I have been very slow to start writing this text. Blame summer. Blame me. Riddled with a chronic illness that is exacerbated by even this empty British heat, I spend the end of spring like a desperately alive child allowed to stay up an extra hour before bed. By June, my body feels terrible. I’m like an old thing plugged in around the house. Water damage, maybe. Or somebody dropped me and never said. In July, I look into the warranty only to find it’s long expired. By August, I have learnt to live without it — whatever it is. Electricity, my energy; or some other polite metaphor so I don’t just write a row of heavy gravestone words that read: ‘Here I am again, splayed out with fatigue even though I’ve done nothing to deserve it. I am dizzy when I so much as turn my head. Sun-stroke nauseous, tender and brainless. Every minute of the day is harder than it should be. This is my fourth dead summer and I can’t bear the thought of any more.’

Of course, I have to stop working in this time. I stop work-working, I stop house-working, and I stop doing the work of maintaining good relationships with other people and with myself. I wait for winter when my blood cools down and I know I’ll feel half-well again. I cancel meetings. I stop setting phone alarms. I think that if I sleep, I can time-travel out of the grief. I can press play on the other side. Peel myself off the pause button like dropped, crusted food. God, I am not a person who enjoys having to live this slowly. I do not feel restful. I think there is a Tasmanian devil spinning inside me but my broken nervous system grabs its hench cartoon shoulders so that it is no longer a whir of dust and motion. The one static frame that remains looks totally unlike itself. That’s it. And this summer, despite my best attempts, I keep thinking of the speed I used to move at. Used to do Kung Fu with a group of men in a school hall on Wednesday evenings. Used to fly to countries alone. Used to do these hot wet runs around the Victorian park next to my house, come home with baby hair plastered to my face like feathers moulded under glue. I am so many months into this sick (im)position that I had to ask my boyfriend to hang a blanket over the biggest mirror in the house. I cannot bear to see myself so 2D, still and sad.

Slow body. Slower than the kids on my road who play out every day while they’re off school for the summer. And this is about to sound completely hypocritical but there is a part of me that doesn’t actually want the season to end. It’s because I don’t want to go back to work. Even if work can be good, I’m too disabled right now to benefit from that goodness. Our book comes out at the beginning of October which means I have exactly a month to learn how to spin again. Not even a month, because there’s a book tour in my calendar where a relief of empty boxes used to be, and two weeks before that, media training and interviews and a photo shoot and — I’ll have to let down the blanket. All these things with tight beginnings and endings. Deadlines. Train tickets and accommodation that require me to make sure my body is in the right place at the right time. All normal stuff if you haven’t been in one tight place for months. It makes me think of men who talk about how many seconds it takes for a car to go from 0 to 100mph; makes me think this nausea will become motion-sickness when I am pinging between different cities, trying to stomach the summer-to-autumn lurch.

And right, even though summer is gravestones and torture (and also clear-headedness but only because my head feels gone; and the world becomes uncomplicated, but only because my head is not there to complicate it) the other reason I am not ready for its sticky pace to end is because of art. In lieu of actively giving, and thinking, and making, and working, and actively being a person in the world, all I have been capable of in recent months is receiving — of being an audience for art. I haven’t had to be an active audience member understanding the thing, or criticising it, or turning the art around in my mind to see its many facets; I have been like a tourist splashed in the stands by an imprisoned whale at sea world. A peripheral, sweating body. I’ve listened to ten audiobooks since June. Some books, I caught every word, good and lucid. There were a few where I was more like a bad friend who didn’t have the headspace to hear someone else’s drama. Ten books! Bouquets on my grave. Ten worlds right there when I only knew this house; ten different casts when I was stranded, even from my own reflection. Going back to work means this uninterrupted programme of culture at home is going to come to an end. My head must still be gone, because I am mad to walk into a fast, distracted future.

So before I have to wake up, and speed up, and do my job again; before my calendar becomes busy with things other than friend’s birthdays and the Battle of the Boyne, and I am racing on trains and sick in other ways, I want to write about slow art from the slowness I’m still under. I want to because there are things about this experience that must be good, otherwise a small part of me wouldn’t feel dismay at the end of summer. But also because for as long as I’ve been sick — for as long as Covid lockdowns forced many people to slow down — the vernacular of slow living has been moseying around the many places on the Internet where people are able to turn their lifestyle into content, and profitable branding, and philosophy with which to evangelise. Given the situation I find myself in, I have thoughts about it whether I want to or not.

The slow living moment refers to people who consciously try to deal with the world at their own pace, rather than at the relentless hustle culture-speed that capitalism and consumerism thrust upon them. It is concerned with living in a calm, minimalist, natural, organic, local environment. It is concerned with practising self-care and mindfulness, and also with prioritising enjoyment over achievement. I like it on paper. Of course. I like its anti-work values most of all. But then I come across these fashionable, leisurely vlogs by healthy middle class people dabbling in a bit of slow living as a treat: introducing the video as though they are only reluctantly picking up the camera as a favour to their viewers. They’ve been too busy resting, and we should all let ourselves rest. There’s always home-made granola. Abundant fruit and veg and light and fresh air. Beautiful people filming themselves watching TV on a projector from bed in the middle of the day with pedigree animals lolling across them and cloud couches and —

Urgh, I roll my eyes, and find that I want to tell someone (anyone!) to piss off. We can’t all have nice things! Still, I gravitate towards those nice things anyway because the content creation around something like slow living becomes a trailer for a new and improved world. Anti-work! Pro-culture! Hyper-local! Fresh produce! TV in the middle of the day! But this is a new and improved world only a select few can afford to visit. I don’t think their slow world is quite the place I go to during summer. I think my slow world is under the heel of the good one, where I also get to watch TV in the middle of the day but I’m panicking daily about my lack of income, and there is no abundance of passionfruit, only of pain; where I am not living a slow life, but one that’s too slow, because my material conditions very much need me to hurry the fuck up. I almost have it good but it’s not enough, like getting a sample of a perfect-for-you perfume glued to a magazine, and passing people in the street who can afford to smell good all over, and not just in a temporary centimetre squared on their wrist.

God, I can only tolerate the idea of going back to work this winter if it means one day in the future I won’t have to work again, but the likelihood is we will not sell an infinite amount of books to the good people of planet earth for the rest of our lives to come. I think our book is good but it is not The Hungry Caterpillar, which has been on the bestseller list for 19 years and counting because babies are born requesting it or whatever. Thinking of those ten books I read this summer, I want to think more about how art could fit into a slow lifestyle. I don’t want to imagine how we might go about jamming slow art into this version of the world, because that would be like trying to sync the wrong audio to a film. No, I need to write this text as if we both exist in an alternative slow world where everybody has the money and the body to enjoy an eternal day off work. That means, I can’t carry on speaking in my own voice because we can’t even be in that halfway point, caught underfoot by illness or redundancy that slows a person against their will. No, for the remainder of this text, I’m someone else and I’m in the other place. The home-made granola place. Capsule wardrobe, wide-open balcony, the free days ahead of all of us forever-place, where work has been siphoned out of reality and art grows over the world like moss in its stead:

I’ve just woken up. I don’t know what time it is because there are no clocks in my house — there never have been. I slip downstairs when I’m ready to be vertical. Feel the breeze. I always leave the front door cracked open because there’s never any danger around here, and I like the air, and I like the light coming in as well.

I can see a shape just outside the door. A large wicker basket with a gingham blanket tucking something in. I pick it up but don’t uncover what’s inside, just leave it on the table for later, or tomorrow, or whenever I’m in the mood. It’s not a picnic delivery. Every so often, somebody leaves a basket full of culture on my door step. I’m not sure who brought it to me this time. It’s just something we do for each other here in the village. I return the favour. Go around my house collecting the art I want other people to share in. Pick sea shells sometimes, the best leaves. Acorns, jam, seeds, hand-spun wool. It’s always free. I never know when a new basket will turn up, nor do I plan ahead when it comes to leaving a basket for my sweet neighbours. The goods just sort of accumulate gradually, and then the baskets kind of complete themselves. They appear when they’re ready, like it feels when I wake up. No regularity. That way, we have learnt not to wait for them. We have made peace with our own expectations of time. Peace with what happens when. Slowly living together, but the togetherness comes with a light touch — point of contact in the occasional exchange of slow art.

I won’t open the basket just now. I won’t open it for a month, actually. I’ll get on with the other things my imagination brings in front of me, like a cat with a soft toy, and then another toy, and then a bird, and a cherry, and a mouse. There are all the books I’m reading. Hammock afternoons learning about William Blake; not learning too much in the words as much as I am in the imagery. Slow art can mean looking for a very long time. Looking with care, intent, discretion. I look slowly at Blake and see patterned lines across muscles like faint coral. I catch the outline of winged, sleeping heads seeping through a watery, shattered rainbow. Eyes dotting the folded wings of angels, like giant peacocks closed for business. I spend a lot of time looking until I think the creatures move, and only then do I look away. Notice the sun is setting, and I have been here all day. It must be time for dinner.

The neighbours eat collectively on long, low benches in the middle of the village. For the past while, one neighbour has been knitting a fair isle jumper, inch by inch. After she finished the yoke, she began wearing it to our nightly dinners like a necklace and then eventually a vest, yarn and needles clinking like jewellery at her side. I have watched the garment grow each night, a living, rhythmic thing. Another neighbour brought a painting to dinner with him. We spend our days with art, so it is only natural that we make it ourselves. He said over stew that he didn’t think it was especially good, but that it didn’t need to be good. He had enjoyed himself enough just making it.

Instead of the old way of doing things (unilateral exhibitions that happened once in space and time), he had carried it under one arm and had it leaning against a plant pot. Whoever felt like looking pottered over after dessert. Most people went straight home but a few of us looked at the painting slowly while dinner settled in our bellies, the art settled on our eyes, and the dark settled behind us. I have read plenty of history books about the beginning of the 21st Century, and I have gathered that popular culture was an infectious experience in which many people caught its virus quite instantly, with huge spikes in cases, and in fans, and in sales. But all the people who enjoyed a particular piece of culture would just as quickly move onto the next thing, and the memory of the first one would fade, as if it happened decades ago, not days. I’ve read about the way museums used to be, too. Planning their exhibitions years in advance, no capacity to respond to the life right there in front of them. It’s this kind of stuff I don’t like to think about, and neither does my company; the man with the painting brought it back to dinner with him a few weeks down the line, and different people looked at it that time. Two of them went back to his house to see other things he had made. There are no galleries or museums anymore; only plant pots and people’s houses and a better opportunity for legacy.

Sometimes travellers pass through the village with new culture-things that go into circulation. There are always books, which I’m glad for. We exchange the ones we are done with, and that includes the ones we like. There is not much of a sense of ownership nowadays. And anyway, we have learnt to copy out the text we want to hold onto. It takes a long time but we have plenty of that. One of the travellers once told me that they had been in Norway, coming over on a ferry, and walking the rest of the way here. The traveller had met a group over there in the old capital, Oslo, who called themselves The Library of Living Books. It was an ensemble of performers who had memorised books and were happy to read them on request. When I heard about it, my first thought wasn’t that I would want to hear the stories read to me, but that I would like to be a performer reading one. To become the art. To be so close to it. It would be like a kind of worship, believing yourself to be a book. I like the idea of having spent so much time with one novel that I know its every word — that I know it more closely than the writer who decided on their arrangement so long ago. I think that would be the very slowest kind of reading.

Eventually, it is time to open the basket. I peel back gingham to reveal an assortment of cultural objects. There is an expired roll of 35mm film for my camera. A bundle of used postcards. A vinyl record with a piece of paper attached to it. It is an excerpt of Jim Finer’s piece Longplayer. The paper has a map from here to the Trinity Buoy Wharf on the River Thames, where Jim Finer’s composition has been playing since the year 2000; an algorithm stretching the music out so that the piece lasts 1000 years. There is not usually any reason to rush around here, but I should try to catch that before it ends. There is also a candle in the basket, a crochet hook, and three books tied together with dried grass. One is heavy and stout. It is called an Argos catalogue. Another is a play, The Seagull by Anton Chekhov. I struggle reading plays; I need The Library of Living Books to help me there, or I’ll have to ask my neighbours to read the script with me. The third in the parcel looks to be an old story from 2018. Some of the pages are loose. The book is called My Year of Rest and Relaxation by author Ottessa Moshfegh, and I open it right away because I like the slow roll of the title.

It is about a woman in the year 2000. She lives in a busy city and she is so overwhelmed by how uninterested she is in her own life that she attempts to sleep for a year. She thinks it will reset her mental state, and also her will to live. She works out the correct combination of sedatives to achieve her sleep, locks herself in her apartment and sleeps in 3 day stints, only coming up for air and a bite of food before quickly going down again. An artist she knows, Ping Xi, agrees to keep a hold of the key so that she doesn’t sleepwalk out of the building or do anything absurd while she’s under. The artist is the one who drops off food, only agreeing to be her minder in exchange for the use of her peculiar situation as material for his own artwork. He wants to film her, wants to paint her. Later, he puts on an exhibition of the portraits he made when she was in her chemical retreat. She doesn’t care about any of this. All she cares about is getting that perfect year of sleep.

The whole thing reminded me of a real artist I’d read about in an art history book a long time ago. Tehching Hsieh, the man who did a series of one year long performances. I’m thinking of the one from 1978 when he pledged, ‘I shall seal myself in my studio in solitary confinement. I shall NOT converse, read, write, listen to the radio or watch television, until I unseal myself on September 29, 1979. My friend, Cheng Wei Kong, will facilitate this piece by taking charge of my food, clothing, and refuse.’ Hsieh’s artwork makes me feel uncharacteristically sick (and I’m never sick) because I’m not sure what the point in living is without conversing, reading, writing, listening to the radio or watching television. I’m sure that’s the point he was making, and it was not meant for a woman like me to wrestle with, years in the liberated future. The working classes might as well have been living in solitary confinement, because wage slavery robbed them of their time for culture, and for each other. Art was once like a fast slap to the face; there was that other year-long piece Tehching Hsieh did, when he checked into work on the hour every hour, which meant he never fully slept. His performances make My Year of Rest and Relaxation seem like a fairytale; still extreme, at least the woman in the novel got to Sleeping Beauty her way through the full sentence.

I’ll probably never understand these people, not really. I flipped the book over when I finished and found two different testimonials on the back cover from some of the big newspapers and critics of the time who referred to My Year of Rest and Relaxation as a comedy. The humour was lost on me. Totally lost in time. Reading it from a world where nothing wears us down, so we have nothing to run from or sleep off, was like hearing your parents discussing whether or not to have a baby — to have you. Mechanical, absurd, lightyear trickery. After her year of sleep is up, the protagonist describes feeling like a newborn animal. Like Tehching Hsieh might have done after his year without art, the woman then buys a battery-operated radio and just sits in the park every day listening to jazz stations and feeding squirrels. Her happy ending, a comedy. People at the beginning of the 21st Century were crying out for my life. The artists and the most privileged. Fascinating. I got a pen and a stack of paper ready to make a start on copying the book out by hand. I knew had to keep hold of such an important historical artefact.

I got through the first page but then I stopped. I am rested. I am relaxed. My head is perfectly clear to take part in the practice of slow art, and so I put the pen down and decided to memorise the entire book instead. I never wondered how long it would take.

— #1 please comment a slow emoji like 🐢 or 🐌 on our instagram so that I know you were here reading this text — #2 from 2019’s Oslo Biennale: ‘In Mette Edvardsen’s Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine — A library of living books, a group of performers have each memorized a book they themselves have chosen. Together, they make up a library of living books’

— #3 you can pre-order our book Poor Artists here