A brief reflection on PESZTA and the role of the project manager

Lately I’ve been thinking about Virginia Woolf. I’ve only read two books of hers, but they reverberate in my mind still. Mrs Dalloway, about an upper class housewife, which is to say socialite, who’s about to throw a massive party, and Orlando, about a charismatic, gender-bending, era-traversing, ageless being. In Mrs Dalloway and Orlando, Woolf explores memory and the palimpsest of time and history, capturing that ceaseless internal monologue and temporal overlaps that are always running through a writer’s—or a woman’s?—waking mind.

I guess in the modern day, Mrs Dalloway would be running an uppercrust gallery. She’d be an elite project manager. Someone who’s always busy planning something and juggling the expectations of others, but never has any time for deep investment into the thing she’s planning nor in interrogating other people’s expectations. Every task and emotional burden is simply and immediately assumed by her.

Well, Peszta (or PeSZta) was this madcap whirlwind of tasks to complete and objectives to tick off. It was this one-day festival of artisan markets and cultural happenings in Kampung Attap, supported by PNB 118, ThinkCity, and Yayasan Lim Yee Hoh, that happened on August 27th, a couple of weekends ago. In the modern day, Mrs Dalloway would also be forced to engage our existing matrix of online marketing through shares and likes, propagated by Instagram. Helping to coordinate PESZTA, at times I felt out of control, spiralling, like everything was happening beyond my grasp of understanding. Many times I lost my temper, got overwhelmed, and treated some people badly. The constant messaging, notifications… And given the emotional structure of The Zhongshan Building arts hub, how people just pop by your office with some issue or merely to say hi… all these distractions, assumed by me immediately and without reflection, accumulated into a tension within the body. A tension that, unchecked by proper rest and realignment of my capacity for attention, can (but thankfully didn’t) explode into something damaging. With such an amorphous and ambiguous and fluid role as being a “project manager”, I felt the urge to stay on top of things but this urge contrasted with an inner tug that told me to honour my own feelings, my own time, and especially everyone else’s.

Well, actually, all things considered, I don’t think I did that much or worked particularly harder than (or even at the same level as) the rest of the team for the PESZTA project. But the role of project management, a role that doesn’t come easy to me, feels so loose as if it were merely the management of multiple distractions; what’s beneath it all? If you forced yourself to stop and pay attention to something, what would your mind focus on? I was aware of many events that were happening at the time, and of the festival programming, but I didn’t actually know what was going on at all. And I mean “knowing” in the deep sense of the word, not merely knowing what’s “going on”, but to actually know what is happening, what you are investing energy into, and why you’re doing it. Every feeling is real, even if not all of them are “valid”; some feelings aren’t articulated or developed, but they arise from somewhere and during the preparations for Peszta I wanted, more than anything, the headspace to understand and locate the place where these feelings and questions were coming from.

Maybe one of my most gratifying contributions to Peszta was in social media content generation. I took pictures, I kept the Instagram Stories fed, and I wrote captions. All of these things are ways of capturing souls and emotion for distant viewers’ consumption, and every time I posted it had this sense of finality as if a part of my/your/other people’s soul had been cathected, spliced and pinned into data. So you need to adjust and make sure the angles are just right.

The still centre. The tumult of daytime demands an immediate retreat into the quietude and forgiveness of nighttime. That’s also what smoking and writing are for me: they slow down time. They still the blurry image. These are the pockets of time when the mind is given a reprieve to search for meaning and, hopefully, fulfilment within it all. After nearly two weeks of reflection, I’m happy to report that my findings are the same, which is that I love The Zhongshan Building and I love my friends. I still greatly admire what every individual within this building’s community is trying to achieve in their separate projects.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I was asked once, by S, what I do to “return into my body” at the end of the days. I never thought about it until then, but I guess I write and smoke. I try to make jokes too to smooth out some of the edges. I’m no more than a speck of dust in this universe and I feel sorry towards everyone. But the obligation/burden that I feel towards all my wrongdoings and shortcomings towards others is, thankfully, not so great that it becomes some monstrous narcissistic depression… I also have enough of a perspective to feel grateful to everyone for going through this God-given life with me, for struggling alongside me and shoring up the energy (when I can’t) to be present for each other, and to forgive our lesser selves. Like Orlando, everyone is just this shimmering, hazy ghost constructed of variegated memories and influences, some conscious and some hidden. The question has and always will be how to honour that, the facets of others that you know (professionally and personally), the facets that you know you don’t know, and to let the knowing be loose enough that it allows room for the wildly unexpected.