Looking for the gap in the fence.
Beginning to read Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (2013) last summer has been transformational on my approach to the Final Fridays.
You know that feeling when you read a book that feels so fundamentally pivotal, and the world starts to make a bit more sense, because you feel deep down that there’s always been something wrong with how we organise, partition, and describe it? Yeah, that.
So, I decided to seek a gap for these thoughts to root.
Since the start of the Final Fridays in January 2024 I have recorded the walks on a GoPro and edited the film each month to document the journey and the process. Something about this started feeling too lineal, both in the development of ideas from one walk to the next, and in the order of activities within the walk.
At times when we are walking and mark-making, our senses can reawaken memory, and this can be transformative on our understanding of the concept of ‘now’ and how we experience time and place. Are we where we are, or are we back in that memory? What set of circumstances has led to the assemblage of things we consider to be the present moment? Our experience of the world does not tend to be lineal, but rhizomatic.
The monthly film edits as they stand don’t reflect these ideas. I have continued to record each walk but will be looking for future edits to form portals rather than transitions.
Seeking a no-man’s land.
Another change since reading Deleuze and Guattari, has been a re-consideration of how we make marks on the Final Fridays walks. Since August we have moved from individual sketchbooks to all working together on the same 10-meter roll of paper.
This co-creative practice helps encourage more of a sense of community and collaboration, considering the roll of paper as a de-authored and de-hierarchical space. Deleuze and Guattari might deem this ‘a smooth space’.
I have been thinking about the space created on these rolls of paper as a sort of no-man’s land, like the types of edgleland places we seek during the walks. The sort of places no-one is really responsible for, or at least no-one takes individual responsibility for. Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts’ Edgelands (2012) continues to be inspirational for the sort of places we seek on the walks.
The act of rolling and unrolling of the paper has been synonymous with the rolling and unrolling of time and place. The marks we make on the roll of paper has allowed more space for non-human voices in the work – feedback from surfaces, and dialogues with the unknown.
Since working in this way participants have remarked on a feeling of greater interconnectivity not just between each other, but also between us and the land. We have spent longer in particular places, thinking about the sense of lingering, revisiting, remembering, and repeating.
Concepts such as edges and thresholds have become more significant, and as we move into the next stage of the Final Fridays, more space will be given for the unknown, the unexpected, the in-between, and the forgotten.
The Final Fridays will continue throughout 2025 at a revised time of 5:30pm, on the final Friday of every month, from Altogether Otherwise.
