Taking part in this activity has allowed us to do some good, unhurried thinking at several levels. On the most zoomed-out plane, we’ve been part of a national network of artists grappling with some similar ideas, but skewering them from different angles and in their own ways. These similarities reinforce this sense of togetherness. On a local level, we’ve been able to talk to more people and invite more people in to the ongoing social practice research/sharing stuff we are interested in. Surprisingly (to ourselves), it also allowed us to zoom in to a more introspective, personal level and work out exactly why we are keen to operate in the ways we do, and now we’ve worked that out (sort of) we can share this and expand back out again. “Why bother” is a really good question to ask yourself, and if you have a good answer – carry on.
As we strolled in late 2020 we sketched out a more cooperative and perhaps tighter-knit approach to whatever peer learning group/social practice forum/Socially Awkward spin-off. One that solved the problems of us being the two dominant decision-makers, was accessible to people at different stages in their practices and provided a core group of shared responsibility that Kitt and I would get a lot out of bouncing ideas around in. The classic flattening of the accidental hierarchy. The Socially Awkward NewBridge project has revealed a gulf between the people that had been practicing for a longer time and had the experience to hoover up commissions, and those that were earlier in their progression and perhaps finding commissions harder to come by (but no less enthusiastic, full of insight, wild new ideas and thinking unencumbered by received wisdom).
We decided to approach some artists we’d worked with before who had expressed interest in sharing/learning opportunities.These were Sarah Li, Beth Stead and Sofia Barton. Instead of doing yet another dreaded Zoom meet up. We thought it might be fun, relaxing and useful to chat in different ways. During the end of 2020 and the start of 2021 Sarah and Kitt had a long frosty walk and chat. Kitt and Beth talked and made some paper sculptures together at Kitt’s studio (masked up and socially distanced!). Sofia and Kitt had a variety of conversations on the phone centering around a couple of projects they are working on together. The topics were pleasingly wide (from how to write a social practice CV, to what is the value of copyright in participatory art, to why plants make humans happy) and (also pleasingly) very much confirmed our thoughts about there being a desire for a social art mutual support/ enthusiasm group the North East.
After the individual chats we then did do a group Zoom. As we are so keen not to continue “running” social art meet ups, we just asked a lot of questions about what people need and are interested in. We also talked about what we need and didn’t make any definite decisions about what to do next, which felt a bit uncomfortable, but very positive.
Kitt and I never positioned ourselves as experts. The world is run by the people who show up as they say. We have simply been ‘showing up’ for 10+ years and slowly got asked to talk about our work more. Because we actively seek out support and peer networks of learning we have often put our hands up to say “I’ll help organising this or that” and then sometimes forget why we are organising (to give us a space to share different burdens of care, ways of working with people and stuff that goes wrong) and instead spread ourselves too thinly, try and be all things to all people and end up imparting our knowledge and experience in a top-down way despite saying “this is a peer-structure, what we do is over to you”.
Both of us are totally at ease with the idea we have a certain amount of experience and understanding of the mistakes and successes we’ve had and are very keen on sharing what we’ve learned, but if we are setting the agenda we are likely a) shutting down other lines of enquiry and possibility and b) cementing ourselves as the reluctant figureheads/dictators.
What we have used the Artists Make Change opportunity for is zooming in and focusing, Now we are keen to put the energy we were beaming out in a scatter-gun way into the artists closer to us, to jointly run the support structure, so it can then proliferate along more equitable lines. The wider group of people who’ve previously come to North East meet-ups will be invited back into this new form.
To finish I’ll loop back to the ‘unofficial’ activity Kitt and I work on together at the confluence of our interests and practices, because we think revealing how this works might be helpful. In short, we chatted a lot about the kinds of work we like to do, and honed in on the similarities. We did a bit of work for fun (ie unpaid) to develop some ideas, and thought about applying for a pot of money to tackle all the strands of stuff we are interested in, in the form of a fixed, finite, manageable set of activities. This was unsuccessful (in practical terms we didn’t secure money, but in conceptual terms it was trying to shoehorn too many things together). Instead, an alternative presented itself, that also made sense of the fragmented micro-commission approach that limited funding has forced on those distributing the pounds. We decided on an over-arching, ongoing set of research interests and bit them into chunks, to be tackled in bitesize nibbles by getting little bits of funding here and there. This was semi-accidental, and semi-planned. It took the constant pressure to come up with new new new off, as we could look at the bigger, interconnected picture, but each funded snippet was coherent enough as its own thing to make sense to those allocating money (as they don’t often like funding stuff that’s already happening or isn’t distinct). So we’d get £500 here to do a toolkit, £350 there to test out some workshops, £100 here to write an article and all these little pots come with very few strings – just do the work and share it. The stuff we have used these pots for – Social Practice Surgeries, social art-meetup networks for the North East, interviewing people about innovative commissioning approaches, re-thinking the active usefulness of archives and toolkits – are all interconnected as the broader body of research we conduct together, but also can be broken down so enable us to access the mini-pots. It’s the stuff we’d be doing for fun, for free if we didn’t get money, but we’d be doing it much slower, and without deadlines we’d be sharing less. Because we do get a bit of money here and there (it’s mainly Kitt that writes the applications – thanks Kitt!) we can save some up and pay other people to get involved too. I don’t think this is a totally amazing model for the future, but I wanted to share it as it shows how you can have a long-term, rolling plan of learning and divvy it up into more manageable bits that conveniently fit criteria for those sub-£1000 micro-bursaries so beloved of institutions, and can be used as paid (at least in part) professional development that might fall by the wayside, but is so important not just for the individual, but feeding this knowledge back into the support structures and communities of practice.
