This five-week programme led by curator Louise Shelley invites participants into a space of critical discussion and exchange around collaborative and community art practices.
The programme considers ways to re-think established norms, values, roles and relations in order to produce new forms of collective knowledge. We'll ask:
- how can we imagine new forms of living and working in common?
- how can we put these into practice with groups, cultural workers and other individuals?
- how can we respond collectively to the local, social and political shifts in our neighbourhoods?
Some prior knowledge, experience or interest in community art practices and a willingness to contribute actively to the sessions is recommended.
Course Structure
Week 1: Introductions
Examples of collaborative and community art practices will be presented to open up discussion around the key questions and issues at stake. As a group, we will begin to establish our ideas, interests and positions going forward.
Week 2: Methodologies
Based in Tate Exchange, we will explore group work exercises drawn from dialectical methods of education, affective pedagogies and consciousness-raising. We will map our own positions, knowledge and skills to think about entering collaborative work as embodied practitioners.
Week 3: Artistic Practice
Together with artist Rehana Zaman, we will consider how we bring people together to work collaboratively and why. Zaman's practice is concerned with the effect of multiple social dynamics on how individuals and groups relate.
Week 4: Histories and Solidarities
This week we will meet offsite at MayDay Rooms, an archive, resource and safe haven for social movements, experimental and marginal cultures and their histories. We will be joined by Marissa Begonia, Community Organiser for The Voice of Domestic Workers, in a discussion and group exercise around the reactivation of histories of social organising.
Week 5: Sustaining Practices
This final session addresses the care, energies, commitments and practical resources needed for collaborative work. How do we sustain this work, learn from, evaluate, and support each other? What futures can we imagine and what practices in common would we like to construct and join?
Biography
Louise Shelley is a London-based curator. Current projects include Structures That Cooperate at Cubitt, a 15-month programme departing from the organisation’s position as an artist-run cooperative. Previously she was Collaborative Projects Curator at The Showroom, where she ran Communal Knowledge, a series of projects activating approaches to critical engagement with the Church Street neighbourhood. She is on the board of The Voice of Domestic Workers and City Projects.