Along with six staged works this text constitutes my thesis.⁵⁾All works are shown together in a travelling exhibition: At Skövde Konsthall, Varbergs Konsthall, and Skellefteå Konsthall 2015–17. There have also been a number of exhibitions and street screenings of individual staged works. In connection with the dissertation there will be an opportunity to see the works at Skellefteå Konsthall, starting October 30, 2016, which is one of several exhibition windows for the material in the thesis. My artistic work is physical, spatial, and temporal, and these parameters also affect the presentation. The thesis includes and discusses all these forms of art and presentation. This presentation uses the same approach as the staged works shown in art spaces, at street screenings, or as photo manifestations on social media, it was developed with the intention that text and other renditions of this work should be regarded as a whole.

My first encounter – or rather non-encounter – with a person who was begging prompted me to embark on a five-year exploration of what happens between the begging and the giving on the streets of Sweden; I pose questions about the images at play in the social choreography of begging and giving – how can images be activated in this context and new ones generated? I explore begging and giving in the urban landscape, in the media, and in other activities that stem from these actions. I use images as my starting point; images of action and images that implicate, images that are set in motion, images that generate motion (moving images) and the reverse: new movements generate new images. For each work, I’ve described the concrete work process and what the negotiations with those involved have been. The text fragments that appear here and there are my “internal negotiations” and of importance to the work.

I discuss the practice of other artists in a number of reflective and analytic texts.⁶⁾All fall under the umbrella term participatory art. They are: A documentary participatory-performative film, Enjoy Poverty by Renzo Martens, a documentary participatory-performative film installation, Kropp – Erfarenhet – Kunskap [Body-Experience-Knowledge] by Ioana Cojocariu, a public space-performance, Persondesign, by artistic duo Bogdan Szyber & Carina Reich, a participatory-public-installation, Lights in the City by Alfredo Jaar, and a site-specific action painting and cutting by AKAY & KlisterPeter. I use these terms to show how contemporary art uses and compiles various practices and methodologies. These artists work both within and outside of art as an institution. Their – and my – work has in common that it is dependent on the people involved in the social situation discussed in its staging. A form of participatory performance is involved in the production process one way or another – and aims to generate images to be presented to an audience.⁷⁾Performance is an art form that can be part of works in various ways. Stimulated by my colleagues I investigate possibilities in practice, and have done so since the early 1990s. My background was in painting during the 1980s. I was active in video art in the 1990s, in the tradition that involves a performance in front of the camera in a closed room, alone or with a participant, which is then screened as an art installation. My practice later transitioned to participatory performative staged works and action documentary (www.ceciliaparsberg.com). Since the turn of the millennium I’ve worked with participation in different forms, some of these can be designated variations of delegated performances, which is a term used by Claire Bishop. But these also differ from each other, see further discussion in the text. This thesis work contains the staged works What Images does the Giving face? & What Images does the Begging face?, chapter 2, Body on Street, chapter 4, and The Chorus of Begging and The Chorus of Giving, chapter 7, where performance forms a foundation for my work. In these participatory performances I am the employer, I pay all participants and everybody knows that this will become a film for an art installation. I am describing art movements and –isms so that we know that we mean the same thing while talking, but it is not within the scope of my thesis to analyze them. Much like the term “art” I use “performance” as an open term.
——The meaning of performance in relation to performative acts is analyzed by, among others, artist and art theorist Barbara Bolt, she refers to philosopher of language John Langshaw Austin, Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida and others.
——Barbara Bolt, “Artistic Research: A Performative Paradigm?” PARSE 3, (2016). An older and shorter version can be found online: “A Performative Paradigm for the Creative Arts?” accessed May 9, 2016, www.herts.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0015/12417/WPIAAD_vol5_bolt.pdf. “Performance implicates the real through the presence of living bodies”,⁸⁾Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The politics of performance, (London: Routledge, 1993), 148. as performance theorist Peggy Phelan puts it. She adds: “Performance clogs the smooth machinery of reproductive representation necessary to the circulation of capital.”⁹⁾Ibid., 148.
Phelan positions the constative (self-referential acts of speech – findings) in contradiction to the metonymic: “Metonymy is additive and associative; it works to secure a horizontal axis of contiguity and displacement.” (Ibid., 215). She also maintains that the performative displays independence from an external reference in present actions. In her text Phelan uses photographer Cindy Sherman’s self-portrait as an example of performance. Cindy Sherman’s photographs describe a female body – her own – but she doesn’t reproduce the reference. She is an actor who executes a performance in front of the camera (in different ways and with various “additions”)¹⁰⁾“Just as her body remains unseen as ‘in itself it really is,’ so too does the sign fail to reproduce the referent.” (Ibid., 150). . The performance she has staged for the production of the photograph is unique, it hasn’t been documented, rather it generates a new image. Sherman’s photographs destabilize the relationship between the symbol, the representation, and the female body and thus the reproductive representation. Her photographs participate in – but also clog – the smooth machinery necessary to the circulation of capital.¹¹⁾In another example Phelan discusses the works of Sophie Calle, an artist who works with stories and who “is increasingly moving toward performance”, here on a work at the Isabella Gardner Stewart Museum in Boston: “The descriptions fill in, and thus supplement (add to, defer, and displace) the stolen paintings […] the interaction between the art object and the spectator is, essentially, performative – and therefore resistant to the claims of validity and accuracy endemic to the discourse of reproduction. […] The description itself does not reproduce the object, it rather helps to restage and restate […].” (Ibid., 147).
——According to my interpretation Phelan is talking about how the absence of objects together with the stories of the vanished objects create images in the viewer, a performative act takes place between art object and viewer that generates new images. The way I read Phelan what she means by reproduction is to reproduce an image that I have of somebody else or something else, that is when I reproduce the image I have of you – it is a kind of objectification. But performance demands that these images be reformulated and doing so necessitates a sensual physicality. It’s often difficult to discern reproduction from representation, it is exactly this balancing act that takes place in cooperation with the participants: to no longer reproduce an image I have of you, but to try to reformulate – and arrive at a new image. I describe it as the performative process, activating images and generating new ones. There is no general method for how to go about this. Every work that I have produced over the course of this thesis has its own process, and taken together these variations can be seen as a method (guided by the research questions) within the framework that the study of the subject constitutes.

The works of all artists in the thesis are ethically challenging and aim to reveal and activate various social gaps as spaces for political action; some of these can – in terms of their staging – be termed delegated performances to use the terminology of art historian Claire Bishop.¹²⁾In the mid-1990s a particular kind of performance emerged, described here by Claire Bishop: “Although this trend takes a number of forms, […] all of this work […] maintains a comfortable relationship to the gallery, taking it either as the frame for a performance or as a space of exhibition for the photographic and video artefact that results from this. I will refer to this tendency as ‘delegated performance’: the act of hiring non-professionals or specialists in other fields to undertake the job of being present and performing at a particular time and a particular place on behalf of the artist, and following his/her instructions.” Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, (New York: Verso, 2012), 222.
——One example is the work of Santiago Sierra, in which he hires workers to complete simple tasks in the exhibition space during the time of the exhibition, such as hold up a wall that’s about to fall, or part of a wall. His performance alludes to the socio-economic system. “Although the artist delegates power to the performer (entrusting them with agency while also affirming hierarchy), delegation is not just a one-way, downward gesture. In turn, the performers also delegate something to the artist: a guarantee of authenticity, through their proximity to everyday social reality, conventionally denied to the artist who deals merely in representations.” (Bishop, 237). Bishop addresses a number of variations on delegated performance and discusses these in chapter 8.
——The works by Ioana Cojocariu and Szyber & Reich that I mentioned can be termed ‘delegated performances’ according to Bishop’s definition, as can my works What Images does the Giving face? & What Images does the Begging face? and The Chorus of Begging and The Chorus of Giving.
——The ways in which the performance of the 1990s differs from that of the 1960s and ’70s is also interesting in this context, and as Claire Bishop puts it: “Artists in the 1970s used their own bodies as the medium and material of the work, often with a corresponding emphasis on physical and psychological transgression. Today’s delegated performance still places a high value upon immediacy, but if it has any transgressive character, this tends to derive from the perception that artists are exhibiting and exploiting other subjects.” (Bishop, 223). The examples of staged works that are addressed in the thesis also exist within and aim to discuss this kind of drawing of ethical and aesthetic boundaries. But this term alone is not enough to encompass the methodological intent that I claim characterizes my work and that of the previously mentioned artists. The philosopher Boris Groys maintains that this is a new phenomenon in comparison to other movements in history and names this type of art by naming the intention of the actors: “Art activists react to the increasing collapse of the modern social state […] Art activists do want to be useful, to change the world, to make the world a better place – but at the same time, they do not want to cease being artists.”¹³⁾Relational Art is a tendency in contemporary art that art critic and curator Nicolas Bourriaud highlights with his book Relational Aesthetics, (Dijon: Les Presses Du Reel, 1998), and that has influenced my artistic practice, But with my engagement in social and policy issues my practice is closer to what Boris Groys describes: “The phenomenon of art activism is central to our time because it is a new phenomenon – quite different from the phenomenon of critical art that became familiar to us during recent decades. Art activists do not want to merely criticize the art system or the general political and social conditions under which this system functions. Rather, they want to change these conditions by means of art – not so much inside the art system but outside it, in reality itself.”
Boris Groys, “On Art Activism”, E-flux journal, 56, (2014): 1. Accessed April 30, 2016, www.e-flux.com/journal/on-art-activism. They are forged in the relationship between the ethical, the aesthetic, and the political. Thus they create points of contact with theoretical fields relevant to the work such as political philosophy, sociology, cultural geography, the history of ideas, and anthropology.

There are two whole chapters on the image. The ideas that have become important in the artistic practice are the same as those that guided the theoretical framework. When I examine an image in practice it’s about the relationship between viewing and participating – about which position I inhabit in the creative process and the relationship between imagining and producing an image. Which is to say that I don’t examine image as production medium (in this thesis). Rather, I use specific designations when describing specific techniques, for instance photo, film, painting, film installation. I use the word “image”, both in the sense of imagining something without physically standing in front of it, that is an image that belongs to the thought and thinking; as well as in the sense that images are actions, that what one sees is experienced as a response and perhaps also as a responsibility – something that needs to be revealed and transmitted to a viewer. Philosopher Hannah Arendt’s book The Human Condition has guided me in understanding how actions and thoughts occur as two-way communication; thought demands action and concrete experiences demand the abstraction that thought can supply.

In chapters 3 and 8 – Places I and Places II – I have photographed places (or non-places) that those who beg have set up on the street. Together they transmit images of a gap between representation and presence.

In chapter 4 I explore gestures in collaboration with different people in different cities; their images are made physical and become performative in the photo demonstration Body on Street. The participants’ individual experiences – images that they have – of the situation of giving in relation to begging are our points of departure. We explore the boundaries between the personal and social experience and also what capacity (influence) these images can have as physical movement on patterns of movement in the urban landscape. When Barbara Bolt claims that “The performative act doesn’t describe something but rather it does something in the world,”¹⁴⁾Barbara Bolt, “Artistic Research: A Performative Paradigm?”. she is saying that a performative act is about power and effect that can affect both the participant and the audience.¹⁵⁾“The essay argues that the performative needs to be understood in terms of the performative force of art, that is, its capacity to effect ‘movement’ in thought, word and deed in the individual and social sensorium.” (Barbara Bolt, “Artistic Research: A Performative Paradigm?”, 134.) In the urban space, in front of onlookers passing by, still and relational acts are improvised, new images are generated – photographs that frame the movements in the urban environment in which they are enacted are passed on as a photo demonstration on social media and in exhibitions to the audience. This procedure could also be seen as reverse street photography.¹⁶⁾“The street photographer can be seen as an extension of the flaneur an observer of the streets (who was often a writer or artist)”. Susan Sontag, On Photography, (London: Penguin, 2008), 55.
——Street photography is “conducted for art or enquiry that features unmediated chance encounters and random incidents within public places. […] Street photography can focus on people and their behavior in public.” “Street Photography”, Wikipedia. Accessed May 14, 2016, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Street_photography. The work is the entire chain of events.¹⁷⁾A workshop has been arranged for each exhibition together with participants from that town, the photos that are generated are then displayed in the exhibition space together with the others from the series Body on Street. ☞

The title of this thesis is How Do You Become a Successful Beggar in Sweden? With it I aim to critically review and challenge a linguistic context, as well as actual phenomena. The title serves as a starting point for discussions and as sort of a verbal engine. The question of how one can succeed is posed by a person in a state of emergency, begging. Or by a person who is expected to be, or is, a potential giver to the person who is begging – how can success be achieved? A gap opens up between those who pose these questions, language doesn’t hold. Does this mean that something new might emerge? Is it possible to make one’s way outside of the frame of knowledge, outside the hierarchy of power that also controls facts? Perhaps. In any case this is the way in which I attempt to find a point of entry into the questions that are being discussed in the media and on various political levels parallel to this. It is my intention to show how ruptures, openings, gaps, voids, spaces in which language loses contact with meaning and content, can be conveyed, visualized, embodied, and fashioned. Art is one way of doing this.

When I began my project in 2011 the media used the single designation “beggars” for people who beg on the streets. Initially I chose to embrace this problem of definition and regard beggar as an open concept.²⁸⁾“The distinction between open and closed terms was important in this context. A closed term is a term that can be defined by the traditional ‘if and only if’ definition, that is by giving the necessary and sufficient conditions for something falling under this term. Examples of these types of definitions are mathematical terms as two, three, four, circle, equilateral triangle, and so on. An open term is a term that can’t be satisfactorily defined in this manner.” Tore Nordenstam, Exemplets makt, (Dialoger, 2005), 31. To solidify a definition would be to risk alienating, rather than problematizing an effect of poverty, or otherness, that stems from social inequality. I reasoned that if the definitions of beggar and begging respectively remain open, there is no particular group of people to be defined and named. My hope was that a necessary discussion about what begging is would subsequently arise.²⁹⁾In order to understand ‘open terms’ one needs to know series of cases that fit the pattern, according to philosopher Tore Nordenstam. “These are necessary conditions for the possibility of understanding and action.” (Ibid., 59).
——“Art” is an example of an open term, it’s only characterized through the shifting examples that are contained in it. The strength in art is that it shows the weaknesses in the definition process.
——Begging is an open term. Can begging be categorized as an occupation – what counts as begging? Is peddling begging? Is recycling cans begging? How many hours a day does one need to work to count as a beggar? Are buskers beggars? “The law on busking says: According to the municipal assembly circular 1995:41 collecting money in connection to performing street music doesn’t necessitate a permit, partly due to the fact that this would limit the individual’s freedom to perform a musical or other artistic work, partly due to a musician’s collection in an instrument case, or on an article of clothing being a passive act. It is a different thing if the musician is walking around in the audience collecting money. This act is to be seen as collection of money and can necessitate a permit in accordance with local regulations (prop. 1992/93:210 s. 141 f). Exceptions to the need for permits can be made in cases such as school classes collecting money to aid organizations.” Ann Sofi Agnevik and Emilia Danielsson, “Några juridiska frågor gällande utsatta EU-medborgare”, September 12, 2014, Sveriges Kommuner och Landsting, 9. Accessed April 26, 2016, www.skl.se/download/18.2371797b14a4dca6483fe13/1418804156789/SKL-juridiska-fragor-om-utsatta-EU-medborgare-2014-12-09.pdf.

“Success” is a very mediagenic word. The desire to be successful could apply to every line of work, but when I pose the question in relation to someone who has to beg language seems to crack. A disabled man in Bucharest who apparently (begging is forbidden in Romania) is permitted to beg, since he is sitting across the street from police headquarters when we interview him, says to me, “If you can accept that you won’t get more than the minimum needed to survive, then it’s successful. It depends on what your limits are. For me, if I can survive, then it’s successful.”³⁰⁾An interview that was filmed by me with interpreter Laura Chifiriuc in Bucharest, August 2013. Those who beg are at the bottom of the social hierarchy, they are the poorest, and often do not have birth certificates or passports and thus aren’t part of any formal community. The image of success – an improved future situation – is transmitted by the prevailing system, which has created free movement. By having the question about success remain, I hope that the dissertation will also convey the shifts in terminology over the five years that my research has been conducted.

Over the years a number of designations have been used by Swedish media for people who beg: The beggars, the people who beg, EU-migrants, Roma who beg, the Roma from Romania, the Romani EU-migrants, the EU-mobile, the vulnerable EEA-citizens, The EU-citizens who have the least resources and thus beg.³¹⁾In his investigation on vulnerable EEA citizens in Sweden, national coordinator Martin Valfridsson has described as “vulnerable” those who don’t have the right to access Swedish welfare. The report became official in January 2016. The image of which people are included in this term is complicated by the following description in the introduction to his report: “By vulnerable EU citizens this report means individuals who are citizens of another EU nation and who do not have so-called right of residency in Sweden. Those who don’t have right of residency have significantly lower chances of accessing welfare here. In order to obtain a right of residency, it is in somewhat simplified terms, necessary to have a job or good chances of obtaining a job.” The report gives a very short history of begging in Sweden and especially points to the last three years that in the introduction are described as follows: “In 2012 vulnerable EU citizens began to come to Sweden in larger numbers than before. Some came to beg, others to pick berries, or look for work. Over the next three years their numbers increased considerably. In the spring of 2014 an estimated 2,100 such individuals were present in Sweden. In April 2015 there were 5,000 individuals. Since then the numbers ceased to increase and a minor drop has been recorded. In November 2015 the number was estimated at 4,700 individuals. The number of children in the group varies, but is estimated at between 70 and 100. Martin Valfridsson, “Framtid sökes – Slutredovisning från den nationella samordnaren för utsatta EU-medborgare”, Statens offentliga utredningar, (SOU 2016:6), 7. Accessed April 12, 2016, www.regeringen.se/contentassets/b9ca59958b5f43f681b8ec6dba5b5ca3/framtid-sokesslutredovisning-fran-den-nationella-samordnaren-for-utsatta-eu-medborgare-sou-2016_6.pdf.

When terms such as EU-migrants or poor EU-migrants are used, begging is connected to migration and migrants. “To describe someone as an EU-citizen, rather than as a migrant, or migrant worker, signals that the person in question has rights that the state is bound to honor, while migrants have the rights that the state chooses to give them.” So writes political scientist Meriam Chatty. She claims that the term “migrant” isn’t neutral, rather it is normatively charged with a content relating to safety. “While the citizen is the person who is protected, the migrant is the one who poses a potential threat.”³²⁾Meriam Chatty, “Migranternas medborgarskap” (Ph.D. diss., Studies in Political Science, Örebro University, 2015), 40. ☞

How can one make visible the new situation regarding the begging and the giving? The number of articles about “beggars” increased seventeen-fold during the more than five years I worked on this subject. This bears witness to an increase in the number of people begging – from about a thousand people in 2011 to about five thousand in 2015 – but also to a need for expression in the general public. The social climate is changing and this can be seen and felt.³⁸⁾I searched the Swedish newspaper database Retriever Research for articles on “beggars” and found that in 2011 there were 470; in 2012: 793; in 2013: 1,836; in 2014: 7,044; and in 2015: 7,699.
——The number of articles on “beggars” has multiplied by seventeen in four years. Professor Hans Swärd, who researches poverty, social problems, homelessness, social work and the history of social work, has done a similar investigation: “The number of begging people who’ve come here through free movement is estimated to be 4,000–6,000 people (in all of Sweden) in 2015, compared to about 10,000–30,000 undocumented migrants, and about 34,000 homeless people.” “Den nya utsattheten – om EU-migranter och tiggeri”, Socialmedicinsk Tidskrift, 269.
——In regards to the attention media has paid the issue Hans Swärd concludes: “Despite the issue having garnered attention, the level of knowledge is far from comprehensive.” He also writes: “We see the stranger through the eyes of the majority culture and base our assumptions on visible conditions, temporary behaviors, race or physical markers. The physical proximity of the situation to our daily lives along with lack of knowledge has meant heightened drama, which to some extent explains the heightened attention.” The visibility of those who beg has been given as a reason for why their presence is so frequently discussed and for the drama it causes, but their visibility also makes me visible – as I write above in “The First Encounter”: The act reveals me to myself as well as to my surroundings – the actions of both fall outside of the social contract. Images are made out of acts and images in turn create actions. What has happened and is happening between two people on the street – the giving and the begging – shreds a social self-image, at least for those who give, How are images – and physical action – in turn connected to social image and body politic?

Regardless of whether those who give and those who beg interact with each other, if they are in contact or not in contact at all, most seem to have stories about and images of one another, and of what the other is like. My curiosity and my investigation is based on my own first encounter during which I realized that I didn’t even attempt to see – that I could see more together with others. Was my dead gaze an effect of some collective influence – how do “we” regard begging as an activity, how do we regard the beggar, and who are “we”? My initial research questions were: What images does the giving face? And I began to ask people who give. Parallel to this I posed the question: What images does the begging face? I asked people who beg. In part I wanted to know which given images were in circulation, in part I wanted to try to understand something about the motivations, ideas, affectivities, feelings, thoughts, and values that shaped these images. This resulted in two films that are presented as an installation where the viewer (the potential giver) sits in between, in the space or leeway where the follow-up question becomes: Which images are at play between those who give and those who beg? My first two research questions are posed in the work to the viewer, and subsequently returned to me – the researcher – who can then reflect, analyze and pose the next question. The next question is about using various practices to investigate how these “images”, collective, as well as individual, visual as well as linguistic – are put into play in society. Revealing images in this way is a performative act. ☞

Apart from the study of the specific subject at hand, my research project is my artistic method and practice. As Mara Lee puts it in her dissertation on literary portrayal: “So far there are few methods within artistic research regarded as generally valid and shareable. It is hard to find a set of methodological rules that can be used by many. Our methods usually stem from and are rooted in our artistic practice, and thus the element of style becomes part of the method.”⁴⁰⁾Mara Lee, När andra skriver; skrivande som motstånd, ansvar och tid, (Gothenburg: Glänta, 2014), 26. I have worked with methodological intent.

Throughout this entire project I activate my research questions together with other people. Often “the beggar” is referred to as if they are the carrier of “the problem” and thus also require a personified or collective solution, something the authors of the article “The EU-Migrant Debate as Ideology” are also critical of: “Rather the EU migrant appears as ‘a figure who embodies a life beyond the disciplined bodies of the well-behaved workers’. This figure is intimidating in the eyes of the ‘rule of law’ since it cannot be isolated from the ethnic group.”⁴¹⁾Örestig, Bäckström, Persson, 6. The authors maintain that the images ascribed to those who beg are the result of a prevailing economic structure, which must also be problematized, and they stress the importance of renegotiating and “to establish conditions for EU migrants to come forth as political subjects that social majorities not only speak about but, in the end, speak to.”⁴²⁾Ibid., 9. How then, in practice, does one speak to? This is what the thesis as a whole aims to investigate, using my first encounter above as a point of departure. This is also what the research questions aim to investigate. I’ve been guided by my experience as a documentary filmmaker, action researcher, and with other field study over the years, in terms of what speaking and listening to might look like in concrete situations. The works that this text describes and which are shown on this website intend to further illuminate this practice within the discipline of fine art.

When the artistic work is done in concert with other people every situation involving another person is unique and necessitates its own negotiations over the image, over the ethical in the aesthetic presentation that is being created. To want to speak through images does not mean that it is doable, it often fails due to the questions being asked not being formulated in relation to the one who is expected to answer, they aren’t heard or understood, or aren’t relevant to the person being addressed. Space is vital for both parties and the process of negotiation can’t be too controlled, but still needs to have a certain direction. To speak to is a mutual process. This is why I think it necessary to go into this project with a methodological intent and to develop the method together with. To use art historian Claire Bishop’s description, I am “less interested in a relational aesthetic than in the creative rewards of participation as a politicized working process.”⁴³⁾Bishop, 2. This includes an investigation of the aesthetic. Nor do I assume a specific method of image creation in this context, rather I begin by making visible and shaping the research questions. ☞

1. A way of destroying⁴⁷⁾Inspired by Louise Bourgeois’ notes in Deconstruction of the Father, Reconstruction of the Father, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998). – the image of the image; that is the imagined image (ways of seeing as part of a prevailing, normative image, the image belonging to the culture). This is about self-reflection and revealing oneself as a bearer of dominant norms and working through these images. To paint (or in a different execution: text, photo, performance); a self-portrait – a self-image as a revelation of me as the person who sees and depicts in order to declare a certain position.⁴⁸⁾In this project for instance the short recording of the first encounter is what reveals me. After this, revelations happen for each step of the thesis. Self-reflection that also leads to revelation is perishable. Self-reflection is the trampled track next to the road. The cursive passages in this text are a selection of self-reflections. The destruction takes place during the time it takes to understand and can involve a personal reckoning with a past, to see old insights in a new light.⁴⁹⁾Insights that have been reached in a previous situation are contemplated anew in the next. But they can sometimes be difficult to distinguish from self-images, understandings and old, sanitized images that limit. Insights must also be challenged, as Hans Larsson points out “How infinitely much lies not in a person’s view of themselves? His conscious reflection can hardly include anything but a few traits, a few needs in their most general direction and not the particularity they have and that everything will depend on.” Hans Larsson, Intuition, (Stockholm: Dialoger, 1997), 52.
2. A will to see – to reach, listen with all senses, reflect, translate. To set up encounters and find out what opens up. To seek contact – a mutual desire to see and be seen. The quest for horizontality, there is a de-objectification in the process of speaking to. Reflecting over an aesthetics of distance and an aesthetics of proximity. Zooming out and seeing larger contexts, power structures, frameworks – framing.⁵⁰⁾A friend of mine tells me that her seven-year-old son has brought home two drawings from school. The teacher instructed the children to draw a self-portrait. He paints himself, his mom, and his dad. He shows the drawing but the teacher said – No, you were supposed to paint your self-portrait. He draws another: Himself, his mom, and his dad. A self-portrait is a form of self-image and this boy drew those closest to him as co-creators of his self-image. Perhaps he is saying that his image is a relational process where the image of the other is returned, reflected by the person, or those who look at him. Perhaps the fact that he was adopted from China matters here and hence he has an intuitive understanding of what it means to have a different look – image – than those who surround him. Perhaps drawing conveys what he can’t express to his teacher in words. Perhaps – if the teacher has an authoritarian outlook on teaching as well as image – this boy will eventually begin to draw like the others; a self-portrait like the face I see in the mirror. Because that is, “the right way to draw a self-portrait”. He is schooled in adjusting his way of seeing according to the prevailing consensus on how a self-portrait is drawn. But if the teacher can see outside of his accustomed frame, see what his drawing conveys – listen to the image, be open to learning, it is possible that his self-image can have a place next to the others, in school, in education.