Notes from the tenth of October

Four days ago, coaches in fourteen places across twelve countries opened a room, hung twenty photographs, and sat in a circle. Toronto had several rooms; Houston, Rome, Delft, Berlin, Brussels, Vienna, Istanbul and Dubai had one each; hosts in Oman, Malaysia and Australia ran theirs in places still being confirmed for the public list. I was in Madrid, watching the clock and the messages. The hosts' written reports are not in yet, so these are not findings. They are the notes of a curator who spent the day on the phone, and they are mostly about what the format was built to hold and where I expect the reports to tell us it strained.

The first thing I wanted to know was whether the format would hold at all. A silent walk followed by a coaching circle is simple to describe and easy to break: one talkative person, one host who cannot bear the quiet, one venue with music leaking through a wall. The messages that reached me during the day were short, and none of them described a room that had come apart. That is not proof. It is the first thing I will read the reports for.

The shared minute of silence is the part I most want to hear about. I had pictured it as a moment of connection across time zones. Sitting in Madrid, I suspect it was something more local for most rooms: the moment when a circle that had been talking for half an hour became a single quiet room again before dispersing. That it was also happening elsewhere was known rather than felt. If the reports confirm that, I think it is fine, and possibly better than what I imagined.

The sequence is the second thing. The twenty images are ordered in four movements, and the design predicts that a room's rhythm changes around the twelfth and thirteenth pictures, where the third movement begins: people stop walking and start standing. We asked every host to note where that happened in their room, if it happened. If the answers cluster where the design says they should, the sequence is doing its work. If they scatter, the sequence needs rethinking before January, and I would rather know.

Where I expect strain. Timing, first. Forty minutes for twenty pictures assumes nobody queues at a station, and the larger rooms will have had queues at the early pictures and a rush at the late ones. The fix I am leaning towards for January is a cap on the number of people per room, with a second room opened rather than a longer slot. Second, the twentieth station, the one with no image. If it is hung like the others, people will walk past it looking for the picture. The install guide should ask hosts to set it apart, with more space around it, and I want the reports to tell me whether the hosts who did that saw people stop.

Third, the ending. Circles that are going well want to continue, and a host who has just watched twenty strangers speak honestly will be tempted to let them. I think the ending is part of the form: a circle that knows it will stop at a set time speaks differently from one that might go on. I am not going to make that a rule before the debrief. I am going to ask the hosts who ran over what they would do next time.

The next edition is 31 January 2027. Between now and then, the hosts' written reports come in, we read every one, and the facilitation module gets revised from what they tell us. If you hosted a room and are reading this, thank you. The format is yours now as much as mine.