The Brooklyn Rail

“I just received this wonderful note: one of the visitors, in the handwriting obviously of a young child, left me a note that said, ‘I love the art, but why are all your images fuzzy?’ I love that.” That was how Ann Hamilton began her answer to me about what she’d learned from the process of developing We Will Sing (2025), a large-scale project installed in Bradford, UK. Situated in the historic Salts Mill, an early remnant (opened in 1853) of the Industrial Revolution in northern England that processed wool, We Will Sing's components include the building and its manufacturing detritus, raw wool, donated textiles stitched into veils and capes, swatch books, whistling, live and recorded reading and singing, lullabies, letters written by visitors advising the future, giant photographic-enlargements of miniature, antique Fève figures, a newspaper, and a rarely opened door left unlocked to permit a view out to the horizon.

Hamilton portrays her projects as tapestries, nodding to her beginnings as a textile artist and referring as well to the tightly woven visual and aural communities that result from her interventions and collaborations. Acknowledging the close attention undertaken by her visitors and responding with love is emblematic of Ann Hamilton’s embracing and generous practice.

Amanda Gluibizzi (Rail): You’ve talked about your approach to taking on big commissions like We Will Sing and have described how you try listening without expectation, and that the project starts with your intuition about things. How do you know when your intuition is intuiting the right thing?

Ann Hamilton: It’s a mysterious process, isn’t it? I’m sure it’s the same when you’re writing. How do you know, “Yes, that’s the right word,” or, “Oh, that’s the right way to address this.” The process is responsive in every way. It’s a bit like lifting a wetted finger to feel the weather and sense the direction of the wind. I begin describing back to myself what I am experiencing knowing it holds the seeds of what will follow. It becomes a sprawling associational list beginning with the conditions and feelings of being in a place. What is here? What does it invite and ask? The volume, the materiality, the sound, the light of the architectural surround is first, but the spine begins with the social, with the history of a place and the people I am meeting. I feel that the work really develops from conversation, from how a conversation zig zags, unfolds and points different paths as people share what they love and find interesting. And then I follow a hunch about what might be possible. While I may push to the rim of possibility, I know I have to “read” the condition and work to meet it. The key word is “with,” and so understanding and working with the condition is central and unique to every project.

I made several visits to Bradford; each return is a chance to prod and test my initial impressions. I may swoon with the enormous volume but know immediately I need to resist filling it—understand that my job is not to fill it, but to touch and engage it, to tune and focus and in some senses to draw forward what I find. With each return I am testing my form ideas—how do I give form to what I am finding? That is the hardest part for me—like finding the right word to describe something, only it isn’t a word but a complex of interacting materialities. With each return, I meet more people, deepen conversations with others. From the beginning I was inspired by the history of the mill, by the ethos and material research of the local fifth generation wool company working out of one of its spaces, but it took me several visits before I understood how to work with their materials—in both a raw and processed state. Every process has many dead ends.

I implicitly trust process, but with the reality of pressing deadlines I try to resist my need to know what something is or will be. I think it is easy to talk yourself into thinking you are on the right track when really you are lost and still hiking. Usually, my intuition knows when I am trying to falsely reassure myself, but knowing it doesn’t “feel right” yet—that is hard to explain.

A project is just very slowly woven from all the threads of the experience. One of the important things to emphasize here is how much the making is an ongoing process from the first visit to exhibition close. Everything may be “in place” when it opens but in some ways it is just beginning, it is still becoming. The making is ongoing, and the making part is the learning part and the energy of a thing that’s not quite yet staying in motion.

Rail: Can you tell me something you’ve learned since it’s been open?

Hamilton: One of the important things in this piece is the middle of the three rooms, where there was a small wooden structure built against an end wall. It has open windows without glass on three sides and a low ceiling. It is a very small space sitting in a very large space, and it was already there. I think I understood intuitively, and then came to articulate to myself later, how the location and the dimension of that booth, which was probably a manager’s booth or something in the mill, helped me orient the entire project. We’ve transformed it into a booth for readers, and the ongoing daily life of the project is the process of reading out loud. The booth faces this big room where the images of the enlarged Fèves now hang, and their presence shifts the act of reading. It’s not a performance for the people that might be visiting, but an address to these images. And it’s the experience of reading out loud itself that I’ve come to understand is the third voice of the piece, and very central to the project, more central than I understood. In fact, maybe the whole project is about making the condition for the invitation to reading and writing to happen: “Dear Future, I want you to know and remember…” Readers can select what they want to read from the letters, the writing in the project’s newspapers and other publications. There’s something about the cadence of that voice in relationship to the other aural elements in the piece that just grounds the whole thing, and something about the intimacy of being read to. Bringing that kind of intimacy into this huge space is the ongoing life of the piece.

The surprise has been how many people are writing letters. It is a big ask, thinking about letter writing in this era of texts and screens. Before the project opened, we prepared lots of prompts to solicit invitations to write, but there wasn’t much response in advance of the project opening. I think there’s something about the atmosphere: the scale of the space, the invitation to sit on benches, the invitation, maybe, to take time. We have clipboards around the space, and while people might send letters in, most people are taking the time to sit and write in the space. Letter writing invites a reflective kind of thinking. It connects the immediacy of “you’re here with this paper and pencil and its tactility in your hand,” addressed for a time or person that’s far away. The letters are delivered to the project in an old office wire basket that hangs off the edge of the booth. We’re posting some of them to a Tumblr site, and some are being reproduced in a local paper. I have found the letters heartfelt and very moving.

Rail: Where are the letter writers coming from?

Hamilton: I know there are people coming from out of town, but I think the majority of letters are local. I’m told that people are making many return visits. Some of those return visitors have stayed to become readers and some of the letters have shared memories of people whose family members may have worked in Salts Mill or another mill in the area. Just as the space is saturated with the smell of its former use, so are people’s memories. I don’t think I understood or appreciated until late in the project just how fully the legacy of the mills saturates the DNA and literacies of this place and everything I was experiencing.

Students in a textile program at Bradford College helped with sewing the felts and mounting of the images. One of the students who came and helped still works in the mill, and it was interesting to hear how over the course of time he had worked in almost every aspect of cloth production. One of the expressions I heard that was new to me was “he has cloth ears.” Cloth ears is a euphemism, I suppose, for someone who’s hard of hearing because the racket and the noise in the mill was so loud and damaging; you couldn’t hear over those machines. The phrase conflates hearing and touching and that appeals to my metaphoric sense—but it is the sound that brought me to thinking about qualities of voice and the intimacy of a lullaby sung and hummed: and too, to wonder if whistling could be heard as a form of communicating over the spinning machines, to think about what sound might meet a space that’s already so saturated with a history of deafening mechanical sound.

Rail: You described wanting the space to “be held by sound.” I can get a sense of what you mean, but I was hoping you could articulate a little bit more.

Hamilton: Without being loud, right? [Laughter]. There are skylights in each of these spaces, so the pattern of light moving daily across the space is one clock and the turning of sound—on records and horn speakers from rooms at opposite ends, is the other. If you imagine it in a plan view—the two ends spaces are the ears, the middle is the body. A solo voice at one end, a choral recording at the other bracket the middle space’s reading voice.

I think it’s Susan Stewart, but maybe others too, who have written that sound is how we touch at a distance. Tactility is the center of my work. I think the atmosphere of the aural environment is what touches and invites you to spend time, to listen, perhaps to exhale and let yourself feel like you can rest for a minute. It is sound and memory, not “stuff,” that fills the space. The old horn speakers that we found in a pile in the back of one of the rooms were probably used for announcements in the mill, but we don’t know.

The horn shape of the speakers funnels the sound. We mounted each horn to a turning pole, so they now stand as figures in the space, and because of the particular volume of that room, as they turn, the sound kicks back and bounces off the walls—it’s palpable. It feels as if the sound, like cloth, brushes against you.

I collaborated with Emily Eagen, a vocalist in New York and we recorded Emily singing directly into the bell of the horn, which gives the sound its particular quality. We started out with lullabies, including one of the earliest known medieval pieces, so she’s singing, humming, half whistling in turns. The melody is somehow familiar, even if you can’t put your finger on it. Maybe as you listen there’s some recognition, but I’m not sure. Emily described to me how a folk tune or lullaby which passes down through time is like a stone worn by water to its essence.

Rail: It makes you feel comfortable but not so comfortable that you wouldn’t still want to be aware.

Hamilton: Yeah, not sleepy comfortable, but held. Like a long slow exhale and shedding of tension.

Rail: The way you described this sound—almost as though it brushes you—reminds me of another quote from the newspaper that you produced for the installation from Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley. It describes a girl singing: “she breathed into the feeling, softness.”

Hamilton: And you know, of course, the Brontës: their parsonage, now a museum, is in this area and is a strong part of local history. Visiting, I was so struck by the size and exquisite hand of the sisters’ writing. Handwriting is so generational. The cursive they penned is now rare.

This was commissioned by Bradford 2025, UK City of Culture; I developed the project with two independent curators from the area. Extremely well read, with backgrounds in textiles, they trusted and supported my process, linked it to people and organizations in the community and generously fed me a constant stream of background context, history, and readings, all of which made the project possible.

Rail: When we think about softness, too, we could think about wool. It is a strange fabric because it can be the softest of the soft, but it can also be quite wiry and hard, and it has its own oils, which makes it particularly dexterous or supple and waterproof. How was it to work both with a woven fabric and the tufts of wool that are in the shadow boxes?

Hamilton: In the beginning, I was thinking about processes of transformation—raw into cooked, grown into made, formless into form—plant and animal into thread, thread into cloth, cloth into coat, coat into warmth.

The cadence of threads crossing and of stitches passing through cloth was my first understanding of making’s transformative power—two pieces of sewn cloth becoming a coat to keep someone warm—a simple act achieved by complex means.

If you take the stairs in the mill up to the top floor you enter under the water tank. It’s a low, dark room with heavy metal beams that seem almost ship like. In front of you across the wall are a row of stacked open frame metal stillages—what you are calling boxes—stuffed and overflowing with wool freshly sheared from the sheep. Side light from an adjacent door falls on them but they are mostly in shadow. What you don’t see you smell. I love that you arrive and leave through the presence of the animal. Obviously, we’re animals [laughter]—who can’t grow, but must make, a coat to keep ourselves warm. How we have accomplished that is the history of the world. This particular mill, Salts Mill, is famous for developing the process to weave wool and alpaca. It was a vertical production mill, technologically and socially innovative in its time. There, raw materials enter from a global shipping network and finished goods likewise go out. Built during the 1850s’ social reform movement, the complex included housing, a canteen, a school, and a church, and was part of an effort to build a better working condition, as awful as the long hours and noise may have been.

My research back in time turned me also toward the future and the transformation of these mammoth complexes for a contemporary present and future—a future the family transforming Salts is now making.

I was inspired by my conversations with Dawson’s wool company and their innovative work to replace non-sustainable materials—foam and feather—with a sustainable one: wool. As woolkeepers the cycle includes care for the soil, the animals, and the farmers so we all survive and thrive. We all still need to be warm, right? I think the conversation with the different wool companies operating in the area, in conjunction with my experience of being in the mill and the kind of beauty and welcome of that experience, led to understanding that the central question is the question of the future, of a future’s possibility. In the circuitous way that is the way of projects this led to the letters: “Dear Future, I want you to know and remember…”

Rail: The boxes of wool seem so luxurious. How tall are they?

Hamilton: They must be the height of that room, maybe nine feet. Those same metal structures, the stillages, found in the basement of the mill, are in each of the rooms, and used to hold the newspapers and the record players. Everything came from the mill or the area. There’s the raw wool, and then there’s the giant blue wool and mohair curtain, which we can talk about later. But behind each of the images hanging in the middle room is a wool cape, based on the Dorothy cape, a Shaker pattern. Ann Lee, one of the founders of the Shakers, came from Manchester, an hour and a half away from Bradford. But maybe what’s more important than that historical anecdote is the fact that I didn’t understand the capes for a long time. I kept asking myself, “Ann, why are you making these capes? What are they doing there?” Others were asking too. They’re beautiful, like the most beautiful wool. I wish I could send you one Amanda.

Rail: I would wear it, Ann. [Laughter]

Hamilton: I’m going to work on that. But beyond their beauty I was like, “Why, Ann? Why are you putting them there?” They’re not there to be worn. I think they relate to the reader’s booth, or maybe your question about being held, in the sense that when you’re held by sound, you’re held by the cadence of a voice reading or the story being read and being inside a cape’s surround is reading’s physical analog. It’s a literal wrapping. And it’s funny because when the show opened, and even since then, in Zoom sessions with some of the people caring for the project, the question has come up: “What about the capes? Tell us about the capes.” I guess this goes back to the first thing we talked about: you’re making something, but you don’t always know why or how all the parts might, in the end, fit together. It needs to reveal itself. I stayed in Bradford for a week after it opened to read, to be in the space; to learn what it is, to understand what it had become. I have my hopes for it, but I have to let go of them to learn from and see, what is it? I will return for the last weekend in November, and that will be another learning.

Rail: How did you develop the colors for the veil and the capes?

Hamilton: For the large pieces that are draped over the rod structure of the roof in the spinning room, there was a lot of back and forth. I was working with generous donations from William Halstead, a mill celebrating its 150th year anniversary. They were very keen from the beginning to help with the project and donate cloth, but most of what they had in the volumes we needed were dark suiting cloths and I just couldn’t see a black curtain in the spinning room.

The color of the capes came from end pieces selected over several visits to their warehouses and their mill. I still have lengths of the most beautiful orange. I should send you a piece of it.

Rail: That is my favorite color.

Hamilton: Your favorite color? Mine too!

I went back and forth, back and forth about the color for the veil/curtain, and how it should be. I knew it would be totally wrong to just stitch a conventional curtain, I understood it shouldn’t be an object set in the space but needed to be of the space and work with the rod structure that forms the roof. Over time, we found the form by stretching and tensioning fabric lengths with stones reminiscent of warp weighted loom. But the blue came spontaneously one day from the sky.

The skylights down the length of the rooms make a strong path. One of the days we were there holding up samples, and doing Photoshop simulations to try to figure out, what would this color look like? I realized, oh, the sky holds you. It must come in. In the end it seemed simple even if getting there was not. I went through the same process with the Armory (the event of a thread [2012–13]), going through a hundred options to end up with white cloth. So, I guess I’ve indulged my attraction to chroma in the capes.

I worked with a wonderful costume maker. We gave her the Dorothy pattern and the donated yardage from Halstead’s, and then she, in turn, went and secured donations for different linings and put all the combinations together. Some of the capes or cloaks have pretty wild interiors and we draped them in such a way that the lining reveals itself.

This project is so much about the felt quality of things, and how feeling is a form of thinking, and I don’t think we have vocabularies for understanding or perhaps trusting that. I mean, we have Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and certainly we have a lot of writing about embodied knowledge, but our cultural habits privilege certain kinds of experience and information over others. It is hard for us to trust experiences we can’t easily name. The sound: sung, hummed, whistled, spoken, thanks to Emily, invites you into feeling what you see.

Rail: I think much of your work is aiming to make words and sounds textural. I understand why you would want that texture—the hand, if you will—of the fabric to lend itself, as well, to the sound and vice versa.

Hamilton: The other sound is, obviously, from the six records which play in the canal-side space, the room where raw goods would have lifted into the mill directly from the canal that links Leeds and Liverpool. In the spinning room the voice is solo; the humming, whistling, and singing have a non-performative quality—as Emily described it—a before music quality. In contrast, the canal space is filled with a chorus of different voices recorded in intergenerational collaborative song writing workshops Emily helped lead. We worked with the South Asian women’s choir Song-Geet, the community group Armchair Aerobics, a toddler playgroup, and students and music teachers in two local schools (Heaton St Barnabas, a primary school, and Titus Salt, a middle school). The process was new for me—it was both unnerving and magical. The Armchair Aerobics group taught their song to the primary school students who in turn taught the one they had written to them—you hear them singing together on the record.

My amazing assistant Kara Gut took David Crickmore’s heroic recordings from field situations less than ideal—imagine a room next to a school cafeteria!—and stitched the songs and song sections into an eighteen-minute composition you hear played across six records on players built and embedded in metal stillages by a local juke box company, Sound Leisure. Spatialized, you might hear one song section from all the records in unison while other phrases move between records, so you hear one part from one side of the room and the next from the other side. The movement of the sound in the space turns your attention as does the light from overhead side windows.

So, the journey of this piece begins in the harmonies of a solo vocalist at the far opposite end of the building and ends on the canal side here with a collaboratively created choral composition, children’s voices and the horizon of the Bradford hills visible through the door that once brought materials into the mill and newly opened for the project. That open door, the collaborative process, the children’s voices, they are the future.

Rail: It felt important to bring children into the installation not only because of their history in textile factories, but also because if you’re speaking of the future, then I think you need to consider having children involved. In one of my daughter’s children’s books, the main character asks her dad, “Do grown-ups have no future?”

Hamilton: Oh, that is so good. I’m going to hold on to that one.

Rail: [Laughs] I’d love to know more about your use of the active and passive voice. Your writing is very interesting because it often starts with the active voice and then it starts to switch back and forth between active and passive. Do you feel that that has a relationship to the way that your work is generated and exhibited?

Hamilton: Oh my gosh, that’s a fascinating question, Amanda. There must be something in there between being inside and being outside. Or like the linking of the near, which is like the attention of the thing that’s close at hand, like the page, and something like the view of the landscape, which is the far. I do think that that’s a deep structure in the work itself, and how I think about the relationships between things, because it’s the relationships and the space between things that make the work. I’ve never really thought about it relative to active and passive voice. How do you see that? Like, is it just that I’m a bad writer, or is it—one habit of utter confusion is my constant switching between “I” and “You.”

Rail: I assumed it was deliberate, so I’m assuming that you’re not a bad writer! I was curious if you would answer it the way you just did, because I get a sense of push and pull in your work or tension, that elements are holding each other in tension.

Hamilton: Yes. I think that’s exactly right.

Rail: I guess it’s a change in cadence, which you could think of as a form of singing. If we wanted to go back to all the metaphors that we’ve been employing in this conversation, it seems very aware of your practice.

Hamilton: This goes back to your first question about how I start, because in some ways there’s, yes, an experience I’ve already described, but I’m also paying attention to those tensions in a place that might then rub together, in the work. Things in relation are the deep structure of the work. As Anne Carson has written: “Contact is crisis.” And I would say in this piece, there is a felt tension in the size and quality of gigantic images made from Fèves hanging in the middle space. A “fève” is a hand-painted miniature figurine, a “figure of luck” traditionally baked into annual King cakes. When the scans are enlarged, they’re distorted—the figures are a little mangled looking and half out of focus. In some ways they have an affect or a quality of expression that can draw you in, while on the other hand, they’re haunting and a bit monstrous, and while each is unique, they don’t represent a person but are a collection of human-like characters… are perhaps us.

Rail: You start by linking them to the figures in a galette des rois [King cake], and I found it very charming that the newspaper has a recipe for the cake. But I was also thinking that what you’re creating, overwhelmingly, is a gift economy. The newspaper quotes Marx, and I realized that the Fèves are both bearers of gifts and gifts themselves. The newspaper, likewise, is a gift. And then, of course, this entire operation’s condition, as you would put it, exists in a gifting economy, rather than in what we would consider more of a capitalistic economy.

Hamilton: A project needs such tremendous support to become and operate as a gift. In turn, it has many invitations. The newspaper is one physically, in the sense that you can take it, but its content is another kind of invitation—an invitation to an associative kind of response to, or being with, the project. We worked with a local Yorkshire paper, Telegraph & Argus, and they donated the printing. The organizers of the festival and my project manager there thought we’d need, I can’t even remember, twenty thousand of each of the twenty-two pages and I’m like, “Twenty thousand? Are you kidding?” But I am told they are flying out the door. I love that these images and texts, hand carried, find their way into other spaces. The other hand-carried circulation I love is the mail. Whenever you see a personal something in the mail, it’s kind of a big deal now, right? [Laughter]. I don’t know if you remember in the Wexner Center project (When an object reaches for your hand [2019]) we printed images of objects we scanned in the Ohio State University collections. We set up mailing tables so people could fold, tape, address, and leave them in a basket for us to post to USPS. Those images of objects, mostly out of sight and hidden away except to researchers, were sent out through the mail. I love that. I love that circulation system. I also love how it inverted taking into gifting. How mailing the images invites you to think about someone you wanted to share it with. We have not set up mailing tables for these newspapers, but I have heard they’re appearing in lots of different places. Someone sent a snapshot, “Here it is on my grandmother’s refrigerator,” that kind of thing. [Laughter] It’s like the fève in the cake. It arrives unbidden, so your experience is one of finding something or a text or image being found, and that’s very different than other forms of experience and consumption.

In addition to the songs, the wool, the cloth, and the newspaper, the local community gifted their letters and their help. The person who cut the records is in the area. The players came from a company that builds jukeboxes, and has worked with every generation of sound, beginning with and now returning to vinyl. Everything in the project comes from what is there most immediately in the mill, and then beyond. The local is the project’s heart but isn’t its narrative.

Rail: You make that very clear in the paper. My favorite pages were the Indian fabrics spread. That’s basically the entire history of the Industrial Revolution in Britain in one spread, right? England’s colonial pursuit is happening in India at the same time as the building and the rise of this factory; the introduction of cotton winds up supplanting linen first, and then other materials, which contributes to the destruction of these factories. It’s remarkable, the way that just that single spread winds up pointing—

Hamilton: To all that, to everything yeah—the complexity of it and again—pointing not telling.

Rail: The newspaper quotes a guidebook: “Take down some of those greasy or dusty samples, and you bring the ends of the earth together.”

Hamilton: The associative nature of the newspaper allows me to make an address from the side, right? I remember working on a project where I just hated the didactic materials: the form of address, the telling you too much, the not trusting the art to do the work. And I thought, what can an exhibition guide be? Rather than tell, the voice invites, and I thought, wouldn’t it be great to have a commonplace of excerpts from literature and other sources to help you think along with the work. A kind of sideways accompaniment to engage you in relationship with what you are seeing, which isn’t directly about the thing you’re looking at. That’s what started the whole newspaper thing. It was just because I hated the didactic materials [laughter] so much and working to turn that into a form of sharing what you love.

Rail: In this newspaper, there’s a spread about the commonplace book, which rhymes so well with the newspaper and the installation as a whole. Seeing that reminded me of the concordance project that you installed at Ohio State University (VERSE [2011]), and these forms of writing that are texts but not necessarily literature. They structurally replicate your own installations. We can start to think of your practice as a commonplace book that winds up having this core concordance where words or elements get repeated.

Hamilton: That’s so true. The core vocabulary of the work repeats but the condition of each project draws forward the spine elements—language, touch, material—into new relationships.

Both the commonplace and a concordance are woven accretions. The structure of a concordance, setting a text into a non-narrative order, creates word and phrase repetitions that I love.

Given the length of the subway walls at the World Trade Center site (CHORUS [2018]), this song-like cadence of repeated words is especially evident. Like that early cross writing in the Brontë letter. I am drawn to seeing textile processes where words and lines replace yarn and thread.

It may seem simple—but threads crossing, words crossing physically make visible the crossing that constitutes thinking—this crosses that crosses this crosses that and soon you are across the room in another thought and universe. Something is being made at each juncture. It is fascinating how replete our vocabulary is with textile metaphors, even with the remove most people have from actual textile processes.

Rail: Roland Barthes writes that the text is a tissue of quotations. In the French, text and tissue are etymologically related. And then, of course, it being Barthes, and me being me, and you being you, we would then think about the way that paper is made, and that it’s a matrix too, and that it’s tissue, and it goes on and on.

Hamilton: Exactly. Our thinking is connected to the materialities that we surround ourselves with, and the words we use to name and understand those things. Words are materialities as surely as cloth.

So often, I’m asked, “What do you want people to get? What do you want people to take away?” How do I answer that question? Because there is no answer. Just as a work’s making is woven from many parts, so is its experience by someone else. That experience depends on the day, the light, the weather, and each person’s own associative path and response. There is no answer.

I love making work in response to a place, the experience of working on site over an extended period of time. Every project brings me into another world, takes me outside of myself. The gift is the worlds I enter and the people I meet. It may be only one crossing—but recognition exchanged in that one crossing can be so consequential and moving. Like working only one evening with the beautiful women in the Song-Geet choir. In the back and forth of the collaborative process they wrote a new song, one they thought they might sing at all their concerts, and that song now inhabits me. Something happened in the crossing that wouldn’t have otherwise happened. These crossings, these little eureka moments are what make life. A condition is made for the work and the work makes the condition for these crossings to happen. The same is happening around the readers booth where volunteer readers not only read but sometimes cross with visitors in meaningful conversation. I might be quite shy to ask for help or try to meet someone for myself, but it is somehow different when the help I am asking is for the work, is outside myself.

An invitation to work in a place like Salts Mill is a gift. Being there I found conversation, trust, and the conditions that make making possible. How lucky is that!