how to say we in an hour?

This paper follows from a lecture-form that, over the past three years, I have been developing for first year students on the Central Saint Martins BA Fine Art Programme. The lecture unfolds in two parts. During the first part I read assorted texts – fragments I bring myself and, for the most part, invited and collected contributions from students and the BA Fine Art Critical Studies teaching team. A non-exhaustive list might include receipts for coffee, train tickets, rough translations, clothing labels, shopping lists, AI-generated texts, students’ own writing, flyers, coupons, photos of signs, a paragraph from a novel, a line of a poem, the back of a penny, and the list of potential side effects from a prescription medication. The collectively uttered text that is produced offers a texture through which to reflect how “a people” might “say themselves”; might utter themselves through what they do. In this essay I examine the potentiality of a momentary collective utterance through concepts of ethnopoetics, sociopoetics, the assembly of peoples, counterpublics and strangerhood, the vernacular, and the complex texture that imbues every act of relating. Here, “we” is enmeshed in processes of relating that are “plurivocal” – many-voiced, and collective. In this paper, I probe the ongoing, variable, patterned texture of reciprocal exchange within a local group of people and their acts of making that emerges within an art school. Such processes suggest a becoming-belonging, or a woven texture of relationality that produces difference and accounts for the co-constitution of selves through and with others. I propose one possible form for patterns of reciprocity, for ongoing exchange. In doing so, I begin to unravel the texture of the weave that is produced through our “saying ourselves”, our utterances of poetry, and our co-embodied acts of making.