A Book of Ours: Commentary by Jeffrey Robinson
“Ours”
In our market economy and society based upon inequality, “ours” signifies possession of an object of monetary value adding to our status in the minds of others. Yet sitting at the workshop table on the second floor Art Room of the Booth Centre, among homeless makers of this book, I see not an object but an event of cooperative exchanges. Phrases and sentences and poems pass from one maker and one page to another maker or designer and a new setting. Language itself is held not so much by individuals as by any number of collaborators. “Ours” becomes a collectivity of mental, emotional, and artistic movement—a hum of voices and exchanges, rustlings of paper, pencils, markers, and pens.
The book re-purposes a medieval artifact for daily prayer, The Book of Hours, as a claim of heritage previously invisible and unvalued, the collective histories of the homeless, disenfranchised and poor, unnoticed and trivialized. O-U-R-S occupies H-O-U-R-S, just as P-O-E-T-R-Y occupies P-O-V-E-R-T-Y. In each case just one consonant (H,V) separates oppression from value, identity, and beauty. The book intervenes in an injustice. “The intent in our case is that this homeless history, this culture has a place to arrive on a page, to be finally OURS” (Philip Davenport). Time for people who’ve experienced homeless can be a steely clock: lack of shelter, lack of health and health care, lack of stability and safety. The imagination learns to reinforce this trap of time. In the art room, organized as an arthur+martha event, the mind begins to free up, a space for the recovery and loosening of memories, indeed becomes “a mode of memory emancipated from time and space” (Coleridge). The Hours, occupied by “ours,” “re-break, re-set, re-model.”
A Book of Hours could be designed with its owner in mind; their name printed in the book along with prayers designed for that person. The sumptuousness of the book gave its owner status. Possession was material: The Book of Hours became a Book of Mine; here, upstairs at the Booth Centre, “Mine” becomes “Ours”—what is possessed is voice, memory, reflection, wisdom of not the solitary individual but many persons brought together, who co-exist on the page and in the book; they possess the untold history of the homeless...
ABOVE: Chris K in John Rylands Library, at the moment it became "Ours"
BELOW: Lois Blackburn in Manchester Cathedral 2021 at the launch of the finished book
HEAR: songs, recitations and chants
A BOOK OF OURS was exhibited at Bury Art Museum May-July 2021, then Manchester Cathedral Oct 2021-March 2022 after which it went permanently into the collection at John Rylands Library, where it can be viewed. It is the last project by arthur+martha CIC.
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