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Building a campfire for you in lockdown

All credit to the brilliant Kayleigh Hilsdon for her wonderful, image here, Legacy

Team Scary member LH Trevail writes for us here about their work on our interactive Greenham Campfire. Not seen it yet? Go play!

Late spring 2020. I’m in my flat. I haven’t been outside in over a month. My family are just a day’s travel away, but they might as well be on the moon. I can’t reach to touch the tree I see from my window. If I stand closer than 2m to the Asda delivery man, I could kill him. 

But I’m building a campfire. 

I’m on my computer. A thin, light, laptop I bought for travelling work. Not going anywhere right now. Except we are. We are going to a campfire. And we are going together.

I want you to see something. I want you to see some things people have said. I want you to see these things glowing – bright text on a dark screen. Bright words in a dark time. 

These people are talking. They aren’t talking to you, but they sort of are. They are talking to someone who is asking them questions on your behalf. Because what they have to say is valuable to us. How can I bring you closer?

Can I make you somewhere to be? Somewhere you can ask the questions yourself? How can I best make you feel welcome, and quietly get out the way of the words?

I can drag a stone circle of code. I can lay the words out like sticks, build them up so one can catch aflame and lead to another. You can pull up somewhere fairly comfortable to sit, a bit off the ground. Wherever you are – in your home, at work, on a train, in the woods – you are welcome here. 

These are stories about a time we fear could be forgotten in talking, even as its learnings and workings-out form the tendons of our present action. These are rememberings of something still current. Still flowing as current flows. It happens over a long time, and not all of us know or remember how it formed. How people joined in a circle around and within something rigid and brittle, and forced it to change. How they sat in circles on the Common, around fires, learning and sharing new patterns to get things done. 

Come and see some of these patterns today, written in light, in the words of those who wove them into our society. 

It’s a horrible year, and we are in danger. Everything is knocked over and poked in, and we are scattered. We’ve got work to do. 

“And the fire would get put out. And immediately that they’d gone, people would start getting the fire sorted out again.” – Alison Napier

Explore the stories from Greenham Women that Laura wove into this fantastic game here

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