H E R M I T P R O J E C T S
FAG PACKET GALLERY
FAG PACKET GALLERY
Chewing the Fat: Play Act Cards (PAC), by Sophie Chapman + Kerri Jefferis, 2020
Chewing the Fat: Play Act Cards (PAC) is a card game that invites us to step into someone else’s shoes and improvise an exchange, event or happening from a different time, place and perspective. It is a micro role play where players can choose to alter, align or shift things depending on what arises. These prompts have been gathered from a neighbourhood in Beeston, South Leeds but could be anywhere, or anyones. The cards are split into categories: People, Place, Atmosphere, Line, Discuss, Character Prompt & Wild cards, and are accompanied by a set of instructions.
On 17th March 2020 Natasha MacVoy (HER MIT Projects) emailed Sophie Chapman + Kerri Jefferis with some questions as prompts to find out more of the back story:
Chewing the Fat: Play Act Cards is a prompt for right now as we try to care for our communities and each other. I’d like to update my website, giving more info about some of the projects without it reading like a series of dull press releases. Here are some questions to use as an approach - if you want to tweak them / change them / or edit (add some or remove any) then please do so that you can share the info you want, framed the way you want it to be read:
I first met Sophie when we were both helping deliver Tate Exchange projects in 2018, and then met you both at Jamboree 2018 where I was struck by the lightness and joy you share as you tackle important social questions. Can you tell me a little about the people you work with and the perspective they bring to the projects you run?
Thanks Tash. In a pep talk Phoebe Davies gave us once, she described our practice in a similar way, as “tough politics in soft embraces”. The people we work with are really varied, this started off with open invitations via generous platforms like the Antiuniversity to strange kind of collective happenings like ‘Fuck it, Lets Make a Band’ and ‘Behavioural Training for Astronauts for Earthilings’ (with Giles Bunch) which essentially asked people to come along to something unknown to experience something out of the day to day or ordinary. We are still really interested in what happens when a space is made for that temporary or not. In the beginning these experiments were open to anyone interested in coming along, and we got quite a mix of people, and not knowing most of them produced varying wild effects. Especially in Astronauts, as a kind of Live Action Role Play, people quite quickly used it as a space to exercise different personalities and approaches - good and evil - and the same storyline produced VERY different situations dependent on different ‘characters’ and ‘scenarios’ emerging!
Following that our work extended closer to home ~ with friends, accomplices and then strangers. This was a definite decision as we wanted to both extend out beyond the ‘art world’ or ‘alt education’ contexts (and sets of peoples) and also as we wanted to see where we would get if we had more time together rather than just one off events. With these more recent projects there is often some kind of shared interest, mutuality or intersecting itch to be scratched though. For example, Guttural Living came out of repeated conversations each of us were having with disparate friendship circles about codependency, instinct, societal patterns and the desire to carve new paths but these chats really became resonate with Kyla Harris, Serena Morgan and Zuleika Lebow and part of making the work involved an intense period of time ‘researching’ together. This involved hauling up at METAL Southend, preparing meals together, gossiping, reading aloud, dancing, moving together and touching and feeling objects, together. These women had not all met before but each have very distinctive and different lived experiences and bodily knowledge which as a group allowed moments of acknowledgement and agreement but also dispute or challenge which was welcomed. So the common denominator is that we always want to bring people together in a fairly intensive way who have different perspectives, lived realities and wisdom and see what happens and how this disrupts or dislodges any fixed ideas we might have about ourselves, other people or the systems we live in.
Chewing the Fat: Play Act Cards is a prompt for right now as we try to care for our communities and each other. I’d like to update my website, giving more info about some of the projects without it reading like a series of dull press releases. Here are some questions to use as an approach - if you want to tweak them / change them / or edit (add some or remove any) then please do so that you can share the info you want, framed the way you want it to be read:
I first met Sophie when we were both helping deliver Tate Exchange projects in 2018, and then met you both at Jamboree 2018 where I was struck by the lightness and joy you share as you tackle important social questions. Can you tell me a little about the people you work with and the perspective they bring to the projects you run?
Thanks Tash. In a pep talk Phoebe Davies gave us once, she described our practice in a similar way, as “tough politics in soft embraces”. The people we work with are really varied, this started off with open invitations via generous platforms like the Antiuniversity to strange kind of collective happenings like ‘Fuck it, Lets Make a Band’ and ‘Behavioural Training for Astronauts for Earthilings’ (with Giles Bunch) which essentially asked people to come along to something unknown to experience something out of the day to day or ordinary. We are still really interested in what happens when a space is made for that temporary or not. In the beginning these experiments were open to anyone interested in coming along, and we got quite a mix of people, and not knowing most of them produced varying wild effects. Especially in Astronauts, as a kind of Live Action Role Play, people quite quickly used it as a space to exercise different personalities and approaches - good and evil - and the same storyline produced VERY different situations dependent on different ‘characters’ and ‘scenarios’ emerging!
Following that our work extended closer to home ~ with friends, accomplices and then strangers. This was a definite decision as we wanted to both extend out beyond the ‘art world’ or ‘alt education’ contexts (and sets of peoples) and also as we wanted to see where we would get if we had more time together rather than just one off events. With these more recent projects there is often some kind of shared interest, mutuality or intersecting itch to be scratched though. For example, Guttural Living came out of repeated conversations each of us were having with disparate friendship circles about codependency, instinct, societal patterns and the desire to carve new paths but these chats really became resonate with Kyla Harris, Serena Morgan and Zuleika Lebow and part of making the work involved an intense period of time ‘researching’ together. This involved hauling up at METAL Southend, preparing meals together, gossiping, reading aloud, dancing, moving together and touching and feeling objects, together. These women had not all met before but each have very distinctive and different lived experiences and bodily knowledge which as a group allowed moments of acknowledgement and agreement but also dispute or challenge which was welcomed. So the common denominator is that we always want to bring people together in a fairly intensive way who have different perspectives, lived realities and wisdom and see what happens and how this disrupts or dislodges any fixed ideas we might have about ourselves, other people or the systems we live in.
Can you tell me more about your film WIP Idle Acts (2019/2020), which Chewing the Fat: Plat Act Cards are taken from?
Sure. This is an example with a long tail. Bear with. So last year we spent four months of the summer in Beeston, South Leeds. We were both living in Artist House 45, which is a residential property managed by East Street Arts that operates as a live work space. During our time there, as you can imagine A LOT happened but one of our main interests became urban pedagogies and how gestures in the micro ~ i.e. a conversation on a park bench contains, all the DNA of, and can speak to, the macro. We were spending a lot of time getting to know folk locally contributing to things like the amazing grassroots Beeston Festival, meeting local organisers, working with the Working Mens Club up the street on Rowland Road and just getting to know neighbours. As in many places in the UK just peripheral to larger cities, we observed how much the ‘out of sight out of mind’ approach of our Conservative government had its effect. That amongst real fucking struggle there was also real fucking care and people autonomously just operating through really generous and sophisticated bottom up ways of life.
Alongside the doing we were reading about Spatial Justice and The Undercommons and thinking how architectural delineations and the carving up of space and resource is so palpable and visible in the streets we live when you have time to look hard enough. But amongst this there are all these lively exchanges that for good or worse are what life is held within. The chaos within the structure. We have also always been really interested in ‘unproductive’ or ‘unmanaged’ space and found a theory about these Third Places that really captured why we were drawn to them. They are spaces you spend time in away from home or work. Playgrounds, barbers, the street, because people just exist here. They socialise if they want to, they play - if they want to, they are communal but they are not necessarily commons, they have different rules outside of a pure consumption or service delivery kind of exchange. They have their own unstated rules, that you can feel when you go there but aren’t necessarily articulated, and this excited us.
So somewhere along our stay we started taking note of these occasions and encounters ~ we had a list of ‘surreal moments’ and started to log places where this activity tended to occur most. And towards the end of the summer we set out to produce an experimental film in Beeston with local acting ‘enthusiasts’ that took some of these settings and ‘characters’ and saw where they might go through a totally improvised process. For the first time we worked with a cinematographer (the brilliant Lou Macnamara) and someone to help capture sound (the excellent Martha Adebambo) and recruited actors via a paid open call (anyone with any level of experience could apply, and we selected the group to get a varied and representative group) and for the first time really straddled the director, artist and facilitator roles.
In the end we only had four days and the card game Chewing the Fat became a way for us to quite anarchically develop strange pairings, unexpected situations and step away from ‘reenactment’ per se. Inspired by ‘Theatre of The Oppressed’ / ‘Games for Actors & Non-Actors’ by Augusto Boal, as well as Peter Schmidt and Brian Eno’s ‘Oblique Strategies’. We had no script, only locations and people, so we set about getting to know each other and letting people know that this was a process we didn’t know the ending to as well. Which is of course terrifying, and super weird, and brilliant.
We started with conversations about people’s own memories and relationships to some of the content we had gathered and questions we had been asking ourselves about social justice and space, rooted in experiences of living or working in the area. From this things just escalated to playing with characters, to duo and group improvs and some scenes emerged. We drew some prompts from Boal’s approaches and switched roles, intentions and discussed stereotypes. It was super interesting to be in and outside of this process, a real head fuck to be honest but improvisation between people, acting as other people ~ sort of being themselves but not and seeing what comes out is a really particular place, very surreal. No props, you can just be anywhere. No costume and you have began to engage with someone else’s perspective, reasoning, position etc. Lots of very complicated, moving, and just ridiculously funny things happened.
Then we shot the film. In the Working Men’s Club, in the park, in the streets, in the house we were living. The act of this was also significant. Occupying known places, in your own neighbourhood but in a completely transformed way. Your neighbours watching, maybe joining in, maybe wondering wtf was going on. Kids interrupting wanting their spot in the limelight, asking us if it was for Hollyoaks. Doing it all professionally, treating this play as serious fun.
So yeh, we are currently editing the footage further, which could become so many versions and hold many strange things. And when you approached us about the Fag Packet project it was just the perfect moment to try and imagine this process as something that could exist in a more fully formed and accesible for others to use way.
So Chewing the Fat is a slimmed down version of the game we played over the days of shooting. The scenes that ‘made it’ into the first edit of the film came directly from improvisations by the fantastic actors we had the privilege of working with and all their weirdness and life experiences. The film was shown in its first rough edit with all the actors friends and families, and people we had met along the way in Beeston, at the Working Men’s Club at the end of our residency, and has also been shown in a group show in Leeds, at Convention House since.
Asking people to consider an alternative perspective is a necessity right now as we deal with the unprecedented times Covid-19 is causing globally. Would you consider a new edit or iteration of the game in light of what has happened and the changes ahead?
Wow. Our question would be OK so now this ‘everyday’ where the game is set no longer functions or exists as it did two weeks ago so do you use the game as a kind of experiential tool to tap into that, imagine it’s like nostalgia for like how things were pre-virus or is it a process that allows us to play in our restricted lives, imagine you are elsewhere for a moment, with maybe the people you are in touch with or ….
We think with anything like this, it’s like what is this a tool for? Right now all the Third Places are shut and (some) people ARE beginning to see life through other people’s experience for example as a disabled person who is unable to leave the house regularly and relies on others, someone who is financially insecure and therefore must on a daily basis rub up against the government's hostile processes for living, someone who yesterday was a ‘unskilled migrant’ with a insecure visa is now a ‘key worker’ and expected to ‘defend’ the ‘frontlines’ when even their residency status is uncertain.
Not everyone is having the same experience but definitely acknowledging how deeply our capitalist desires flow is revealing and really how fragile and endgame the circumstances are. If we were to make an edit - at this second of writing - we would be most interested in making one that allows people this moment to unlearn, strategise and refuse to go back to ‘business as usual,’ note take during this pandemic and come back collectively refusing to go on.
Something we want to explore more and get more knowledge of to borrow process from is Live Action Role Play (LARP). There is a huge community of people that will know a whole lot more about the idea of stepping into someone else's shoes, and this is something we have just dipped a toe in. So to think about how the game would go online, it would be great to talk to experienced LARP’ers to think how it could work best - when people are apart - together?
HER MIT Projects functions remotely, engaging small audiences, as it was conceived out of my own need to stay connected whilst being a full time carer and living rurally. Your collaboration works over long distance - what adaptations have you made to the way you work and what could other artists use or learn from your approach?
We were really lucky that we had last summer together in the intense way a residency like that necessitates and from that little practices emerged that we have tried to hold onto. We also chatted with pals Gab and Zarina from The White Pube and Hannah and Rachel from Low Profile to learn about their long distance colab rhythms and routines. Everyone is different, but we learnt from these top lasses that you need admin time and creative time, so like specific time for emails and shared scheduling and then also another space/time for creative work ~ we are trying to do admin whilst we both on Skype so the time is acknowledged and shared and then experimenting with like a studio wall blog alongside our usual life of Googledrive. When we are making we tend to have LOTs of bits of paper and images and mapping so the blog studio is sort of meant as that space to keep studio threads, unbound ideas and references kind of floating between us virtually. But we're learning as we go, and as separate work / life happens it definitely seeps in and takes over. Have to guard time together properly. Another thing is to both try and get chunkier time together so like applying for residencies and stuff but also keep doing more spontaneous, responsive stuff like the Fag Packet, and 12o’s 30/30 which we’re gunna do in April.
Things have definitely adapted but to be honest when we were both in London we were really struggling to get in the studio, let alone together so our ways of communicating already seemed to have this mode of up-close-project-research-experimentation and then periods of in-between-admin-planning-ruminating just happened. But being honest with each other about capacity and other stuff is the most super important thing otherwise it can become very business and that’s not really our vibe. We are lucky as we have worked together pretty much since we graduated that we have really grown up in our art practice together, both in the things we are interested in and also the ‘how’ of art practice, learning the admin, the structuring, the behind the scenes. Sharing everything equitably, and balancing each other out when someone is stressed to fuck and can’t handle another google doc. So because we have that quite instinctively down, and a shared language around both conceptual and practical stuff, it makes it easier now we are living in different places. Getting that collaborative language down is important.
As we face the possibility of months of social distancing and/or isolation, can you suggest some ways we could use this positively and how you feel we could emerge from this crisis having grown together rather than apart?
One thing to be noted is that we are having physical distancing which limits the physical side of socialising which is mega important but we feel like we are actually more social right now with so many people because of the crisis ~ online of course. Like speaking with family and friends everyday and seeing so many mutual aid groups, live channels, subscriptions offered free. Of course this does not mean that distance and alone time is not triggering and extremely difficult for people but we are curious about what emerges in the wake that challenges the logic of before. Particularly around social care, the state, the recognition of different forms of work (cleaning, shop keeping, care, education to name some) and challenge to some of the emergency bills being passed that seem to both show that universal basic income and for example nationalising rail is do-able in like 24hours, but remaining vigilant that some of the police measures under the mental health act and rights to surveillance might pull in the other direction…. Also - to acknowledge that not everything needs to continue as normal, not everything works online, we don’t need to be ‘productive’ but we have some space to think about what does, and what will feed us in this time rather than just fill our time as usual!
You said positive ~ maybe this is all positive as it is about collective consciousness raising and showing the hold capital has on life, but also that change is very, very possible at both a state level and grassroots level. Growing together means shovelling the shit upwards, trying to understand together what happened and what is possible, it’s taking time, reflecting on who we are and where things are going like personally and as a globally connected creatures, rest, listen, tune in, reach out and collectively make demands on the logic that governs us presently. Hard to imagine another time the world will stop in such a way, and let us do this.
Can we add something off piste that doesn’t respond to your questions??? Going rogue! Just wanted to say how much we have enjoyed answering your q’s and how it has helped us think more deeply about the works, from different angles, which we rarely get the opportunity to do! So thanks for creating this format and approach, it feels very important!
