COLLABORATIVE ARTS PRACTICE

A blog about making process driven artwork by a group of artists who are working at the forefront of collaborative practice.

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Calling artists working in social art, socially-engaged art, community arts, collaborative arts and social practice at all stages of your careers to come together and share work at the:

SOCIAL ART SUMMIT An Artist-Led Review of Socially Engaged Arts Practice in the UK

1st & 2nd November 2018, Sheffield Convened by Social Art Network

Over two-days artists from around the country will come together to share practice, showcase work and explore what it means to be making art through social engagement right now.

The Summit will showcase the work of artists from around the UK and beyond testing the ground for launching a Social Art Biennale in 2020. Artists, activists, community groups, curators, students, academics, funders and sectors working in the arts and social realm are invited to join the conversation through a series of events at Site Gallery and other venues around the city.

Founded in 2016 by artists Eelyn Lee and R.M. Sánchez-Camus, Social Art Network [SAN] aims to build an international artist-led network; expand dialogue and develop agency in the field of art and social practice. Sheffield based artist Ian Nesbitt is guest co-convener.

Major partners include Site Gallery, Peckham Platform, a-n, University of Highlands & Islands and Middlesex University. 

CALLS FOR EXPRESSIONS OF INTEREST IN PARTICIPATION

We encourage interested parties to consider and respond to the question what does it means to be making art through social engagement right now?

Proposals can take the form of exhibitions, presentations, seminars, performances, participatory workshops, walks, new media or any other form we haven’t yet imagined! We are actively seeking new ways of sharing practice and process while encouraging discussion so please feel free to suggest new ways of doing this. We are interested in forms that reflect practice and are keen to represent diverse modes of engagement.

Ten years of severe austerity measures together with the wider divisive political climate has triggered a sense of urgency for conversations around the impact on communities and the art being made with and within them. We are interested in questioning, what kind of society do we want to live in and what roles can artists play?

By issuing this open call we are seeking to reveal the practices and ideas that are out there at this moment in time. The artist-curators will select a range of contributors to reflect vital perspectives on race, class, gender, sexual orientation, disability, age and national status, including areas where each of these might intersect.

Proposals should include the following information: 

Title, Description (250-350 words), Visuals (max. 4 references),

Biog (max. 50 words per presenter), contact info email / mobile / website

Type of participation (talk, visuals. dialogue, film, workshop, one to one, meals, etc)

Proposals should be sent via email to [email protected]

Submissions extended deadline: 10.00am Friday 7th September 2018

FAQs:

WHAT IS SOCIAL ART PRACTICE? ‘Social Art Practice’ and ‘Socially Engaged Art’  are contested terms for an art medium that focuses primarily on human interaction and social discourse. These terms describe work in which engagement in social situations is not only a part of the process of the work as it develops, but also where the social interaction itself is at some level the art; an aesthetic in itself.

Artists working in this field may co-create their work with a specific audience or propose interventions within social systems that inspire debate or catalyze social exchange. Socially engaged art typically aims to create social and/or political change through collaboration with individuals, communities, organisations and institutions.

WHAT IS SOCIAL ART NETWORK? In 2016 artist and filmmaker Eelyn Lee was selected by Artquest to convene a group of artists with socially engaged practices to form a Peer Forum at Peckham Platform. These sessions, with twelve artists, triggered urgent conversations around the need to de-marginalise the practice, leading to the idea for the Social Art Summit.

In 2017 Eelyn and fellow peer forum artist R.M. Sánchez-Camus co-founded Social Art Network (SAN), a base from which to realize these ideas. Eelyn and Marcelo are working collaboratively to co-convene the Social Art Summit; build a network of artists with social art practices and develop the first ever Social Art Biennale. SAN aims to build agency for artists and communities making art through social engagement whilst developing new audiences for the work both nationally and internationally.

Social Art Network has been developed through the volunteer labour of artists interested in social practice.

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT? In mid-September a selection panel of six artist-curators will meet to select up to 20 artists from the Open Call who will be invited to present their work at Social Art Summit. Selected artists will be contacted soon after that.

DO ARTISTS GET PAID? All selected artists will be offered travel expenses and accomodation* if required, and will also receive a complimentary Summit pass. There is a small materials budget.

*Accommodation will be offered through an Artist’s B&B scheme, whereby local artists will host visiting artists and delegates in their homes.

*Travel expenses will be capped at £80

In the interests of transparency, as the budget for Social Art Summit currently stands, 59% of the total cash income is going towards paying artists and their associated travel and accommodation costs. Further fundraising is ongoing. The Summit has secured funding for this project but stems from the volunteer labour over the previous two years of artists participating in the Social Art Network.

The spirit of the Open Call is seen as an extended Peer Forum where artists can come and share practice, meet new collaborators and be part of a growing network of artists whose work involves modes of social engagement. By expanding the network we aim to drive up the critical discourse and raise the profile of social art practice.

WHAT IF MY PROPOSAL IS NOT SELECTED BUT I WANT TO ATTEND THE SUMMIT? A second release of Summit tickets will take place at the end of September. If artists have bought tickets during the first release and their proposal is successful the price of the ticket will be reimbursed.

HOW CAN I FIND OUT MORE? If you have any questions about the Summit or SAN, please get in touch via email: [email protected]

Travelling instructions, our local accommodation list and information about the Summit will be posted to our page: www.facebook.com/socialartnetwork

This Open Call was updated on 24th August to clarify the scope of the Call and disseminate information on fees and the selection process.

Image Credit: Ian Nesbitt, EK-UH-NOM-IKS [text, image, blog, exhibition, event, zine] 2016. Courtesy Ian Nesbitt

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Social Art Network launch

The Social Art Network has been developed over the course of 2017 and launching in 2018 with a new showcasing of socially engaged art works from across the UK, to be held at Site Gallery in Sheffield 1st & 2nd of November 2018. 

One of the important findings from the Collaborative Arts Peer Forum was the importance to establish a network for artist who are working in social art practice. Though the mediums are varied it was clear from the peer forum that the shared challenges, learned methodologies, and skills sharing was an important part of the dialogue between artists. Social art practice is just beginning to get attention in the UK but artists who are working in the field, often practice in isolation, without critical reception, recognition, or common spaces in which to convene, share and exchange. 

In order to address this issue, the Collaborative Arts Peer Forum continued to meet after the peer forum was finalized with the intention to formalise the conversation and create a space where a larger dialogue could ensue with artists across the UK. In the challenging socio-political times the country finds itself it, this initiative became even more crucial. While developing the ideas in 2015 Assemble won the Turner Prize, further highlighting the importance & emergence of the practice in the UK. 

Led by artists Eelyn Lee and R.M. Sanchez-Camus the peer forum was consolidated into the Social Art Network, an artist-led organisation that would take on board developing a pilot national review of social art practice in 2018 with the proposal to found the worlds first Social Art Biennial. 

The work has reached a successful outcome with a showcasing and symposium of social practice hosted by the newly expanded Site Gallery in Sheffield in autumn 2018. 

Social Art Network will be developing a call out to artists, activists, cultural producers and thinkers in the next coming months and bringing together creative responses to the times we live in from across the UK. More information coming soon…

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SHIFT, What Worked, What Didn’t

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.

Images: 1. Lost Characters by Close and Remote 2. Lost Characters by Close and Remote 3. Seek Courage by R.M. Sánchez-Camus & Isa Suarez 4. Designs in The Sky by R.M. Sánchez-Camus

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Process as Artwork

Having agreed the theme of this month’s discussion at the previous session we were all ready to share a project, experience or piece of work in relation to the notion, ‘process as artwork’.

Annette Mees volunteered to kick off the discussion by sharing some questions around her current project, The Almanac of the Future. Annette is bringing together groups of 65 and 15 year olds across four continents to co-create a ‘radically optimistic’ almanac for life over the next 50 years.

Simon Terrill kicked off the second half with an introduction to his commission from the National Portrait Gallery. Simon is collaborating with a group of Yr10 students from a school in South London to make a large-scale photographic work inspired by NPG’s collection of portraits of people with links to Southwark.

By discussing just two projects in detail we were able to take the conversation to great depths, on detours and back to the work again. Here’s a glimpse of a few thoughts that emerged.

Making Process Public - Why Do It and Who For? Annette posed this as a question she is currently grappling with. The process of making the Almanac of the Future is so interesting, epic and multi-layered we spent quite some time discussing it. I mean... as well as 65 and 15 year olds she’s collaborating with Live Futurists and talks about things like, ‘pushing the construct of the future in to a public space’ ....what’s not to like?

With such a rich process, it’s inevitable to have a degree of anxiety around the big book living up to the journey of it’s creation or as Mees asks, playfully provoking her own process, is it merely ‘a MacGuffin’ to entice out the narrative? Watch this space....

Process & Form So if you choose to make your process public what form does it take? Is it a series of photographs, video clips and quotes organised on a timeline on the project website or can it be something more than that?  Is it possible to find a form for the work that honours the process of making it or in some way contains the language of it’s journey?

We talked about Jackson Pollock’s action paintings in relation to these questions. Pollock found a form that expressed the narrative of the making of the work. We see the movement of his hands through the marks on the canvas. The creator is evidenced in the work and the physical act of painting is captured and brought right in to the frame.

Process as Chaos / Mess as Narrative We talked about editing and framing.....If through the edit-decision process we choose to leave evidence of the process in the artwork, what bits stay in the frame? Back to drawing and painting, some of Frank Auerbach’s charcoal self-portraits took him seven years to complete. We see evidence of his process - the rubbing out, remnants of old lines - the work contains the narrative of it’s making.

We often read the messy lines; the torn edges and the distressed as evidence of narrative whereby chaos contains story and history. When designing a process we often leave space for chaos or moments of the unexpected. Is this because we secretly know that here lies the key to discovering a new language? The holy grail of a form that honours it’s process?

Simon Terrill talked about leaving space for moments of chaos when making his large-scale photographs. Public spaces and crowds are often subjects of Terrill’s work. Partly constructed but without the means or desire to completely control the environment, chance actions play an important role in the image.

Bow Cross by Simon Terrill,  2011 © Simon Terrill Process as Artwork Returning to the title of the discussion in it’s purest form we should also ask, ‘can the process of a project be an artwork in itself?’ It could be said that Assemble won the Turner Prize for the process they put in place for Granby Four Streets. The dilemma of what to exhibit in a gallery was easily overcome in this instance as one outcome of the project is the Granby Workshop, a new social enterprise manufacturing handmade products for homes which was cleverly launched through the Turner exhibition. A cultural outcome which could be ‘gallery-ized’ and monetized but rather than lining the pockets of a private art dealer, the funds from the sale of the work are re-invested back in to the Granby community project.

Most of us in the Peer Forum are in the business of designing processes to collect, seed, shape, nurture and challenge ideas. We build structures to journey through and endeavour to remain open to the unexpected. This is arguably the same as any creative process, it’s just that some are more tried and tested and steeped in a tradition. When talking about some of the craft-based processes employed in things like marbling, making tiles and furniture at the Granby Workshop, one local maker says, 

“The fact that it is a process you...have to follow a certain structure to get an end result but even when you follow that process it can still be a surprise at the end of it”

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In Praise of Peers - Disphotic

Ramillies Place street sign in the Peer Forum meeting space at The Photographer’s Gallery. – Today marks the final session of Peer Forum, a monthly mentoring session I’ve been organising since last year in conjunction with a group of nine other photographers and supported by The Photographer’s Gallery and Artsquest. Peer Forum provides a space …

Interesting article from Lewis Bush who’s been organising the Peer Forum at the Photographer’s Gallery.

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Why I’m Setting Up This Peer Forum

- by Eelyn Lee, Artist

Since graduating in Fine Art in 1990 I have been making work through collaborating with groups of people - some of whom have been young, old, artists, parents, unemployed, school-excluded, fishermen, coastguards and single mums. Places where I have made this work have included old mills, warehouses, housing estates, schools, youth clubs, streets, homes, theatres, parks, canals and estuaries.

Over the past 25 years my work has been called live art, performance, visual theatre, installation, film, video, moving image, community art, education, participatory, collaborative, creative learning, co-produced and now socially engaged - and with this new label comes new kudos! Never before has ‘my type of work’ been so en vogue and who’d have ever thought a community project in Liverpool would ever win the Turner Prize?

Given the renewed interest in collaborative working it seems like a good time to reflect on some past work, interrogate the new and contemplate the future. I am also at a pivotal point in my practice whereby I am currently transferring creative processes developed over twenty years to a two-year investigation in to improvised filmmaking. Using methods of devising I am collaborating with local people, artists, actors and musicians to make a feature-length film set on the Thames Estuary.

As I journey through the project on the estuary I will be sharing my experiences with the forum and through this blog. I am also interested in questioning how the wider economic and political climate plays a part in causing ‘socially engaged practice’ to trend.  

I have invited the other artists and guest speakers to join the forum because I feel we share some ways of working; we all have extensive experience of making work through collaboration and the mix of personalities will make for stimulating and dynamic conversation.

I am looking forward to learning more about everyone’s work and interrogating ideas around process, collaboration and engagement.  

Images: Above top - From Fools Gold by Sacred Cow, a performance group making site-based performance work in the 90′s - co-founded by Eelyn Lee and Ruth Dale. Above bottom: Thames Estuary, photo by Eelyn Lee, 2015