Whispers and Echoes with Angela Margaret Main

Detail from Whispers and Echoes: Continuing practices of participation and co-evaluation by Paola Granato, Sophie Hope, Ana Lorger, Angela Margaret Main, Henry Mulhall & Santa Remere. Image: Lewis Rhodes.

Angela Margaret Main is an artist.  Via her collaborations with Scottish Sculpture Workshop (SSW), a BE PART partner, she was recruited as a Fieldnote Diartist. Sophie and Henry worked with her and some of the other diarists to produce Echoes and Whispers. This book contains a collection of diary entries from BE PART and a set of creative texts written by the diarists in response to each other's work. 

How did you get involved in BE PART?

I applied for a role at SSW, in Lumsden, close to where I lived at the time, to be part of a community radio station they were organising. The radio station was their BE PART Assembly, the first assembly. Because it was during COVID, SSW had to rethink what was planned as an in-person gathering.

The community radio station was programmed in a co-created way by 6 of us. We worked hard to make it a space where all our voices could be heard equally, really trying to listen to each other. We also invited local community members to create content, supporting them to realise and produce their ideas as well as offering payment. It was a really great project and something I was extremely proud to be involved with. 

I find it hard to categorise the work you produce. Do you think of yourself as an artist, a writer, or a community organiser

Me too! I sometimes like how I can't always pin it down, though. I completed my MA in 2021. Before that, I'd been working within performance and doing little projects. So, performance came first, and that seemed to naturally develop into socially engaged work. I have always worked with people in different ways, not always within arts, but I think for the most part, my practice is responding to sites and spaces. So yeah, I’m an artist….. I think?! 

I think of you mainly as a poet. Is that a major part of your practice, or is the site's responsiveness the main thing for you? Or do you use different media, whatever fits the context?

I'm really excited about communication and how we communicate in different ways. Performance is often the way that I explore communication within the site. But when I'm making a piece of work, I mostly use writing and poetic language to understand the place, to connect with it. I see it as just, kind of, the underneath work, but sometimes it’ll be used as documentation to show that the work has happened, or to demonstrate the process. Poetry is definitely part of the process, but the performance is, more often than not, the main way I communicate. I'm interested in, you know, that embodied kind of experience, and how we can communicate with each other through performance and what that means in a space. So, yeah, I think performance first of all, but it wouldn't happen without the writing as a way to try and understand a place. 

It’s interesting you say that writing often leads to performance, because that suggests a kind of scripting, or textual planning at least. Most of your diary entries were written in the present tense, very much from the moment. 

Writing was/is a way of processing what's happening in real time, hopefully to get across a sense of the temporal nature. I wanted to get that essence of real time, the liveliness, of being in a place at a particular moment.

So, rather than describe to someone what it was like to be there, you use a poetic form and ask the reader to put themselves in the moment?

Yeah, I suppose you can only ever ask or invite, can't you? The reader has to decide how far they want to go and what they want from it, if anything. For the writing to hold integrity and have some sort of substance, it needs to be as real as possible, whatever that means. For me, the language has to be subjective enough for people to find a way in, poetic language lends itself well to this, often giving a feeling or expression which is really open and honest. 

I suppose it's about ethics as well, isn't it? As a writer, how are you holding that space for them? What's in there? What's the content? What does it mean for the space? What are the ethics of the space? There's all that lovely, interesting thinking around that.  

I like the idea that for a text to be accessible, it can help if it's a bit personal. If you were completely removed from the text or tried to write like that, it wouldn’t make it more accessible. People can access those moments partly through or with you. 

Yeah, giving something of yourself as an invitation, to say it's okay. 

On the subject of invitation, can you say a bit about the process of being invited to be a Fieldnote Diarist for BE PART?

It was really exciting. I'd said to one of the co-creators that I enjoyed the writing component of the MA, so I wanted to do more. I'm involved in an online poetry group, so I was doing some bits of writing there too. I was asked by another co-creator who worked at SSW at the time. It was one of my first professional (paid) roles and was extra exciting because of the European connection with all the other partners, and how vast the project was… definitely the biggest project I've been involved in. 

When you joined, even just for the radio, did you understand the scope of what you were getting into? I think a few people (me included) didn't realise the scale and scope of BE PART when they first got involved. You were part of a project in Lumsden, but did you realise you were part of a huge network with 10 partners all doing their own fieldworks?

I still find it hard to understand, because, like you say, I saw what was going on locally, and I heard about this network, but actually understanding it is a different thing. 

Thinking about how they all connected and came together… and came apart again, meeting further down the line. How they affected what was happening in Lumsden. Obviously, funding, but also the ideas. To think, some people had all sat around a table talking about these ideas, questions, probably 4 years beforehand, and it was being enacted in Lumsden. 

On the Saturday of Lumsden Live, some of the BE PART partners came on and did some work on the radio. They had a conversation about BE PART. But it was just too big to process at the time, and we were still in the middle of programming. 

 And was it Jenny Salmean who initially explained what you’d be doing?

Yeah, she was really excited about it as well. I met you and Sophie during a game of Cards on the Table that we played after the radio show. I think it was around about the same time I was told a little bit about being a Fieldnote Diarist (not enough to overwhelm me), enough to make me feel confident and happy about going forward. 

Once we had recruited most of the diarists, we started meeting as a group online so that you could all speak to each other about your respective contexts. We also offered a few resources if anyone wanted to know more about ethnographic participant observation methods. How did you find those meetings? 

Yeah, great. I felt like we could ask questions if we didn't understand; it was a supportive space. The meetings were quite frequent, but I also felt like I could email and ask questions if I needed to. It was exciting to be part of. The role was presented really well. I liked how you both went into it without knowing what you were going to get. You left it so open to interpretation. 

I had wanted to do some bits of drawing, you know, make some marks, and that was fine because it didn’t have to be a strict diary entry. That helped me find my way, find my place in it. But I also loved the moments of formality, the presentations, especially in the first meeting. Even though it was so open, there was a lot of clarity, and there was a lot of material that we could go and read. Your energy and the way you approached it helped me to be as free as possible when I was writing. 

Once you’d been recruited as a diarist, did it change how you felt or behaved when you attended BE PART events?

Yeah, I think so, I definitely changed a bit. I suppose I would step back a little bit, always knowing that I was going to have to write or produce something. I’d take loads of photographs anyway, but even when we went to Documenta, I still had to think about things a bit differently. I don’t think there’s any other way I could have done it - knowing you're going to write something does take you out of the moment a bit…

Do you think that when you're asked to have a critical eye, even if you approach the event with a critical eye anyway (whatever that might mean to you), it changes how you experience a context? 

I really understood the project, like coming from a real personal space, experiencing what it was like to be in it and take part, so I think I found it really hard to be critical. 

By critical, I don't mean something negative necessarily. I just mean there's a level of judgment that you're going into a context with. You’re critiquing, maybe, not being critical.

Okay, yeah. I think I was looking for something else. We had guiding questions that were useful as starting points for our diary entries about what was happening in the space, and what it felt like to be in that space. That made me think differently than I would normally.

Also, you’re watching what other people are doing more closely. When participating normally, you often tend to focus on yourself. But when I was a diarist, I’d ask myself questions: What are other people doing? How is this working? What does that mean for that person, and are their voices being heard? You're thinking about a lot of components, especially around accessibility. 

I was hyper aware that I had been chosen to do this; I’d been chosen to be the voice for this specific work. I’d think about what the experience was like for other people, even though I couldn’t ever really know, so I couldn’t write about that, but it still felt weighted at times. 

Because I wanted to put the most honest account, you know, I wanted to grasp those far-reaching things that may be unnoticed or unrecognised.  I mean the invisible work that happens to set up a space for artists to come in and run a workshop. Who does that? Who's washing the dishes, who's making sure people feel comfortable? Who's, you know, asking the right questions so that people feel safe in the space. Who's making sure that everybody has a sandwich and a drink or whatever they might need? That was interesting, trying to hold all that but also join in with the activity. 

You're describing exactly why we wanted to work with you guys [the Fieldnote Diarists], because we would find it very difficult to get to those spaces where you see someone giving someone a sandwich or cup of tea. On a personal level, as someone who works in arts and culture, I’m not actually that interested in the artwork or performance or whatever. I care more about that background stuff, how things end up happening. 

You knew you were part of this network and that similar-ish things were happening across Europe. What was it like when you started to get to know and collaborate with the other diarists? 

It was exciting to be working with the other diarists and hearing the questions they brought to the meetings. Getting a feel for how they were approaching it, and learning what was going on in their spaces, and what challenges they were coming across. Often, we all had similar questions and challenges, and it was really nice to just know it was all happening. 

The meetings helped me get an understanding of all the different locations. We were supporting and started to add to the knowledge of the network in quite a unique way. It kind of felt like a fringe to BE PART. 

So let's get into Whispers and Echoes. What was it like choosing an extract from your original diary entries to include in the process? I think we gave you a side of A5, and you’d written quite a lot, so it must have been hard to choose. 

I wanted to choose a piece that reflected the work that had been done the best. A piece that pulled some of the main components together: care, co-creation, and the ideas and questions that ran through it all. I wanted to honour the work or to show the work that had gone into the process, so I chose a piece that would reflect that. 

We decided together that we would work in a rotation, each person would interpret someone else's work, and then that would be interpreted by someone else, and then that would be interpreted by someone else. So there's the whisper from a BE PART diary entry, and then some echoes coming away from it. 

Before you mentioned going into situations with a critical eye, and how that might change how you write. With Whispers and Echoes, you're turning that critical eye towards other diarists and having their critical eye turned towards you. There was a mutual critical exchange going on and, you know, a lot of writing felt pretty personal…

Yeah, so holding that, the notion that we had with Whispers and Echoes was tricky and felt really quite experimental. But I was excited to see what people wanted to do with my words. I was interested to see how some of the ideas might merge. We didn't know how it would end up, like, where it was going to come together and go apart. You never know how someone will interpret your writing until they do it, until they respond to it. It was great to have that opportunity to see how people read and what they get from my writing, how it makes them feel. It was a unique and wonderful opportunity, such an in-depth collaboration. 

You said how personal some of it was. There were times when I didn't want to respond directly because it was so personal, and I didn't feel like that was my place, so I wanted to use it as a springboard for something that might become something else. We didn't know each other that well, only through the online meetings, so using the ideas or parts of text rather than responding directly felt like the best way to approach it, hoping that the writing would develop freely, but still have an essence. I'd often write my response in a few hours without much editing. 

Rather than be critical of each other’s texts or interpret the content of each other's texts, you all seemed to, in some way or another, try and take the perspective of the text you were reading and then write from that perspective. Not mimic each other's style exactly, but try and write from that viewpoint. I liked to read that, which seemed to happen quite naturally. But it meant that in each section, you could draw a line from each whisper and through each echo, which makes each section seem quite cohesive. 

And then other things started to come in. So when I read it back, bits from conversations we'd had with you and Sophie started to come in. You know, there’d been a conversation about how we hear stuff and say stuff and feel stuff, and so that started to come through as well. It’s interesting how it became this mash of things we’d all been talking about for two years.  It becomes hard to say whose ideas are whose and which ideas came from where. But that’s collaboration, isn’t it? 

What about the final book? How did the process of putting that together go, and how does it feel to have the final finished object?

It’s brilliant. To be part of a publication is incredible. I’m back in my hometown where I grew up, and you know, I didn't even get any GCSEs at school. So it's just amazing to have this to come home with. 

During the process, we were regularly updated, but sometimes, especially towards the end, it felt a bit rushed. I would have liked a little bit more space around the finishing touches. Although we did discuss this and chatted about how having too much time can be a burden on the work. 

I'm really proud of the work that we did. It's been a great project, and great to have a product like the book at the end. For me, it's such a big accomplishment to be involved in that.

Yeah, I feel the same. I shared it with a writer I’m working with on another evaluation, and she loved it. That was our intention, you know, to continue some of the amazing work that had been done by you guys and have it in a form where we could share it. 

It's really exciting that the writing is on a page, rather than just on the internet somewhere. I like that it’s got a tangible form, holding the book, turning the pages through these different styles of writing, how they sit together and speak. It's easy to think that evaluation is just about numbers for funding applications. This shows the potential for it to be exciting. There's so much you can't get from a few numbers or even some pictures; there's so much you can't understand. This is just a different way of communicating what it's like.

I think especially with the instructions manual Sophie wrote to go with the book, there’s potential for someone to pick it up and extend the connection in ways we can’t predict. There might be more echoes sparked off somewhere else we’d never expect. 

There’s an openness that we experienced as diarists which is felt. The book invites - use this, have fun with it, experiment for yourselves. It's a different option for evaluation, and the way we think about it, getting away from footfall and into something more substantial.

If you would like to order a copy of Whispers and Echoes: Continuing practices of participation and co-evaluation, please get in contact via cardsonthetable.cott@gmail.com