Jenny Moore – Doing Not Saying
STOP TALKING ABOUT IT START DOING SOMETHING challenged artist and musician Jenny Moore as we started working together on the year long project Doing Not Saying. If we want an amazing festival full of great art and music, but that also makes the world less racist, less sexist, how are we going to actually do that?
We started with bee-dances and screaming in to buckets of water and travelled via difficult questions, gang signs, occupational therapy and boxing. Jenny prodded us gently through conversations and walking, crying and workshops to think about how the organisation that we run could be different.
Doing Not Saying is an artist led project that has brought different perspectives to our organisational structures.
“But how are you different now?” asked Jenny
We made a list:
- No art happens in a vacuum, and we must question the implications of every decision we make
- Learning that we benefit from racist structures and we must work to reduce the racist harm we cause in the world
- Seeing my/our individual privileges more clearly, and working to end them
- Learning that our good intentions to have a more open and diverse festival can pigeonhole marginalised people in negative ways
- Realising we must make our structures diverse – change the way we WORK not just how we TALK
- Seeing how we are negatively socialised in to gender roles, and working against that
Doing Not Saying was about learning to listen more. To know when to be quiet – to just listen – and then how to act.
* Doing Not Saying at Borealis 2020, was a series of talks, open workshops and physical engagements led by our Artist in Residence Jenny Moore and her anarchist, intersectional feminist punk choir, F*Choir, that use active methods of engagement to break patriarchal hierarchies and enact queer social structures in our every day life.