Listening Gardens
Javier Pérez Iglesias Julia Morandeira Arrizabalaga
Libraries facing the pandemic: listening, reflection and construction of public space.
A few months ago, just when we were slowly unwinding after this unprecedented hiatus, Ranganathan joined a beautiful and necessary project. The listening gardens are a space for reflection and pause, or more of leisurely reflection, on different issues that underlie our experiences of confinement and the pandemic.. A space from which to reflect against the anxiety that defines this moment we live in, to think about how notions of value, frontier, learning, calamity or opportunity have been altered. We share with you here the letter with which we began the correspondence, which details the project.
May 14, 2020
Dear friends:
We hope you are well and that Covid19 has not left many bad moments in your lives or that these have not been too serious. Remember when we used to meet live and discuss how we wanted libraries to be? In short, everything has been altered, stopped, frozen, rushed or thrown into a frenzy of activity (we are living through it all).
Some of us think that there has been a lot of incitement to cultural bulimia in the response of the institutions and that is why we want to resume our sessions to listen to each other even before we can touch each other. We want to to change the bombardment with “culture to swallow” for a kind of dialogue with the tools that distance allows us..
With Daniel Goldin, one has to attend to the conflicts that are taking place and that is why one has to listen. For him the tension is not between the analogue and the digital but between listening/reflection (on the one hand) and those who do not give space to see what is happening (on the other hand). For more than forty days everything has been almost at a standstill and this has made us at Concomitentes think about listening, about conversation. Libraries have spent the whole of the 20th century, and the beginning of the 21st, trying to become places of welcome, refuges, those third places (neither work/school nor home) that favour other kinds of relationships. Now that possibility of physical meeting is denied. It is not easy but we want to save some of that while the rooms are closed and the possibilities of getting together are very limited (or missing, for the moment).
The first premise is that there should be no rushing or rushing. The second is that we need you and we want to know what you want to tell us. We are going to propose that you participate in a conversation that will take place within the Ranganathan Group but based on questions that are also being asked in Mexico (the idea is Daniel Goldin's, who has set up a listening and dialogue group there together with Ramón Salaberria and Rafael Mondragón, Jardín LAC, which you can discover through the link we share here); in Ubik, the Biblioteca de Creación de Tabakalera Donostia; in the Xarxa de Bibliotèques de Barcelona; and in any other library that may join us).
Different groups participate in each «node» of this project, but the questions will be the same and the intention is to be able to share the materials and ideas that are generated. We started this when the conditions of confinement are opening up, but we hope and want to be able to maintain it over time.
To activate the dialogue, Mexico has proposed four questions or issues, which have been agreed to be the same in all cases, and which we would like to send you. We have thought of sending you the four questions together and let everyone choose whether they want to follow the order, and send us answers to each one in the same sequence, or answer just one of them or start at the end. You can choose the order and the pace at which you want to answer, although we think the first one is a very good starting point and it would be a shame to leave it aside!
We want you to speak from your own point of view, although, of course, the answers can be generated from quotations, readings, other texts, appropriate images. Ah! Another very important thing is that there is freedom in the format of the answers: a text or an audio or an audio-visual or a photo, a drawing or a mixture of several. Of course, we ask you to send us your answers by email. We will receive what you want to tell us and we will articulate answers or new questions that will be shared on the Concomitentes website.
Although the Concomitentes website will be a wall so that other people can know what we are telling each other, there will be a communication channel just for us through email.
By the way, you can make it explicit in what you send us that it will not be shared on the Concomitentes website or that it will be shared anonymously. And here are the questions/issues we want to discuss:
1.How you have lived these days: As a calamity or as a gift? Or both?
These days herald a crisis that has surely begun to affect your economy, both in your income and your expenses. In addition to telling us how both have been affected, we want to know how you perceive today what produces value and what is valuable (money, free, effort, pleasure).. The ties, people and practices that have emerged to sustain the life of one's own home at times when money is not forthcoming or becomes less important. What is worth it and the sorrows that are not worth what they cost.
3.Do you think that the world that emerges from this crisis will mark different borders? Have you seen the construction of new ghettos or places of confinement? Have you experienced new ways of making links between people, regions, ages or social classes?
4.How do you feel that learning and teaching is being transformed: what has become unnecessary, what has become a crisis, what is emerging and what can we strengthen?
If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us at this email address and we will be delighted to hear from you.
Hugs, kisses (everything forbidden!) and see you soon.
