Know Thy Neighbour Residency: Tom Campbell with City of Vincent #1

Sep 14

Tom Campbell reflects on the start of his Know Thy Neighbour #4 residency, describing what it means to land, make decisions and deal with tensions within ourselves. Working in partnership with City of Vincent, Tom shares a list of his August activities.

I’ve been asking myself how to land:

in the container of this residency,
in a return to Boorloo after three months in Taiwan,
in a life rhythm that balances everything life asks of you with your responsibility to yourself and to others.

Each question holds its fair share of tension.

Landing is about tethering your attention, but also about where you come from and where you go, and what brought you there. In May, I visited family in Sabah for the first time in 20 years. I sung karaoke, I went alone to the mountain, ate fish on the beach with a very close family friend, and visited my ancestors’ graves. I sifted through archives, felt and breathed in the jungle air, and held that tension when a place is unfamiliar to you and yet forms part of your DNA. I returned to Taiwan, and visited the prehistory museum in Taitung, where I got to see textiles and objects from Borneo, layers and layers of time pressed up against each other. I came home to Boorloo, and fell back into life.

I reflect on a conversation with my friend Zora, who once said that I was good at asking questions. What makes a good question and in which context - does it open up more pathways? Does it hold the tension between two ideas that are seemingly mutually-exclusive? My job used to be to ask people questions, which probably helped train those muscles. Taking that job felt like a whim, one that led to a fundraising career, then a cross-country move almost a decade later.

As part of this residency, I’ve been thinking a lot about how we make decisions - about the connections between whims and learned intuition, about how decision-making can shift in and out of focus on the micro and the geological time scales. I think about how some decisions that seem small end up charting the course of your life. I think about decisions across interpersonal contexts, across collective and group-work contexts, and within broader landscapes of policy, politics and power. Saturn's return has brought its fair share of big decisions. This year so far has been about trying to find some level of trust in where they may take me.

In poetry and in life I return to the analogy of the rock in the river. We can choose how much force to exert, how big the rock is (if we’re strong enough), where to place it in the river. We might even be able to alter the flow in some consequential way. Sometimes this is really obvious, and sometimes it’s a leap of faith.

In some way, you have to trust that an experience will take you where you need to go, and that you’ll be sifting through the sediment, turning over what’s been dredged up, and attending to the dormant feelings in your body and your mind. This can be a process at the best of times, and especially when things feel tense.

I hope over the coming months to create tools to more readily attune to these processes - to note and attend to the tensions within ourselves, to circuit-break them, to work them through together.

On the geological scale, the river will go where it wants to go, eventually. Right now, I’m trying to place the right rock in the right place.

In August,
I checked into the North Perth Town Hall,
The Boorloo w_acking community rehearsed and performed our first showcase at the Spot, in Leederville,
Zora and I articulated how we listen to the body, and drew tarot,
I submitted a major grant application at work,
I went back to popping class,
Shu and I worked together to map the framework for this project,
What are our questions?
What are our decision making tools?
What forms of movement are we interested in?
We went bouldering,
I went to the gym,
I made project budgets,
I went to therapy,
I made phone calls home.

Images 1,2,3,4 courtesy of the artist.
Image 5 by Yu-Ying Chuang.

More about Tom’s project.

More about the Know Thy Neighbour #4: Gestures project.

More about City of Vincent.

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This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body.