With the initial part of my travel bursary I made trips to Scotland and the North West and spoke to artist-led spaces including The Telfer Gallery , Queens Park Railway Club and The Pipe Factory (Glasgow); Embassy Gallery (Edinburgh); Cross Street Arts and The Old Courts (Wigan); and Islington Mill & The Penthouse NQ (Manchester). Overwhelmingly, all of these spaces identified with what I was asserting – that regardless of how their projects manifested, they were nonetheless driven by a utopian urge to provide space, community and conversation, further artistic practice, and exist despite the financial and organizational burdens of running a small project space. None of the above had any designs to become commercial entities, or to give up. Holding space was at the forefront of everyone’s intentions.
This became of key interest to me – the creation of community and holding of space. Concurrently, I had continued by long-term research interest in utopian thinking into feminist utopian science fiction. It struck me that there was a parallel between the use of fiction and art to propose an alternative, and the use of project spaces to offer one. Even if neither impacted the world on any apparently large scale, the act of holding space is still political act. I began to run a collaborative public research group in London – at my own short-term artist-run space, Green Ray, and later at Res. Gallery – to explore these ideas. The idea was to build on what I had observed through my work on The Shadow Archive in terms of the holding of space to collaboratively enact and explore ideas. I sought to extend the importance of conceptualizing another way of doing things by also utilizing the future as a tool, a kind of blank slate, upon which to project these desires. Through collective study of films, art works, music, literature, art practices and texts, we began to explore:
– Marginalised ideas and practices of the past being essential considerations in thinking about the future
– The future as a tool of fiction for asserting our desires and articulating what is missing or ignored in the present;
– The possibilities of future thinking from the position of ‘the other’.
During this time the following website had been created http://archivesoftheartistled.org/. I felt that it was performing the same function as I had intended with The Shadow Archive and so I sought to shift the focus of my research with the other half of my travel bursary. I felt that active, collective research was more useful and urgent than duplicating existing work.
