L: I’m still thinking about the question of consent and ethics, especially in terms of how it allows for any action, because you always have to look at the context.
Yeah, I think it’s always a balance between what is it that you want to achieve and what is the risk involved in it.
“People should be more aware of the impact their personal actions hold in a group.”
And I think it’s also like… I was discussing this with a friend of mine, this idea of the military, it’s a very toxic environment overall, however one thing that’s maybe good is that when someone wakes up too late, no-one gets to train that day. People should be more aware of the impact their personal actions hold in a group, and mentioning the experiment with the eye colours again, you can also make people who might not be in an intersectional marginalized context aware of the privilege they hold through group action, where there is power exercised over them in a not so explicit way.
But it means that something that may be non-consensual will happen; however that is already the case for someone else, so there will always be a friction between that, I feel like.
Discussing maybe the artwork I mentioned with the stools and ‘the artist is [not] present’, the key word I was thinking about at that moment was ‘friction’.
L: I think friction is also full of potential, especially in terms of queerness.
And comfort, also. Friction and comfort go hand in hand.
Like, there’s friction to create a sense of comfort. The only way you can know that you experience a sense of comfort… I’m gonna go back to my childhood: I was comfortable at home, and I know that I was comfortable at home because there was this clear friction in my social environment between the way I interacted with them and my family, who was fully accepting of who I was.
“The safe space holds no meaning if there was never an unsafe space.”
You can only create a sense of comfort, a sense of safe spaces if there ever was the sense of friction before. The safe space holds no meaning if there was never an unsafe space. No to encourage unsafe spaces of course [laughs], this should definitely be made aware of in a very safe manner, so, indeed small experiments that aren’t very harmful.
L: It’s also just a point about the relevance of safe spaces, because we wouldn’t even be aware that some spaces are safe if others weren’t unsafe, so that shows why safe spaces are valuable.
Yeah, indeed, and it’s also again the friction that happens between. In the LGBT-community also there’s a set of people that just explicitly identify as one letter and there’s a friction between that and more intersectional LGBT-individuals, because that’s also different ways of being marginalized. You’ll never find a perfect balance, but you can try to discuss those things. I think that can be encouraged by maybe safely discussing experiences of being unsafe.
But it’s also always interesting to think about when will that ever be consensual, because you always cross someone’s line of, for me, in this case, interpersonal distance. Even when creating a safe space where sensorial experience is minimized, the sound level is lower than 45 db, there still will be crossed a line, and that line is for me interpersonal distance.
I think a conversation like this for example can be very hard, but I can never achieve a safer place if I never hold a conversation like this.
L: Thank you so much for this.