What do we carry with us? A conversation around the Long Table
A photograph, a shell, a set of keys, a piece of jewellery. At our first Long Table in September, these everyday objects became starting points for stories about family, migration, grief, friendship, identity and home.
The Long Table is a simple format: people gather around one table for an open conversation, with everyone welcome to listen and contribute. There is no panel and no division between speakers and audience. For our first event, facilitator Robert Lee encouraged people to talk, draw and move around the room, using questions and activities to get the conversation going. As he put it at the start “We’re going to give people an option to speak. We’re going to listen. We’re going to participate.”
Held at Orleans House Gallery on 24 September, the afternoon began with the question of what moves us. People were invited to share an object, or simply something from their lives, and talk about why it mattered.
One participant shared a photograph of himself as a child with his father, taken in Greece in 1992. His father is now living with Alzheimer’s, and the photograph has become a way of keeping close the person he remembers. He spoke about coming out as gay and his father’s response: playing records by gay musicians, finding his own way to show his son that he was loved.
Other stories came from things people carried with them. Bangles and rings held memories of mothers and grandmothers. A shell recalled summers spent in the same place since childhood and the knowledge that “I have a place that I would always belong to”. A small flower preserved in resin, brought back from a friend’s travels, was valued for “what it feels like to be remembered” by someone far away.
A family photograph from 1948 took the conversation to the Partition of India. It showed a family after their move from Delhi to Karachi, and had been discovered many years later among a father’s belongings. Most of those pictured have since died. “It’s about resilience,” its owner said. “It’s about how they survived.”
Another participant shared an artwork she had made while studying in Afghanistan. She remembered arriving at art school with little experience of making art and finding it intensely difficult at first. She persevered, learning to make paper by hand and use natural pigments and handmade brushes, before going on to promote the work of Afghan artists internationally. “This piece has changed my life,” she said of the work she has kept with her.
Parents and grandparents came up often, as did migration, loss and the places people had left behind. Stories that initially seemed far apart started to find points of contact. “We’re linked in our common humanity,” Robert said. “We’re linked by the experiences that we’ve all had.”
The idea of being moved broadened as people talked. Someone can be moved by a person or place, but also by a book, a piece of music or a performance. Robert remembered his father trying to tempt him away from the comics he loved as a boy by sending him to the dictionary and asking him to write using unfamiliar words. Looking back, he sees those childhood exercises differently “My father gave me the gift of language and words.”
“Why does art move us?” he asked later. “How does art move us? What bits of it move us?”
The answers weren’t confined to what we might usually call art. Photographs and jewellery mattered because of the lives held within them. Music could bring someone back to a particular person or time. An ordinary object could hold years of memory.
From there, the conversation turned to home.
“Can you leave home without leaving it behind?” Robert asked.
For him, home is closely tied to family. He remembered travelling in Japan and phoning his children each evening, despite the cost of international calls at the time. “I don’t think I leave home,” he said. “Home is always with me.”
Not everybody had the same relationship with the word. One participant spoke about repeatedly moving between Africa and India as a child before living in London. Another talked about home as a feeling rather than a particular building “That moment where you felt like you’re home, that’s a feeling. You can carry that with you.”
There was another side to the conversation too. “Home isn’t always safe,” one participant pointed out while talking about her work with young people. For some, family and a sense of belonging have to be made elsewhere.
The discussion moved through sexuality, migration, racism and experiences of not fitting comfortably into the place or identity other people expect of you. Another of Robert’s questions felt particularly apt by this point “Can you arrive somewhere new and still bring another place with you?”.
Around the table were connections with Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Jamaica, Greece, Africa and London. People had brought parents, grandparents, partners and children into the conversation, even when they weren’t physically in the room. “We are a multiplicity,” Robert said.
By the end of the afternoon, the table itself had become a record of what had happened. People had written and drawn on the tablecloth, shared food and moved around the room to speak to one another. Robert described it as a communal meal of sorts “We’ve been eating the knowledge of each other… sharing each other’s ideas.”
That informality matters to the Long Table. You don’t have to be an artist or know how to talk about art. In his closing remarks, Fahim Qureshi, our Arts Development Programmer, noted that the group had largely avoided “art speak” and had spoken from the heart instead.
“I hope you’ve made some memories today,” Robert told the group as the session drew to a close.
Join us at the next Long Table
Our next Long Table takes place on 13 January in the Main Gallery at Orleans House Gallery, alongside Ronald Moody: Sculpting Life. Robert Lee will lead another conversation around identity, community, home and belonging.
If you’ve never been to a Long Table before, that’s no barrier. You can come to listen, meet people and join in if and when you want to. There is no specialist knowledge needed and nothing to prepare.
Just pull up a chair and be part of the conversation.