Let me tell you the things we did next!

I wanted to share a story from 2018, if I may.

Last year was my first Adhocracy. I was collaborating with Alex Kelly on The Things We Did Next. As someone who is mostly a one-person office I really enjoyed the chance to play and learn and share and see what everyone else was up to and I loved the way that ideas and reflections spread from work to work wherever they touched, like electricity only (mostly) safer.

“I loved the way that ideas and reflections spread from work to work wherever they touched, like electricity only (mostly) safer.”

While I was there I would walk every day to let everything settle in my brain. One rainy day I went for a walk around the port and started chatting to a couple from England who were standing near the market shed. The fellow pointed across the water and asked me if I knew when that bridge had been built and I said I didn’t and I was sorry to disappoint him. He told me he had been in the merchant navy, his ship had docked in Port Adelaide in the 1960s and this was his first time back. He was managing to get around with the fifty-year-old map in his head. Then he asked me what I was doing there so we had a nice chat about art and time and memory.

“the past is always present, and [...] these maps we carry around in our heads remain useful in some ways but can also get us lost”

Alex and I were busy projecting ourselves into the future - we were inventing a timeline of events to which we could anchor our improvisation, a profile interview set in 2029.

The above encounter made me think about how the past is always present, and how these maps we carry around in our heads remain useful in some ways but can also get us lost, and how places remember everything that happens in them, so that whatever we were doing there would still be reverberating in the shopfront and the hall and in the Port for a long time to come.