On the impossibility of narrating mediation

Felipe González Gil

Reflections from Quasars

There is a film of dubious cinematic quality that I often think of when I imagine the relationship between what happens in a mediation process and what is told about what happens. It is Contact.

In this 1997 film, Dr. Ellie Arroway (played by Jodie Foster) is a scientist who has an extraordinary experience of contact with an extraterrestrial civilisation after travelling in a machine built from a signal received from space. However, when she returns, to outside observers the event lasts only a few seconds and there is no direct evidence to confirm her account. Although Arroway claims to have been out for many hours, his recordings show only a garbled signal, a kind of noise shower with no recognisable images. This absence of visible evidence casts doubt on her testimony and puts her at odds with the conflict between first-person truth and the impossibility of scientifically demonstrating it, despite the fact that the technical data suggests that something inexplicable happened. As is revealed in one of the final scenes: that broken recording lasted not seconds, but a total of 18 hours...

At Quasars we decided to open a space of contrast with oncology patients in order to share with them the work processes we were following with Adela Angulo y Andrea Moran, We are the artists in charge of designing a series of illustrations to de-dramatise cancer and a sound documentary as a support tool for patients. We have had several meetings throughout the year and we also have a whatsapp group. The following also joined the process Óscar Romero, Rocio Mesa y Jorge Castrillo. The former is making a photo essay with the patients and the latter a documentary-experimental film.

Well, last October 17th we had a session. And it was one of those ‘Contact moments’. To the session we decided to ask the patients to bring their ‘quasars’, which in the jargon of the project are ‘those people who take care of those who are going through cancer’. I have to say that all the people in this group are women. At one point, in my role as mediator, I proposed the simple methodology of asking each other out loud: what does it take for a person to be a quasar, someone who cares for someone else who is ill? The idea was to answer the question in a circle, giving the patients a voice.

I promise you that what follows is not a strategy of concealment to make the work of mediation more mysterious. It is true that generating a climate of trust and intimacy is part of my usual work at Quásares and that to do so I use some obvious and formal issues (such as sharing the floor and listening sincerely to what patients have to say, something that unfortunately does not seem so common in the health systems we have) with other informal ones (being affectionate, remembering personal details and taking an interest in their lives, making jokes that make them see that I know them, etc.). But on this occasion it was just a question. Everything that happened from that moment on is of such emotional intensity that I personally find it almost impossible to narrate.

I am able to identify that what was produced there is valuable in its own right. It was to witness an intimate act of love between people who love each other very much. In embodying in words the care sustained over time in a moment of maximum fragility. We have photos of the session. And we can say what I am saying. But as we are pressed for time this is simply going to ‘check’ on ‘communicating’ the meeting. And chances are that in the eyes of people who are not involved that could be the equivalent of a faulty recording. And that's what networked communication and the commodification of our own work has pushed us into. However, this is not a post to lament the drift of our algorithms. It is a post to make it clear that when we say that during a mediation project it is the process that matters, it is not a cliché. It is that very valuable things happen that transcend the project. That are special. And that are unspeakable.

I left the meeting knowing that something important had happened but I wasn't able to tell my colleagues. Nor did I want to fall into what sometimes happens to us at a concert or the theatre: «you should have been there...». The truth is that I got stuck between what I had experienced and how to narrate it. And so I became Dr. Arroway for a moment, incapable of proving an extraordinary experience for lack of tools to document it... if it hadn't been for the fact that in this session we also have something that does prove it.

Luckily for anyone interested in mediation, in this particular project or just reading this far, there are people with much more capacity than me to narrate intense experiences in a beautiful, honest and accurate way. Seeing that I was unable to do it myself, I asked Rocío to do it. Because she was there. And she did it in a 22-minute audio. We won't publish it but we can send it to anyone who wants to listen to it (write to info@zemos98.org and pass it on to you).

I always say that there are projects that are dolphins, that are able to nimbly combine being submerged and in non-visible areas with showing themselves to the world in a fast and agile way. Some mediation processes are more like whales. They remain hidden for a long time, even making us forget about them. And the day they emerge... they are spectacular. That day in Quasars is just around the corner. In the meantime, we leave you with these messages from the depths of the process that illustrate well what mediation is sometimes like: complex and unspeakable. But very beautiful.