Nadia Chaney
This week’s dispatch features an interview with Nadia Chaney about the Time Zone Research Lab, a community oriented experiment in the art of “learning without grasping” that is “radical in its approach but gentle in its application.”
Nadia's work with Time Zone inspired me to launch the (De-/Re-)Constructing Worlds project. So I am happy to share this interview in advance of the first open session of the (De-/Re-)Constructing Worlds seminar this Sunday, October 24, from 9am-12pm PST, which I sincerely hope will be as convivial as the weekly get togethers that Nadia has facilitated through the Time Zone.
You can read a partial transcript of my interview with Nadia below or you can listen to the full audio recording of the interview by hitting the play button below.
Nadia:
I'm Nadia Chaney, and I am currently living in Tiohtià:ke, Montreal on Mohawk territory, but I was actually born in Saskatoon, Cree territory. My folks come from India, they came in the 70s, and I was born and raised here in Canada.
Muindi:
If you were to describe what it is that you do, how would you do it?
Nadia:
I would say that I am an artist, primarily a poet, and that translates into community facilitation as arts facilitation.
Muindi:
And what does arts facilitation mean for you and what kind of contexts do you find yourself working in?
Nadia:
It's mostly very frontline community work, really helping communities talk to each other in ways that subvert preexisting dynamics. So, using the arts to find ways to express the inner life without having to defend or prove it, and to be able to receive each other without having to block. So that the arts really help us hear each other on our own terms.
And that when I say the arts, I really mean it as broadly as you can imagine. Sometimes it is “the art of “— like the “art of asking a question”. But it's also dance, poetry, music, painting, puppets.
It's morphed and morphed and morphed over the years as I start to understand what each mode can offer a group and what they do together.
So, it's very often frontline community work, but then it's also training arts facilitators, who are the most awesome group of people and so different everywhere. But one thing that's funny, Muindi, one is I find that community arts facilitators have something in common everywhere. And that's that they're very different from their community, but they love the community very, very deeply.
And so, for them to be able to be together in any capacity is always magical. Suddenly you're like, oh I'm not alone in this vision I have or that I'm receiving for what I could give to my community. Someone else thinks like this, but they speak a different language and they look totally different!
The training of the arts facilitators has really been my focus for the last 10 years. Not intentionally. It just kind of worked out that way.
Muindi:
One thing that struck me is I they way you said that, when you do arts facilitation, and you said “the arts” and then you said “sometimes it is the art of”. Which I think is a logic or rhetorical trope that I'd like to adopt and deploy in the context of this project.
Nadia:
I mean, it's essential things like the “art of registration” or the “art of outreach”. You can do these things in a rote way, you could do them as they've always been done, or you can do them as received inspiration: you can do them to the height of their craft. You can find the illusion and the magic in it — that's what I mean by the “art of”.
When you're doing that kind of art/work, you don't just want to instrumentalize the mode — no pun intended. If you're using it and you're wringing it out and draining it, then it's just an art class, and that's very different from what I intend.
Muindi:
So, the reason why I brought you here is to talk about the Time Zone Research Lab.
I'm gonna ask a two part question. First, what is the Time Zone? Second, and I'll let you choose which question to answer, is either why or how the Time Zone?
Nadia:
Well, the Time Zone Research Lab is an experiment in the “art of research”.
It's an experiment in really what happens if we want to take highly refined academic material and explore it in the context of community, in the context of relating to each other. And to prioritize the relation to each other but not lose the refinement of the material at hand, and to see what would happen.
So, the research questions are one thing, but then there's the questions of the structure. And those for me were, “Can people feel safe in academic environments? What would it take for people who haven't been sanctioned already by the academy in any way to feel comfortable?”
What we're doing at the time zone is physics one day, anthropology the next—it's a whirlwind! So, what we ended up doing was thinking about the problem as, how do we learn without grasping knowledge?
We found ourselves touching this wall time and time again: I can't grasp it. — OK, we're not trying to grasp it. Then it's like, well then what are you doing?
Well, we're trying to relate to it, to allow the knowledge itself to have its own kind of agency and livingness and beingness. So that as we bring our stories to it, it gives its stories to us. That's a much slower process.
So the way that the time zone works is, and this is now touching the “how”, is a weekly meeting. Basically, it's a reading group — like let's read an article together or a chapter of a book. And then and then approach it through the arts and storytelling and it's that simple. It's funny that it doesn't feel that simple because of how many other reading groups I've been to that are so entirely different in their nature.
The “why” is another funny thing. I have so many “whys” and they're sort of scattered through my life. It's like this project has been pulling me in some ways since I was 14 and, in some way, is the direct and natural outcropping of my masters work.
I just really heard a really strong call to see what would happen if I studied the nature of time — that's what's been calling me since I was 14. I've been dying to know what is time.
But then as I went through my working life, I started to ask real questions about highly structured, facilitated environments, and is there another way. I always loved informal groups the most, especially after school drop-in. That was always the place, It was always the biggest challenge. How do you run informal programming where people feel seen? Where they feel cohesive? Where, when they arrive, the place is ready for them, even though no one knows if they're coming or not? A space that's not already controlled and isn't in that sense doesn't already have an overlay of time and timing.
I had these two kinds of questions: one were these content questions about time that just were juicy enough that I knew I would keep my interest. That was the draw to me is like, oh, let's have some friends to read this material. I can't understand on my own.
And yeah, and then on the other hand, these questions of structure and whether I could turn everything I've been teaching for the last 10 years on its head. What would happen? What would happen if we didn't do an introduction circle? What would happen if my focus wasn't to get every voice in the room? What if I didn't have to do retention, outreach, fundraising? What are the other ways to approach value and money and and and even speaking and voice and dominance and interruption? — Interruption has been a huge one, we’ve played a lot with interruption so yeah.
The how was to try to be radical in the approach but gentle in the application — so that the application was highly tender. We would spend 2 hours from 9 to 11 of every single eight hour session just chatting. We called it mending the web and it was just, you know, this it was almost the extreme luxury of time, yeah? And because participants could drop-in and drop out when they had the time, they didn’t have to have two hours. They could take 10 minutes to drop-in and help mend the web
And I gave myself the entire day every Wednesday to hold the space to see what would happen.
So, it kind of started with a few principles of what happens if I invert these basic assumptions, followed by a few principles around value, like paying it forward.
Instead of taking value from the community when I study, exchanging it for money, and then giving the money to institutions, can we invert that whole process so that when we study together we enrich our communities and would we feel abundant when we did that? And the answer is, of course, yes! And I suspected it would be but, you know, you have to see it happen in front of your eyes.
Muindi:
A few things that you said really caught my attention. First was the phrase “radical in the approach, but gentle in application” — which is a phrase that I think it's going to become a mantra for me. Second, and this is what I want to do in and through this project, you're seeking how to create a space in which people who are not sanctioned to speak on a topic and who are not authorities on a topic can still relate to the topic and feel safe.
I find that many of the questions that sophisticated and intricate works of thought are asking and trying to answer are, strangely enough, everyday questions, inquiries into matters of everyday relations amongst people. Given that these works are speaking to something that I sensed to be everyday I would like to talk to everyday people about these things in and through everyday language. I find that very difficult to do. Oftentimes, this sort of research is trapped in environments that are essentially like laboratories, cut off from the rest of the world. Those allowed in to study are authorities on the material and those without authority are left out the door.
So I want to talk to you about how it is that you brought people in, which I think touches on being “radical in approach, but gentle in the application.” Give us some anecdotes about the ways in which the approach and application worked, didn't work, enlightened you, surprised you, etc.
Nadia:
There's a side of it that's technical and there's a side of it that is emergent, but these two sides crossover.
For a start, whenever anyone new joins us, the invitation is that you don't have to know why you're saying what you're saying? We trust that we as a group will eventually know why you said what you said. It's like a kind of a dreaming, right? A receiving of information. That's the principle.
So interrupt with a question, interrupt with a comment, or with a story — a story is always most welcome. But if you feel like saying something, just say it and let us figure out why together.
Going further, the onus is not on you to come on time and stay so that you never miss a thing. Rather, the onus is on us to recap where we are whenever you arrive or return. And you arrive and then someone arrives three minutes later, then we're going to keep recapping again and again, and seeing that as a value for us, not as a not a concession for them. We have been given a gift by you coming at this time, which is never late.
So do you see how you can reverse that awkwardness that people feel?
It's a real inversion. For for a long time I was the only one who did the recap because people were nervous, “What if I do the recap wrong? But they started to see how I did the recap differently every time and would miss a whole bunch of stuff, and it wouldn’t matter.
And when we stop taking ourselves and the material so seriously in this way, it's amazing how serious the whole thing becomes.
We are authoring this space. We have authority here. The text doesn't have authority over us. It has it with us and we had these incrediblymystical experiences with some of these texts — with Tarkovsky, with Hilma af Klint with Buckminster Fuller, you know.
The writers, it's not that we're pushing them away and making them less important. It's just that that we're not making them superior to us. And so once the writing is de-centered in that way and distributed amongst us, then we start to realize the value of our own stories, especially our cultural stories.
Personal stories are one thing, but when people start to bring cultural stories to anthropology, geology, philosophy, physics, that's when you start to see that these great writers don't know more than your ancestors, yeah?
We take these cultural stories seriously and we also take the readings beside each other as seriously as they are intended: we take Buckminster Fuller as seriously as Rupert Sheldrake, as serious as Deleuze. Why not?
We don't have anything to account for, we're not accountable to anybody. We're not citing anything. You take it as it is said, not as a telling of the truth, and what you to see is that the picture is not siloed anymore and that we needn’t to be siloed in our reading.
It ended up in an open mindedness that I could never have anticipated, that I did not have access to before this. It opened my mind in incredible ways.
It's just a question of will I consider it?
Ronald Mallett's research on time travel being as valid to consider as the study of geological time, or as the study of cave paintings.
I think that sometimes the method becomes so dogmatic that it actually does drain the baby with the bathwater.
These are the technical aspects. It doesn't seem like it, but they are. The technical aspect is that we don't reject and we're not looking to disprove. We're looking to stimulate each other into saying something interesting, and then we're looking to do the work internally to find each other interesting. It's not incumbent on you to be interesting. Regardless of what you're saying, I do the work to find you interesting rather than seeking to find out whether you are right or wrong.
Now, as a facilitator you're often looking to do what people call “balance voice and power”, sometimes that is a matter of balancing the time allotted based on identity or other times it is a matter of balancing how much each individual person talks. By contrast, at the Time Zone what we are trying to do is radically different: we maintain that the time in our arena is not limited. We can go on as long as we want, which means everyone can talk as long as they want. It's radical in that sense. It's risky.
Muindi:
That’s a total flip. The first model is one of scarcity. You are given a set amount of time and the problem is how to distribute that scarce resource, time.
Nadia:
Which means the smartest person should be the one to talk, because otherwise anybody else is going to waste your time. But we turned that around in a number of different ways…
