I’m sure I’m not alone in wondering how to discuss things at the moment; when opposition is dismissed as ‘fake’, and arguments and information are replaced with slogans designed to ‘win the narrative’ by stirring emotions rather than ideas – slogans that can mean whatever I want them to mean.

Questions about which of us are really amongst ‘the people’ being talked about – or what I might individually want to ‘take back control’ of, and for or from whom – seem difficult to ask.

In the work, I don’t feel able to offer answers to any of those questions, nor do I want to; but I do feel a need to try to shape and open up spaces where we might look at them.

The Storm Cycle began as an exploration of new ways to do precisely that, as these storms began to gather – and the next public step in that cycle feels like it may perhaps become as pivotal as it may be particular.

That step will try to reimagine and voice ideas drawn from The Ethics of Ambiguity, a collection of philosophical essays on the nature of freedom, choice and personal agency by Simone de Beauvoir – not only out of a recognition of the continued clarity and resonance of de Beauvoir’s understandings, but also as an echo from the desolation and optimism that immediately followed WWII and gave birth to the Europe in which we now live.

That attempt will become a work I’m calling Together and alone.

And we will shape and perform it in Newport, South Wales, in the weeks leading up the UK’s currently planned date of departure from the EU next March…

[ Image: Mike Brookes ]