DOUGALD HINE

Category: News

  • Kartan över oss – How Does the Future Make You Feel?

    Kartan över oss – How Does the Future Make You Feel?

    I spent two years working for Riksteatern, Sweden’s touring national theatre, and much of that time was spent in a room in their headquarters in Hallunda, one of Stockholm’s outer suburbs, which I shared with the directors Lisa Färnström and Joakim Rindå. As ‘leader of artistic development’, my work lay so far upstream from the actual productions that went out on tour, it wasn’t always easy to know if there was a connection between the endless, fascinating conversations that went on in that room and the actual making of theatre. So five years on, it was a joy to get an invitation to work with Lisa and Jocke again, making a small contribution to Kartan över oss (The Map of Us), a production which has its premiere this month, and which is the final element in a strand of repertoire that came out of the work we did together in 2015-16.

    Kartan takes the form of an audiowalk. A fictional bureaucracy, Myndigheten för Emotionell och Själslig Beredskap (the Authority for Emotional and Spiritual Preparedness) has been tasked with creating a map of how Sweden feels about the future. The audience are greeted by the MESB’s representatives, members of the local Riksteatern association in fluorescent jackets, and led by an app on their phones and the voices in their headphones.

    Along the way, there are forks in the road. You get a question about how you imagine the future will play out, and depending on your answer, you choose one path or the other. (All of this has been mapped onto the streets of forty towns and neighbourhoods, up and down the country.) At a certain point in the journey, depending on the choices you have made, you’ll be prescribed a message from one or other of the MESB’s specialists.

    This is where I come in, as one of seven contributors asked to write and record a seven-minute reflection aimed at members of the audience whose choices suggest a certain outlook on the future. (The other members of this team of specialists include a physicist, an environmental psychologist and the Archbishop of Uppsala.) I don’t think I’m giving too much away if I say that I was asked to speak to the most pessimistic fraction of the audience, but the aim of these reflections is to rattle the frames a little: ‘to cultivate the capacity for second thoughts’, as Ivan Illich once put it.

    Kartan över oss will premiere on 19 September 2020 at forty locations all over Sweden. The play is in Swedish – it’s the first time I’ve written anything directly into Swedish, and I’m grateful to Lisa and Jocke for helping me work up the text, as well as to Anna who went through the first draft with me – but there’s a plan for an English language version in the near future.

  • On the Forest of Thought podcast

    On the Forest of Thought podcast

    I’ve been a guest on a number of podcasts over the past year, but this was a particularly enjoyable experience: sitting under the trees in a nearby park, telling stories about what gets left out of the big story of progress and what’s left when that big story fails us. Thanks to Ingrid Rieser for inviting me into the Forest of Thought.

  • When Your Ancestors Are The Problem

    When Your Ancestors Are The Problem

    Earlier this month, we hosted a live session with Rev Sara Jolena Wolcott as part of Homeward Bound, our new online extension of a school called HOME. We had a large audience and lots of questions, not all of which Sara had time to answer during the Zoom call, so I sat down a couple of weeks afterwards and recorded this conversation where we go further into the roots of the ancestor work she’s been doing.

  • Heading to Denmark

    Heading to Denmark

    Strange to be sitting on a train, setting off on a journey, after months in which I’ve not been further than an occasional trip to the centre of our small city. For better and/or worse, the restrictions have been lighter here than for most of you, so I’m just imagining the mixture of sensations that come with the reopening of societies that have been strictly closed.

    In fact, I’m heading for Denmark, and the border is still closed to non-essential travel, so I come equipped with a letter from the Glass Museum in Ebeltoft explaining why my presence there is essential. After six months of phone calls, I should finally meet the artists Monica Guggisberg and Philip Baldwin. We’re working on a book together and their exhibition opens tomorrow. I look forward to all of this, yet if the border guards were to press me on whether the trip is essential, I don’t know if that’s the word I’d use.

  • Homeward Bound: An Invitation

    Homeward Bound: An Invitation

    Well, here’s an invitation I’m excited to share – the first online offering from a school called HOME, an eight-part series I’ll be teaching, starting next Thursday evening. If you’ve found something that spoke to you in my writing or the projects I’ve created over the years, then here’s a chance to go a bit deeper into where all of that came from. 

    I’ll be retracing the encounters that helped me find my bearings in my twenties and the thinking that underpinned the work I’ve done since – but this is also about the broader questions of how we get oriented and find a direction of travel, when the upward sweeping curves of progress, growth and development stop making sense. What could it mean to be ‘homeward bound’, starting from where we find ourselves, in this strange spring of 2020?

    The price for the series is 1000 SEK (roughly £80, €90 or $100), but there are discounts available for those whose current circumstances put that out of reach, so don’t hesitate to get in touch if that’s you.

    I’m excited to see what we can do, bringing this work to a new platform – a way of meeting each other that may not match how it would be to sit around a table together, but might just open the hospitality of our little school to those who would never find their way across its threshold here in Sweden.

  • The Great Humbling

    The Great Humbling

    It’s too soon to tell the story of this event – and it will still be too soon when it starts to be too late.

    Earlier this week, Ed Gillespie and I recorded this conversation, a back-of-an-envelope map of the stories already forming around the Covid-19 pandemic and it’s effects, and a way in to a longer exploration of what it might mean to talk about the moment we’re living in as a time of humbling, being brought down to earth.

    Join us in the weeks ahead, as we puzzle through the links between this crisis and the larger planetary predicament around and ahead of us.

  • On Last Born in the Wilderness podcast

    On Last Born in the Wilderness podcast

  • Notes from Underground

    Notes from Underground

    Announcing a new thing – my first new project since leaving Dark Mountain – here’s Notes from Underground, a weekly essay series launched today with Bella Caledonia.

    This starts out as a journey into the deep context of the new climate movements that have surfaced since mid-2018. I’m not writing to celebrate or critique, but as an invitation to a quieter reflection on where all this is coming from, and what it tells us about the moment in which we find ourselves.

    We’ll see where else it goes, as I write my way through the winter; but I’m excited about this, I hope it will feed into conversations and offer some clues as to how we find our bearings in disorienting times.

    You can read the first essay on the Bella Caledonia site, or it’s available as a podcast and on YouTube. Huge thanks to Mike Small for commissioning the series and bringing me on board as part of the next phase of Bella.

    https://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-notes-from-underground-56957599/episode/001-al-gore-didnt-want-56990631/
  • … as sure as the rain

    … as sure as the rain

    Back in 2012, Anna and I travelled to Oaxaca with our friend Nick Stewart, an artist and regular co-conspirator from my London days. We had in mind to make a film together that would centre on my conversations with Gustavo Esteva – the activist, ‘deprofessionalised intellectual’, friend of Ivan Illich, political advisor to the Zapatistas and founder of the Universidad de la Tierra.

    These things don’t always turn out the way you expect. Back in England, in the cutting room, it dawned on us that the conversations we’d filmed worked better as a transcript than they did on screen – and this transcript became the basis for Dealing With Our Own Shit, a text that was published in Issue 4 of Dark Mountain. (One suggestion that Gustavo made to me, in particular, became the starting point for a whole strand of work on friendship and the commons, beginning with the talk I gave at the Commoning the City conference in Stockholm in April 2013.)

    Meanwhile, Nick had returned from Mexico with an extraordinary collection of footage, shot from the hip as we wandered around Oaxaca and later Cuernavaca, where we took part in a conference to mark the tenth anniversary of Illich’s death. The images that accumulated on camera were almost implausibly suggestive – from the men at work with sledgehammers, smashing up the sidewalk below the Hotel America, to the schoolchildren queuing to be led into an inflatable globe, to the graduation ceremony taking place in a university sports hall, where a gulf of empty floor separates the assembled parents from their offspring.

    All of this and more, Nick had stumbled across during those days. The puzzle was what to do with it all. And then he met the Mexican writer and artist Helen Blejerman, and their conversation became an exchange of stories, like letters read aloud, about memories from their childhoods in Mexico and Ireland. Together with the music of Nils Fram, Nick and Helen’s stories are woven together with the scenes from Oaxaca into a feature-length film essay, …as sure as the rain.

    You can watch the trailer below – or the whole film here.

    And if you watch closely, you may notice a hairy silhouette on the edge of the frame, or two tall white folks arm in arm in the middle of a Oaxacan street market; traces of the journey in which this film had its beginnings. It all seems a long time ago now.

  • Finding A Way Home: Stroud, 15 October 2018

    Finding A Way Home: Stroud, 15 October 2018

    There’s a phrase we use to describe this school called HOME: ‘a gathering place and a learning community for those who are drawn to the work of regrowing a living culture.’ It’s a vision that we’re starting to realise, with all the stumbling and humbling moments that go with bringing any project into reality – and an important step towards that was the course that we held in June, when twenty-two scholars converged on our corner of Sweden for five days for Finding Our Way Home.

    So when planning a trip to England for the Convivial Tools symposium (13 October), I was very pleased to get an invitation from one of our scholars, Francis Barton, to come and speak on his home ground in Stroud. I’m looking forward to the chance to talk more about what it can mean to talk about ‘the work of regrowing a living culture’.

    The evening will include contributions from Francis and me, along with our hosts, Emily Joy and Alison Cockcroft of Periscope, the arts organisation who have made this event possible.

    Tickets are available in advance from the venue – Stroud Valleys Artspace, 4 John Street, Stroud – or if travelling from further afield, you can contact Periscope about reserving a ticket.

    More details here.