. Just a bunch of tarps in a square. Like a tent kind of. So many different color tarps. Like a quilt. Lots of stalls. It’s an amazing space. Huge space. All of the people inside. Big piles of cacao and color. Incredibly colorful and lively.”

The differences and similarities between the people meeting weighed heavily on how the imagined architecture would be described to me. Sometimes it would be a group of peers meeting (Teen Advisory Committee). Sometimes there were different levels of power or responsibility meeting (Northern Police Station Community Meeting). Sometimes they were absolute strangers (Quaker Meeting).

TAC, or Teen Advisory Committee, is a monthly meeting at the San Francisco Public Library. Along with consuming large amounts of Twizzlers during the meeting, teens practice their leadership skills by brainstorming activities that would help make the public library more teen friendly. I sat in on one of their meetings. They were planning a Card House Building Competition, so building was on their minds. Some of the of the members described their meeting as:

“Glass Building
Some futuristic shape
Glass, its open to everybody, we’re all on display and everybody can join”

“A beaver dam
A beaver puts things on in little pieces twigs and leaves
And then takes them off and rearranges them
And the water rushing through the damns are like the events, or time”

They all knew each other. This was their down time. They weren’t looking to compete, like they were required to in school. All they were trying to do was expand their group and have fun at the library. It would make sense that their imagined structures focus on access, entertainment, ease and productive interaction.

At the Northern Police Station Community meeting, where the Police Chief talked with the people living in his district and answered any questions about crimes occurring in their neighborhood, I notice that his role effected how he saw the space of the meeting. He explained his building as a,

“Pyramid. What your doing is building a base and each little group is a foundation to the base. On top of that you build a structure of communication. You’re gonna have one leader. I can see all of the little building block below. More like a Mexican pyramid. They have the steps. You build little blocks and you build a way to move up it. Now I’m not suggesting that we rip somebodies heart out up here. But we’re building so we can have a good vision of our area. “

After carefully following the instructions listed on their website, I attended a Quaker Meeting.

“Please join us at San Francisco Friends Meeting for unprogrammed meeting for worship: we gather Sunday mornings at 11 a.m. and Tuesday evenings at 6 p.m. Our meeting for worship, which is at the core of Quaker practice, is focused on the response of the human spirit to the call of the Divine. Worship begins when the first worshippers settle into the silence in the main meeting room. Some people arrive before the appointed time and begin to worship, so please enter the worship room quietly. Worship ends when the Clerk of the meeting shakes the hand of another person seated nearby. At that signal, people generally shake hands and greet each other.”

There were only five people there, and no one spoke, so I didn’t take notes. I just sat, listened and waited. The chairs were in a circle in the middle of the room. We were all looking at each others shoes. It was intense. I felt like it was the wrong time to whip out my questions, so I decided to contact the Meeting Clerk through his email listed on the website. I would have preferred to speak with him in person. It allows for more give and take in the conversation. But he did not attend the Tuesday night meetings, so I sent him my questions in an email. He was pretty literal in his description of what a Quaker Meeting would look like if it was a building or space. He wrote,

“The Houston Friends Meetinghouse, which has an artwork by James Turrell, the sculptor in light. “

I wrote him a follow up email asking to describe a more imagined place, but he did not reply. So I googled ‘Houston Friends Meetinghouse’ and Travel + Leisure described it as,

“This gray-clapboard house is as spectacular as a place of determined simplicity can be. It fits naturally into its modest residential neighborhood; and you might drive right by, not even noticing it. Inside, however, the focus is upward and away, with all eyes on a sort of curved square that opens heavenward, magically framing the sky and clouds. Capturing the transformation from light to dark and drawing on your gaze and thoughts to the beyond, the experience feels at once intimate and infinite.”

I guess what I didn’t notice, in my experiences in the Quaker Meetings, was the inward focus of the real Quakers. They weren’t there to interact with each other so much, but with the Divine. The fact that they could have weekly meetings and remain strangers, if they so chose, is proof of their practice. Which consists of listening and waiting. Their website continued,

“Many of us find it helpful to close our eyes for most or all of the worship hour to reduce distractions and increase our focus on the presence of God among us. During worship people may meditate, pray silently, inwardly offer praise or thanksgiving or confession to the Spirit, or reflect on a passage from the Bible or other spiritual reading. In our corporate worship, we seek communion with God. We wait and listen together, seeking divine guidance or inspiration from a source known among us by many names: Wisdom, the Light, the Inward Christ, the Seed, the Word, Jesus, the Lord.”

It was a lot to ask of the Clerk, to transmit what his intimate and infinite experiences would build, via email.

It is a lot to ask of anyone, after an hour or so meeting, before they commute home for dinner. They don’t know me. They have nothing to gain from my process. Why imagine anything? Really?

But maybe, the types of people being drawn to these meetings are aware of the benefits of trusting in something that you don’t immediately benefit from. Maybe they are hopeful and willing to get into something that they don’t understand in order to surprise themselves? Maybe they are eager to work it out through dialogue and questioning? Maybe this is why they go to the meetings to begin with, to find a shared understanding about something that they care about?

Nashira is a social housing project initiated by the Asociación Mujeres Cabeza de Familia, which is a non-profit organization in Cali, started by Angela Cuevas de Dolmetch. For about six years the community has cultivated and used the land to prepare it for inhabitation. The board of this Eco-village is composed entirely of women working to support their families.

In August of 2009, I was invited by La Vida Es Un Teatro to collaborate with these families in order to create something together. With the help from a grant from CCA Center for Art and Public Life, I was able to accept the invitation and travel to Colombia to start the work.

El Cancionero de Nashira is a book of original songs based on the oral histories and melodies that the people in Nashira shared with me. We wrote new lyrics based on their stories, then set these lyrics to the melodies and rhythms of traditional songs from their childhood.

This book addresses the importance of the individuals in the community, by collecting their stories and sharing them through music, a medium of communication that is essential to Colombian culture. It exhibits the community’s ecological approach to living and self-sustainable processes by printing the songbook on recycled paper that is made by the women in Nashira. This book hopes to act as an educational tool for people outside of Colombia who are interested in learning how 41 women and their families organized and built an Eco-village. It also aims to serve the future inhabitants of Nashira who are interested in seeing how far the community has come and how much the land has grown.

The songs were recorded by Moisés Eduardo Zamora and Nelson Benté of A Golpe de Marea. There was a performance and singalong in Nashira on December 5, 2009.

For Last Request, I taught twelve people the song that I would like sung at my funeral. After hearing a recording of “Parting Hand” sung by the Western Massachusetts Sacred Harp Convention, I was frightened and comforted. Its insistent tempo carried the gaggle of voices. Some of them strong, some of them haggard, all of them ultimately invested. Belting out lyrics like, “How oft I’ve seen your flowing tears, and heard you tell yours hopes and fears!…Ye mourning souls, lift up your eyes To glorious mansions in the skies;” The song doesn’t deny that an end is approaching, it heartily embraces it with long notes and lofty concepts at the end of each stanza. By learning the parts and singing the song over my seemingly dead body, the group will fill in the emptiness of the hollow square and “draw the cords around their hearts.”

Besides being sung on the Last Day of Magic, “Parting Hand” is the last song sung at Sacred Harp Conventions. The “sacred harp” refers to the human voice. This American style of music began over 160 years ago. It is also called shape note music. This comes from the fact that the notes appear as four different shapes (fa, sol, la, mi) Itinerant early American tune-smiths and singing masters used this four-note system to teach sight-reading to people without musical training. Before singing the words to a Sacred Harp tune , they sing the notes by singing the syllables of the shapes. The music is divided into four different parts: treble, alto, tenor, and bass. Singers sit in a hollow square with each voice part taking one of the four sides and facing the center. The song leader stands in the center beating out the rhythm. In Sacred Harp singing, volume is more important than harmony. This is partly because of the music’s origin as folk music sung by ordinary people, and partly because loud singing provides more catharsis, more instant gratification, and more visceral pleasure than controlled singing. There is no audience in a Sacred Harp Convention. The music is not performed, it is sung as an end in itself. -Text adapted from A Beginner’s Guide to Shape-Note Singing, 3rd edition, Lisa Grayson 2001

Collect twelve to form a hollow square.
Pass out pencils, pass out papers
Say sounds of shapes, write shapes of song
Fill in the square with the sound of the shapes
Fill in the square with the sound of the song
Lay in the square, under the song
Keep tempo with your arms in the air.