weaving Voices 01.04.2025 issuu - Flipbook - Page 4
Preface
What have we got…?1
…We’ve got our bodies.
We’ve got songs.
We have trust.
We have voices.
We’ve got a soft, open space for allowing a lot of experiments, allowing
the space to be brave,
and we’ve got ‘being held’ by others.
We’ve got time.
We’ve got frames.
We’ve got creativity.
We’ve got a community.
We’ve got fears.
We have got quite a lot of languages.
And shared experiences.
We’ve got colours.
We have got new-learned skills.
We have got natural objects.
We have small weaves and big weaves.
We have recordings.
We have got new and differing viewpoints of colours, shapes, and nature.
We’ve got loads of unexpected outcomes!
…and benefits!
We have a number of forests.
We’ve got questions.
We’ve got struggles.
We have got desire.
We’ve got enthusiasm.
1 “What have we got…” was a collective attempt – initiated by Hannah Butter昀椀eld, one of the project partners
from Leeds Beckett University – to gather all the values, questions and challenges that had been accumulated
during the 昀椀rst phase of the Weaving Voices project. The text was generated in the frame of an oral improvisation at the end of the one week-long workshop in the forest next to Unnaryd (Sweden, June 2023) with the
participation of partner members. This event was the closure of the 昀椀rst part of the project with the focus on
exchanging knowledge and good practices amongst the partner organisations. The improvisation aimed to
verbally articulate the experience of this period – those rich and sometimes intimate experiences that often
happened beyond words – and to create a shift in the mindset of the group as they prepared to approach the
next part, when the partners would meet and work with local communities.
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We’ve got listening.
We have got curiosity.
We’ve got intergenerational experience.
We have places behind us – we all come from somewhere and we are
bringing this here.
We’ve got intersections.
And encounters.
Overlap.
We have got many different kinds of expertise and competencies.
We’ve got openness.
We have a wish to make people feel like they are welcome and belong.
We’ve got work to do.
We have ideas.
We’ve got opinions.
We have dreams.
We’ve got stories to tell.
We’ve got lots of responsibility
and lots of ideas.
We have fun.
We’ve got inspiration.
We’ve got introductions to traditions and arts practices.
And we have the possibility to look at them from a different viewpoint and
mix them together.
We have got opportunities for failure.
We’ve got assumptions and expectations.
We have legacies to refer to.
We have villages and cities.
We’ve got many leaders who can also be participants and followers and
move between the two.
We’ve got flexibility.
We have a lot of words.
We have inner spaces.
We also have moments when some of us didn’t understand the languages
of others, and
moments when words were incomprehensible, so we figure out or imagine
what was said in a different way.
We’ve got not-knowing.
We have a commitment to learning what the others can teach.
We have moments to touch each other, to be touched, to share intimate
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