#collaborativearts

     We here at Sundown have been busy this past month!  We held auditions for our 5th Annual Short Works Festival, “WE ALL (STILL) MAKE MISTAKES, THE B SIDES: A DRUNKEN MIXTAPE”, cast all the pieces, and jumped right into rehearsals.        This festival is running for 4 weekends, and is a wonderful mixture of original short plays, devised movement pieces, and spoken word.  There will be drama, comedy, poetry, tennis racquets, green beans, a clown, and so much more!  This is not only a great opportunity for so many people to come together and create art, but also a fantastic opportunity to support over a dozen original works.        Now, I think it’s time for some teaser photos!

     What’s going on here?  What’s that clown doing?  What’s the significance of the tennis racquet?  …is that a lizard eating a dorito?  And what the heck is with the green beans?? 

By R.M. Sánchez-Camus in collaboration with Sophie Mellor

Our current discussion in the Collaborative Arts Practice Peer Forum explored the theme of SHIFT in the process of creating socially engaged art works. This topic came up during the discussion around Process as Artwork, and trying to create a language around value and standards. As artists committed to both working in the public realm and developing an aesthetic output, there was a recognised tension in the responsibilities that this role incurs.  We asked ourselves, are there times that the process is phenomenal but that the outcome isn’t what was expected? Or, are there times that the process is challenging, but then the outcome is phenomenal? How do we begin to define what worked and what didn't work? And more importantly how do we recognise when a shift in process or product is necessary to better fit the situation that we are working in. A key word that came up and created tension was failure. What is it to fail, and how do we define failure? For some artists present this was not part of the lexicon of their practice, which is why a more holistic approach of the work shift was agreed on. But other artists embraced the notion of failure and accepted its importance in the experimentation process and making of art works. Without succumbing to semantics what seemed important was to dedicate a session to tackling this topic head on, sharing our insider perspectives on ways in which our methods of practice may have needed to shift in order to fit what was working or not working during a project.

Sophie Mellor and R.M. Sánchez-Camus (Marcelo) both presented works in which the topic came up and lessons were learned.

Sophie presented the work of Close and Remote, a collaborative practice with Simon Poulter. They describe their work as responding to history as a dynamic form of representation. Close and Remote work with the everyday, marginal or peripheral as starting points and make site & socially responsive works. Sophie presented an example of shift in the project Lost Characters:

“When Simon and myself talk about embracing failure in our practice, what we're perhaps more correctly referring to is embracing an experimental and transactional space when we collaborate with other people. Our projects are carefully structured with clear outcomes that we acknowledge at the start will change shape as we interact with our collaborators. We try to build 'shift' into our process from the beginning.

In 2014 we undertook a commission for Sefton Borough Council exploring the council's photographic archive with seven different community groups from around the borough. The archive contained an amazing set of photographs documenting the extensive bomb damage suffered by Bootle during the Bootle Blitz of World War Two. We ran a session with one of the community groups to make up a loose film narrative based on the Bootle Blitz photos. For the next session we created a live film set, taking the group and two improv actors on a pre-planned route walking around some of the sites from the Bootle Blitz images. The improv actors became characters created by the group, and we filmed the improvised story as well as the behind the scenes devising. What we didn't foresee, or take into account, was that one member of the group had a strong and tragic family story associated with the Bootle Blitz and one of the streets we travelled down during the session. Her expectation had been that we would be exploring the history of the streets we were walking down in that session, rather than the more playful and fictional story the improvised piece turned into. That, coupled with that fact we ran out of time to do a finishing round of feedback at the end of the session, led to some negative postings on Facebook. Our shift in this instance was to quickly redress the situation when we saw we had created expectations of a different outcome, and had also not given that participant the opportunity to share how she was feeling with the group. We held a separate feedback session, watching the edited footage from the improv session, and talked directly about the Facebook posting. The participant was then able to expand on what she had been expecting and to also reassess what had happened during the session. We went on to work directly with that participant on her family story and it formed a part of our final video installation for Lost Characters. So I guess you could say we were open enough to act on our initial 'failure' and address it head on which resulted in shift for both the project's final outcome and in that participants experience of the collaboration.” Sophie Mellor from Close and Remote

I presented an overview of two current projects and two projects from 2015 and discussed how the learnings and challenges from the past two projects have informed the methods in my current two commissions for 2016. The first work presented was Heath Spark, the culminating outdoor event that was the result of a 6 month Neighbourhood Residency at Heath Park Estate in Dagenham, Essex. The second work was Seek Courage, a multi-location site intervention commissioned by People United. Both projects were created in collaboration with Isa Suarez, another artist participating in the Peer Forum. The neighbourhood commission in particular was a challenging residency in that the commissioners wants, the residents needs and the placement of the artists on site did not benefit from any pre-formal agreement or set-up. As a result we spent half of the commission trying to establish a base on the estate to work from, while connecting to residents. This meant that the core of the art making process was condensed into half the amount of time allotted to the residency. In the end we produced a work around parkour, drumming, spoken work, song and fire.

Engaging residents in the process proved challenging and part of this was due to the focus of the grant and how we worked in regards to that demand. The work was funded through the Arts Council’s People and Place fund, channelled in this instance through an organisation created to disseminate these funds in the borough called Creative Barking & Dagenham. The purpose of this specific residency was not based on the creative output of the artists involved but on the social engagement it may produce. This is in line with what Claire Bishop has identified as an Arts Council’s policy that was developed under New Labour to be ‘explicitly beholden to social engineering, (and) using culture to reinforce policies of social inclusion’[i]. As artists dedicated to collaborative works, there remained a tension how to demonstrate that engagement. We were required to show the results of our work on the estate to fit the statistical requirements of the Council, for example the collection of postcodes (at least 500) and visitor figures. The affective quality of the work, which is always difficult to measure while simultaneously running the project, was of course not collected as this data is difficult to quantify.

On the other side of the spectrum was People United, who commissioned Seek Courage and whose vision is to ‘create a more kind and caring society through the arts’. They see their role as inclusive and work both as commissioners and producers. In this specific commission around the theme of courage, what was important was the levels of engagement with local artists in Ashford, Kent. People United saw us as artists leading the road in to a social network, which they then could develop and grow. The process of creating the work, though condensed due to time constraints, nevertheless had very positive feedback from participants. The challenge I observed was the lack of public engagement on the streets of Ashford by the general public to the performance and installation interventions. Five sites displayed works of performance, circus, sound installation, and skateboarding all framed within the courage context. Volunteers handed out maps to passers by with the locations of the work and information about the project. The main shift I wanted to explore as a result of this work was how to make that momentary impact more long term.

Shifting away from live performance and thinking about all of the challenges and learnings in the last two commissions I recently launched a new work titled Designs in the Sky, commissioned by Perry Barr Arts Forum in North Birmingham. Working with various community groups we co-designed large scale street banners to represent the area of Witton. The idea was not to shy away from both good and bad topics that may emerge. I also wanted to develop a kind of street intervention that was not momentary, but could stay up and last, providing a higher number of viewers. Live events are momentary and unless they are repeated like a theatre-run become fleeting fragments of time. Designs in the Sky went up displaying 15 community co-designed banners along Aston Lane and are to remain in place for a year. The permanence of this visual impact did two things, engaged with the participants who made the work, and remained on view for an extended period of time to community members to see the result of socially engaged arts practice.

The collection of these micro moments make a large network of activity that re-evaluates our notions of art and capital. What we value and how comes into question with who we are and why. As Grant Kester notes ‘our most meaningful engagement with the pressures exerted by capitalism occurs precisely through our daily lived experience at the intersubjective and haptic level.’[ii] The shift I was seeking in my work was exactly this, to allow the viewers an extended period in that daily lived experience, to grasp the result of collective action, the positive impact of community, and how the arts can bring a voice to our integration.

[i] Bishop, Claire. (2012) Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. London: Verso.

[ii] Kester, Grant. (2011) The One and The Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context.  London: Duke University Press.

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