The Elevation Station @ last

by Ruth Barker, 13 Jun 2009

Hello,
so it’s done. And after all that, what did it mean? I’m not sure.

A conversation sticks in my head: at some point today, a small, almost incidental aesthetic decision was being taken regarding the Station. How shall we do this? was the question; what should it look like? We didn’t know. And then somehow someone else said that it didn’t matter. What mattered was that we were doing something rather than nothing, and that we were doing it together. Is that true? Is that what really mattered? I don’t know. Is is possible that, amongst the group of us, we had a number of different priorities? I don’t know. I didn’t feel any stress or see any tension.

Throughout the day, there was a very genuine feeling of enjoyment and faith in process that I perceived in all the participants – those who’d spent the whole day there, and those who came for an hour or so and then left again. There were also points at which I suspected people felt less involved; when they wern’t sure what they should be doing, or were cold, bored, tired, or hungry. this was a very human interaction, after all.

Does all that emphasis on process mean that the end result is worth less? Does it mean that we have to evaluate the process itself rather than the object, and what does that imply about the fragility of that process? If the weather had been miserable for example, and we’d all had a miserable time as a result, would this have been a less successful work? Perhaps I’m too close to this particular process to be able to answer this just now. I wonder however, about that tower: I wonder about how and why it sits as a relic of our time spent talking and building. It’ll be there for 3 months now, if all goes to plan. That’s a lot longer than the single day that the ‘live’ part of the process took ¹. But perhaps that’s always the way with memorials, and with relics.

More later,
R

¹ although GANGHUT’s planning and preparation obviously took a lot longer.