 If you've read my keynote, you might wonder what the connection is between that and what I'm going to say today. And I think you can take it as a kind of prolog in a way. So there, I don't go on to talk in this talk about Alison Bechdel, whose graphic novel I mentioned in the abstract. But it does in a way frame everything that I've been thinking about. So the talk today is speculative in nature. It's about reverie and placemaking. And I want it to enact in form and content what it's trying to convey. So I want to avoid the linear argument common to the keynote lecture that aims to draw things to complete clothes. And I'd like the words that I say to tell but also to show and to work somehow on a symbolic level. And the conversation that I want to have is about the rhythms of attachment and loss that characterise people's relationships with places. I think there's a gap between these and the kinds of placemaking initiatives that we're seeing going on around the world at the moment. At their worst, these placemaking initiatives involve the displacement of poor people, as we all know, physically and imaginatively, or both from land, that's become valuable to other people with more power. At their least ugly, their best intentioned placemaking initiatives struggle to tap into the intricacies of meaning that places hold for human beings. And I believe that under any circumstance at the core, human beings are irrevocably intermingled with place. But it's rare for those with the wherewithal to remake places to enter other people's imaginaries of place at an experiential level before altering them. So I'm an advocate for what I see as a different approach to this, an immersive digestive, and digestive is going to come on to be an important word in the talk, a digestive and co-generative approach to place. And it's a bit of approach that's grown out of my crossings between art and anthropology that Melinda was talking about earlier on. And it turns on the ability of all concerned to enter a space of not knowing facilitated by reverie. So I'm really aware of how impractical and inconsequential this approach that I'm going to lay out for you can seem to be in the face of the problems that sit around places and places. But it's precisely because of the gravity of those problems that I think reverie has a potential to create a different kind of discourse here. It's got something going for it. Reverie is a tricky concept to grasp. As Thomas Ogden, who's a psychoanalyst, writes, it's almost impossible not to be dismissive of reverie since it's an experience that takes the most mundane and yet the most personal of shapes. And in this talk I'm going to be drawing on psychoanalytic theory a little bit, particularly the British School of Object Relations for those who know about psychoanalysis. So a different, not a Lacanian approach, which we were talking about at the break, but a very specific school that included people like Winnicott and Wilfred Beon. So the psychoanalyst Wilfred Beon believed that reverie lay at the heart of the good enough relationship between the mother and infant. So we've segwayed a little bit from place into mothering here and we're going to segway back again. He understood it as a means by which raw, unprocessed sensory data becomes experience reality. Drawing on his work with psychotic patients in the 1950s, he theorised that the desperate mind madly discharges experience that can't be abstracted, absorbed or turned into memory or narrative. According to him, the analyst's task was to enter a state of reverie and through this to aid the analysis and digestive process and the saving of memory. So to somehow take up that position that he believed had been there in the early relationship between mother and child and to do that work for the patient, the analysis and until they were able to do that for themselves. So if all goes well, then the person in analysis, the psychotic patient, whoever it is, is able to resume that function for themselves. And Beon also saw reverie as key to the creative process, which a number of people from that school of psychoanalysis did. So Winnicott as well very much saw psychoanalysis as having to do with play and creativity. It's about tapping into that space and using that. Beon saw reverie as key to the creative process, hinting perhaps that the artist, like the analyst, is involved in an experience-producing process that has benefits for others. My hunch is that as the filmmaker Jean Rouche put it in the context of anthropology, that place involves sharing dreams and that place making initiatives, those state sponsored interventions that we're increasingly seeing today, depend on inspiration and grace, things that can't be willed and that connect with the involuntary parts of the place maker's role, the parts governed by reverie. So that's a kind of speculative proposal, that there might be some possibility there for place makers to tap into that inspiration and grace, which would be a very different approach from the post-it on the wall consultation process that we see and that we're probably exposed to ourselves as well. As institutions decide to do future thinking initiatives and so on. So to give substance to these speculations I'm going to present three examples of my own immersive encounters with place. Each is different but what ties them together is the idea that to approach place through the sharing of dreams requires a dual action. To grow your own capacity for place based reverie as someone coming possibly from the outside and to be able to tune into the reverie of others. So three examples. The first comes from anthropological field work in a northern English town and it concerns the loss and attachment experience by a young group of women in relation to the housing estate which is I think you call government housing where they lived in 1997. So this is going back quite a long time and here I'm proposing reverie is a state that I and they seem to access probably quite a bit of the time while we were hanging out together but especially when I was driving them around in my car and in the past I've shown film clips of that. Sometimes I've read writing today I'm going to that's going to be a text that I'm going to read to try and evoke that experience for you. The second text is a short story and it's a paratactic text which means that it has dissimilar fragments that are laid side by side. And I'll give you a little bit more direction about how to navigate your way through that when I come to that. It's self-reflexive, it's semi-fictional, it explores childhood places and memories alongside reverie as a place of tuning methodology. So I'm thinking about methodology there as well as thinking about reverie in terms of childhood sense of place. And then the third example is a segment of video that I'm going to show and it was part of a project which was involved being in Amdabad for a month for an artist residency and I put up a doorway in a street for reasons which again I'll explain maybe a bit more when we get there and invite people to show place to me. So after these three examples I'll go back to the idea briefly that reverie is one, a defining part of what places are and two, a crucial element of what self-defined placemaking should be. So example one, Ashenhurst Estate, it's 1997 and I'm doing anthropological field work on housing estate in the northern English ex-mill town of 15,000 people. Imagine an estate of long curved streets set into a hillside with houses built of yellowish brick grouped into short rows with steps running between them and small front gardens with picket fences set on stubby walls. Fences painted or creosoted or broken down with rusted nails protruding. There are different gardens, some heaving with avories and bird feeding tables and fancy planting and tiny neat lawns and others with long sickening yellowed grasses with two blood red poppies poking up between broken beds and smashed splintering panes of glass. Some with nothing but a bit of grass and tiny lines of, tidy lines of washing flapping in the breeze. Hanging out at the community centre I soon become aware that dinely people are under surveillance. They're watched and monitored by the police and also by social workers, family workers, doctors, housing workers, teachers. Residents are known by these agencies to be perpetrators of criminality, child abuse, vandalism. Unmarked police cars sit on the narrow avi which backs onto the Pennine moors and the cops identities supposedly concealed are known to those who've brushed up with them in the past. Tina and Cheryl know their names and nicknames, can remember them right back to childhood. I hate her, she used to pick me up when I ran away from home and knocked my head with her hard hat. Surveillance not only enters dinely from outside, it grows in these spaces and creates an imaginary that can be hallucinatory and strange. People are caught between appearance and truth and between how things are and how they might have been if life could have been lived differently. There's a kind of double vision that finds expression in talk of shit and home, want to, can't, life, fantasy. And from this double vision in the mind and on the street people can be compelled to act out strange secrets, nightmares and dreams. One morning Cheryl calls at my house to tell me what happened last night where Mitchell spent every hour of darkness pacing the tiny piece of garden behind his picket fence with a gun to his head. Threat me to shoot himself or anyone else who came near because his wife had walked out. Mitchell compelled to make his nightmare visible, to give it form, to conjure up and pace the distance between an ideal of home and an intimacy with shit, so that pacing in the moonlight with the neighbours watching from their windows and police floodlights is how things happen in a place like this. When Cheryl tells me this and I want to know why Mitchell has got into this state, what led up to it, what will happen next, she becomes impatient with my attachment to cause and effect. Her telling's not a retrospective analysis, it's an ongoing performance of place. Teen and Cheryl ask me to drive them around town, take them to prison to visit their partners and friends, make the journey to other larger towns where there are cheaper shops. Without a car they're reliant on walking buses and when they can find the money local taxi services. As I become a voluntary taxi driver, the car as our space allows me to tune into their reflections on this place. Contrary to assumptions that people living in housing estates like this are detached from their environment, I experience through them the desire and loss that joins them to this place. We're on our way to Manchester, 20 miles south of this small town. Tina wants to know where we are. Is this really the way to Manchester? I ask her how else might we get there than along the single road that traverses the valley and she laughs and says she's never been to Manchester before. Passing houses in Milnerow Cheryl says I'll have that house, shoot the people who live there and say come on Kelly, we're moving in. She fantasises about a house with maids and a cleaner and tells us about the fortune teller who said she'd meet a rich man. She imagines Richard winning his case and works out that they'll have 97 pounds odd for every day he's been wrongfully imprisoned. This is a council estate says Tina Riley on the outskirts of Milnerow. I reckon says Cheryl. Along the motorway we see a police car. The women wind down the windows and start yelling at them. Fucking dickhead. Fucking no bastards. I hate them. I fucking hate them. If we had wheels we'd be out and off all the time wouldn't we Tina? I'd be sticking my head out of the window and yelling at all the other drivers. Move over you fat bastard. Manchester here we come says Tina. They'll probably plan to bomb for just for us. We don't want your trash here. Get back to where you came from they'll be saying. Wishing they'd stop yelling at the police cars. I say, Tobin and cops are probably following us right now. In Todd we're followed by cops and it's regarded as a game to play cat and mouse with them. But here such a possibility is more frightening because we're in unknown territory. Don't say that man's fuck if we were mashed now we'd be getting right paranoid. I'd be looking behind me going where? Where? We arrive on the outskirts of Manchester. God Tina Cheryl says. Todd's nothing compared to this. And as we see more she adds, I'd like to live here wouldn't you? You should apply to transfer to Mosside I say ironically referring to the Manchester estate notorious for gun crime. Tina takes me seriously. No way man. I'm not living here. I'd be shitting myself. Both women agree that they could have a great night out here but would they measure up to many folk they wonder. And if there was trouble where would they be for they'd have no backup? In the space of the car of a small bubble cruising rhythmically along the streets the women daydream, digest, reform. Manchester seems inhospitable in the absence of shared stories, impacts and an excess of the real. By comparison their place, Tomadon, is characterised by familiar faces stories and events. To leave this people place is to leave what is both shit, a life and surroundings that are boring, dead end, a waste of time. And also what is familiar and homely. Example two. So this is a brief story. It's called Flower Man and it braids together two different realities. And it has a certain pattern to it that I want you to try and hook into because it will help you follow what's going on. So there are alternate paragraphs and the first one is it starts with Catherine, so in the third person, so character called Catherine. Then it goes to first person, then it goes to Catherine again, then it goes to first person. So that's the pattern. Catherine gathers up her bag ready to leave the train. It's raining. Carefully she picks away around the gathering pools of water. A flight of steps leads from the suburban London railway to the street below. Buses wait under the railway bridge in Rose. She scans the shops looking for her childhood favourites, the ironmongers with its wooden drawers, peeling gold lettering and creosote aroma. The art shop with its display of oil pastels and sable hair brushes, but they're missing. But we came here to write, says Jo, when I complain. It's New Year and we were in a rented cottage on the claim, a jutting finger of land extending 30 miles into the Irish Sea. It's true that we agreed to separate distractions, but I'm caught between the struggle to dream and the unwanted dreams that threaten to engulf me. On a bookshelf from the sitting room, I read that the claim peninsula was used by pilgrims on their way to Bardsy Island in search of the road to heaven. I too am searching for my own road to heaven, not through church, but to creativity, its promised increases. This cottage and my fantasy of it is part of my method. In the poetics of space, Bachelard writes that the house shields the dreamer. The crogloff to crouching over me is made for such dreaming. To the north is the estate where Catherine's mother grew up, built as part of a slum clearance programme in the 1930s. She went to visit it once when she was a teenager after persuading her mother, Enid, to drive round it on the way to somewhere. Catherine conjures an image of her mother's childhood from scraps of information she's stored away and things she's read in a book written in the 60s about the estate. The fields Enid ran across to meet Catherine's grandfather from the tube station after his commute home from work. The vegetables grown by her grandmother in the ample garden, beans with scarlet flowers and bushes draped with fruit. A road name triggers another memory. Her father in front of his car, she and her brother in the back, legs stuck out in front of them. He winds down the window and pushes out his head. I've been up and down this road all morning like a bloody yo-yo he's shouting at the man in the oncoming car. Well Joe writes I spend two days dreaming and fretting. At the end of the second day I write down the things I know. One, I'm engaged in a project about reverie. Two, I'm using poetics as my method. Three, I want to know whether daydreams can be a form of knowledge. And four, a way of doing anthropology. Catherine walks to the bottom of the long steep hill. The road meanders past tidy front gardens, box rooms over hallways. A couple of stray Christmas trees by wheelie bins. Pausing in front of an open gate she holds her breath. When pushed, the gate dislodges some pebbles, grinds them across the concrete path. The knocker rises and falls of its own accord. Places where I've dreamt dwell inside me, but there's no straight line between memories and dreams. In a past I can't determine, I'm on a wooden slatted frame being carried through a desert. The littest ways, cock bars frame the sky. The earth cries like a swarm of tiny flies. The landscape yields nothing but the pattern of my passage across it. Silence. Catherine's about to leave when through the pains she sees a figure moving towards her. Even after so long and through frosted glass she can see that it's him. The door opens, he stares at her, then stands back and motions minimally for her to come in. She follows him to the kitchen at the far end of the passage, her heart's beating. Faster. She wants to form words but can't. Imagines them leaving her lips dry. I've something to tell you. When Joe goes running I meet a man on the hill behind the cottage and we get chatting and discover that we've both been employed in art schools. He's a writing tutor. You must know, he says, zipping his jacket up against the New Year breeze, how it drains you. Still I'm retired now and the strange thing is that on that first morning of my new life I sat down at my desk and after all those arid years the writing simply poured out of me. Her father goes to the far end of the room and fills the kettle. Catherine pulls out a chair from the table. It makes a rasping noise on the tiled floor. He bends down and opens the fridge door, swears under his breath, pulls out a bottle with only a dribble of white left in it. The milk, he says, is out at the front. To be relieved of his presence she goes down the passage towards the front of the house, lifts the bottle from the doorstep, glances into the living room as she passes by. Above the fireplace the painting looms large, though not as big as she remembers it. Backtracking, she slips into the room, stands, then kneels by the unlit fire, placing the milk on the coffee table beside her. The effect of crouching down is immediate. She's a child, lying in front of the fire, drifting into sleep. The sounds of the TV in the background. The gesture figure in the painting looks down at her. She can feel its eyes on her back. It's how our childhood landscapes shape us that I want to reach. How the childhood places of dreaming germinate new dreams. How the adults around children are shaped by their childhood dreams. So we're connected to generations by twisted scanes of reverie. The dark background sets off the gesture's brilliant appearance. One of his legs is raised bent at the knee, toe tipped down. A small dog described in thin lacings and dribbles of white paint sits at his feet. The figure stares out, tricks to like enigmatic. Looking up at this figure she suddenly remembers her dream of the previous night. She's sitting up in bed having been woken by a noise. She knows someone's entered the house. Her bedroom door is wide open and through it she sees something on the stairs. A man, not wearing but made of floral blooms. His eyes lock with hers and in the mix of organic being and human being she registers a wild otherness she's never encountered before. I begin by trying to recall childhood reveries. Mindful that a specialist suggests the anthro cosmologies of childhood might best be reached unencumbered by facts. I surprised myself never having written a fictional story before. How the characters say and do things I would not do and say. Catherine's reverie is broken by her father coming down the passage. He eases himself into the chair. Two cups sit precariously on his knee. She puts him on the coffee table, pours milk into his tea. He points at the picture. Mum never liked it. She never liked anything I liked. She feels the heaviness of the room. The thick, office type furniture is not his taste. It's his taste, not her mother's. Her mother's house is furnished with antiques. A line drawn between where she came from and where she aspired to be. I think of that painting when I think of this house. Last night I had a dream. He grunts, raises the cup to his lips. So you came to see the painting. I came to tell you that she's gone. Her father hangs his head down. In particular I want to overcome what Bachelard calls our remorse at not having lived profoundly enough in an old house. Beyond him, through the window, the silver birch overshadows the back of the house. She remembers the texture and bend of its branches. The sweep of the lawn seen from up high. The field beyond the garden's end. She sees her shelters made of rope and sheets. Smells the stick fires. Feels the texture of mud. The rise and fall of the swing's arc. Despite its suburban origins, she knows now in a way she's never known before how this suburban imaginary has fueled her dreams. Rather than suppressing her longings for the earth, it's increased them for every garden fence as a corresponding wildness. For every unbounded terror of poetics of space. She looks at her father's stooped back and notices the shaking of his hands. The way he shuffles his feet round. Is it time to make peace? She follows him to the kitchen and washes up the two cups and the spoon. I want to discover ways to relive suppressed impressions and what Bachelard calls the dreams that make us believe in happiness. To dream in this foreign but familiar house in order to catch hold of the visions of my childhood home and through these to glimpse the daydreams of others. She stares out of the kitchen window at the garden that, as she comes to it now, was her saviour. It's not her mother or her father who comes to mind but her mother's mother whose stories survived her migration to London looking for work. Stories that stitched together the dailiness of suburbia with the remnants of a childhood lived with animals and earth. Outside it's getting dark. As I close my laptop, I think of the many things I try to explain and how, by doing so, I risk robbing myself of my own difference. I think of the flowerman's eyes, the strangest part of Catherine's dream, the most truthful part of the story. Now looking out at the garden, Catherine recalls the rest of the dream. After locking eyes with the flowerman so deeply other, deeply unknowable, he turns and with the grace of a startled deer, disappears with a splash of colour down the stairs. So, I've suggested through those three examples that... No, I haven't because I haven't done the last one. So, the third example, as I said, was made in Darnipole in Amdabad, so a small neighbourhood in the old city of Amdabad. I was there for three weeks altogether. The film was shot in one day. It was then edited and then screened back to people in the same place where it was filmed. It involved a doorway which came out of me being interested in the otler, the wide steps that exist in that part of the city that are liminal spaces where people do lots of vegetable preparation, have conversations, children play, which is a kind of between space between inside and outside. The idea emerged of putting up a door as a way of trying to work with that liminal space and really just to see what people would do. This is just a short segment. It's just three minutes. So, that was some of the morning and then in the afternoon we came back and there was a long performance of Diwali. I've suggested through examples that reverie is a defining part of what places are. In Togmeddon, in the car, the girls were interleaving desire and identity with environment very much through their reverie. In the short story, the character Catherine redreams her familial history and emerges somewhat transformed while the first person narrator tries to access the poetics of childhood spaces in order to rethink her version of anthropology. In Darnley Pole, an invitation to improvise around a temporary threshold resulted in a slightly expanded version of place than the one that had become habitually available. I went back a year later and spoke to people who were quite surprised because it wasn't intended really as a place-making procedure. We could talk about that more later in a way it was blocking a place-making procedure that was already happening. But to find that people said that they socialised more with their neighbours, they went on more picnics. So, something just happened in that sort of playfulness that changed some of those or opened out a little bit some of the relationships there. In all these cases we could imagine place not as a geographical location but as an environment minutely attuned to that which it supports and holds similar to what Beyond tells us happens between the mother and child. When good enough, when steeped in enough reverie, this environment is transforming and is in itself transformed. When raw sensory data reaches overload in relation to place, provoking what Beyond calls a desperate mind, then perhaps its reverie that can enable this onslaught to be broken down and rearranged as experience reabsorbed. And so my speculation is this, that the degree to which place is experienced as a responsive yet transforming environment, an environment of me not me as Winnicott would have put it, is the degree to which it offers a sense of ontological security. When projections are bounced back and the desperate mind is amplified rather than absorbed, then place can seem fractured, harried, unsettled. But it may still inspire attachment or be tinged with various kinds of affect such as anger and abandonment. What is the right disposition of the placemaker then? If we imagine for a moment this scenario I've painted to be true, if we imagine in other words that place at its best as an experience of being subtly held responded to and equally of being other to oneself. Or if at its most unsatisfactory, we imagine place to be distracted, alien, misattuned, without the capacity for digestion, reception, nurturing of dreams. I think those of us involved in self-directed placemaking need to recognise reverie, to know what it feels like to develop it like a muscle, to be able to reflexively identify what our own dreams are and to be able to use these or curtail them as necessary when dealing with the dreams of other people. And I think we need to know how to tap into and respect other people's acts of place-related reverie and perhaps through a kind of dialogical dreaming become open, porous to new possibilities of place-based sharing and transformation. Thank you.