Meet Olaf Baldini
A Glimpse into the Life of a Scribe for Societal Transformation
This month, Presencing is featuring Olaf Baldini, who lends instrumental support and insight as a scribe, digital designer, and in many other roles. Olaf has lived in Berlin for 19 years and has been self-employed since 2003. Before that, he studied graphic design in Vienna, Austria. When Olaf first arrived in Berlin, he started to work as a junior graphic designer, first in an online-startup and later in a design studio with a focus on print design.
Transcribing Memories: Building Community through Digital Archives
Olaf described one of his most impactful web-related collaborations as working with a historical institute in Berlin on a project funded by the European Union. He was tasked with developing an interactive online archive showcasing historical artifacts.
“The archive included cultural and historical data from all over Europe,” said Olaf. “We tried to make it accessible for everybody, starting off with the First World War.”
The project was called Transcribathon and aimed to expose stories hidden inside people’s attics and drawers: diaries, letters, portraits, and other relics owned by previous generations. In the online archive, people could share their stories and interact with the artifacts. According to Olaf, one of the major problems was that no one could search for anything and computers (in that day) could not transcribe handwritten documents. In addition, many of the documents were written in “Sütterlin,” a German handwriting that is not used anymore and barely known by current generations. He helped design and implement one of the first platforms where crowd-sourced transcriptions could happen.
At first, the audience was mainly made up by historians, however, once the Berlin-based institute began holding events in schools, younger audiences became engaged. “Of course, 1914 or 1918 was a really long time ago for them,” Olaf said, “but the pupils suddenly got really interested because they found, for example, diaries of 16 or 17-year-old boys who were fighting in the war.”
As the students worked on transcriptions,“there was something about finding spelling and grammatical mistakes that made the history really close and personal,” Olaf said. They suddenly could relate to the authors of their age and with that, established a feeling for the past.
Finding and Following the Sparks
How did Olaf find his way from digital archives to the Presencing Institute (PI)? On the one hand, the Presencing community embodies many of the same elements as collective archiving: digital platforms, distributed participation, story-gathering, and linking the past, present and future.
And on the other hand, Olaf’s wife, Angela Baldini, offered a direct inroad. “In the beginning,” Olaf explained, “I thought, ‘what is she doing at Presencing?’ The activities sounded very relatable. And then again, a little bit strange for me.”
Olaf’s first contact with a PI event came in 2010 when he participated in a Presencing Foundation Program (PFP) in Boston. “At first, I didn’t plan to go to the event,” Olaf said. “I went with Angela just to travel around. And then Presencing said, ‘Why don’t you join the PFP, because a few people didn’t show up?’ I thought it was a good chance to get to know what she was doing and understand her better.”
Olaf continued, “Nowadays, I realize I did not understand much of Presencing’s work before I actually participated in the program. I really remember the solo work and I think that what I’m doing today is partially informed by that very activity. It’s hard to explain, but there was a spark that had lived within me for quite some time and showed up that day. And then later, it really showed up later doing a scribing course by Kelvy Bird.”
In 2012, at the beginning of Olaf’s involvement with PI, he mainly helped Angela set up events, including other Presencing Foundation Programs in Berlin. He designed certificates, signs, brochures, name tags and other items needed for in-person programs and events. Early on, he also took a special interest in Kelvy’s scribing work:
“I was always fascinated with what she was doing,” said Olaf. His curiosity led him to enroll in a scribing course with Kelvy where she asked the participants to stand in front of a blank paper and forget about everything.
“Kelvy asked us to just ground yourself and not think of anything specific, but rather to see what’s coming, and then draw.”
Olaf recalled clearly that “I felt actually the same feeling that I had felt in 2010 at the Boston PFP.”
Scribing in the Digital Realm
Olaf remembers a particular summer meeting in Berlin where Angela Baldini, Julie Arts, Adam Yukelson, and Simoon Fransen were all thinking about how to build the u.lab. Angela and Julie had an idea: “Why not include scribing as an element of courses which are held solely online, not just the in-person courses?” Olaf remembers this moment as the beginning of his deeper role in the PI community. In addition to helping with the website, he explored his more creative side through scribing.
Over time, Olaf has developed a particular style of scribing, both online and offline: “I use brushes and start with water to make it lighter… and there aren’t a lot of letters or words. It sounds a little bit weird, but I try to let the meaning come out of the paper rather than the other way around.”
He rarely uses dark colors at first, but rather allows the water and lighter colors to guide him to a certain point. Then he lands on a word and starts to cast it very lightly. “If something is coming up more often,” Olaf explained, “then I give it more importance by highlighting it or even darkening the background around so that it slowly emerges. I’m very interested in different layers so that people might also find their own connections between the words.”
Even with more than five years of practice, Olaf still feels jittery before scribing sessions:
“I’m always really nervous before I start. And then if it works out, I feel okay. I can forget about the notion that it has to look pretty or be a certain way. I don’t even have to completely understand on an intellectual level what a group is talking about. I just need to let it go and work with the colors. There are always these little moments where suddenly I feel very comfortable.”
Fast forward to November 2019, when Olaf worked with Arawana Hayashi, his wife Angela and Ricardo Dutra Goncalvez to do a social experience at BUFA in Berlin: “We were trying to do a map with Social Presencing Theater work and at the same time do scribing with very few words. And there was not much speaking going on.” Olaf and Angela had prototyped this approach shortly before in a u.lab hub meeting.
“It’s funny,” Olaf reflected: “If five years ago, somebody would have said I’d be standing here, trying to scribe while other people don’t speak, I would have thought yeah right! But what I’ve realized is that it’s not ‘I have this feeling’ or ‘here’s my perception of things.’ It’s not about my work. It’s about what people do with it afterward.” The more Olaf scribes, the more astonished he has become at what people make out of the visuals, and what is created as a collective.
In other words, scribing captures what people were feeling or thinking and the connections that were being made in a particular moment. Through the practice of resonance, participants contemplate an image in silence, and then share their observations through the prompts “I see…” “I sense…” and “I feel…” Resonance allows people not only to access deeper levels of perception in the moment, but emotions, thoughts, and ideas afterward.
The practice of “resonance” allows participants, in Olaf’s words, “to remember a process not on an intellectual level, but rather on an emotional one.”
The Scribing Road Ahead
These days, Olaf is hovering around the question: “What is it that I’m actually trying to do here and how can this evolve further on?”
One way the work is evolving is that Olaf wants to create more time for scribing. After more than 15 years of work on website design, Olaf is taking a step back from his web design-related clients. “This was a huge move, but I had the feeling that I had to act now because otherwise, it’s easy to get involved in too many projects.”
Olaf hopes to go deeper with the scribing work, to find more connections to Social Presencing Theater, and also learn more about voice analytics and social poetics.
He is still grappling with scribing as facilitation: “It’s one thing to scribe and try to translate what is happening into images and words. But talking about the result requires different perspectives. If you’re standing there and trying to observe and listen and then suddenly you have to verbally make sense of the scribing, it hardly works.”
“My goal is never to explain or to show,” Olaf said. “The goal is to leave some freedom in there for people to make their own connections. The most interesting part is what people do with it.”
Video of the interview:
Thank you to Hannah Scharmer, Rachel Hentsch, and Sarina Ruiter-Bouwhuis for their video and copy-editing support! For more stories on practitioners of societal transformation, follow the Field of the Future blog and subscribe to the Presencing Institute Newsletter.
