Grand.
So I started the livestream to
YouTube live. And we're gonna start
the presentations for
Social Network London.
One of the things that I want to
just reference is
that the times that we're living in
are incredibly urgent.
They're incredibly powerful.
They can be incredibly difficult.
(slight echo).
And
a lot of artists are working
in sites of
intense, precarious situations
with very vulnerable people.
Or we're trying to figure out how to
even do the work, or
we're working in ways in which we
are not sure yet how it crosses
over with our artwork in terms of
like mutual aid and sharing.
And we talk a lot about
self care in the arts
around social practice and what
we'll talk about today is
how we devote ourselves
to a project's aftercare.
Particularly how we might think
about archiving and documenting
material while we're creating
material and
the presenters we
have today will explore that
before we start our presentations.
I would like to begin with a poem.
It is a Social Art Network meetups,
so I thought we need some art in the
room, so I bring a piece of
poetry.
I have been
feeling incredibly overwhelmed
by the civil rights
movement and anti-racist movement
that has been happening
and the incredible importance
of supporting Black Lives Matter.
And also the social insurrection
that has been happening in Chile,
which is the country
where my family is from and
I thought I would share a poem by
Pablo Neruda
called Educación del Cacique.
The Education
of The Chieftain.
It is about Lautaro, a very
famous Mapuche, the Mapuches were
the indigenous people of Chile.
And he resisted
the Spanish settlements
in Chile.
He was taken as a slave for a long
time,
and he learnt the ways of the
Spanish.
And when he escaped,
he used it to almost defeat them.
Education of the Chieftain, by Pablo
Neruda.
Lautaro was a slender arrow,
supple and blue was our father.
His first years were all silence.
His adolescence authority,
his youth an aimed wind.
He trained himself like a long
lance.
He habituated his feet in cascades.
He schooled his head amongst thorns.
He executed the essays of the
Guanaco.
He lived in the burrows of the snow.
He ambushed the prey of eagles.
He scratched the secrets from crags.
He allayed the pedals of fire.
He suckled cold springtime.
He burned in infernal gorges.
He was a hunter amongst cool birds.
His mantle was stained with
victories.
He perused the night's aggressions.
He bore the sulphur landslides.
He made himself velocity, sudden
light.
He took on the sluggishness of
autumn.
He worked with the invisible haunts.
He slept under the sheets of snow
drifts.
He equalled the conductive arrows.
He drank wild blood on the roads.
He rested treasure from the waves.
He made himself a menace like a
sombre God.
He ate from each fire of
his people.
He learned the alphabet of the
lightning.
He scented the scattered ash.
He wrapped his heart in black skins.
He deciphered the spiral thread of
smoke.
He made himself out of taciturn
fibres.
He oiled himself like the soul
of the olive.
He became glass of transparent
hardness.
He studied to be a hurricaine wind.
He fought himself until his blood
was extinguished.
Solo entonces fue digno
de su pueblo.
Only then was he worthy of
his people.
Something to think about in these
times of
resistance.
So we're going to begin
the presentations and I'm going
to invite Lucie
Wright, who's an artist and a
researcher.
And she'll be sharing some of the
work that she has been doing.
Hi.
Hi.
Huge thanks to Marcelo to invite me
for inviting me to speak today and
to everyone in the room for let me
be part of this first
digital SAN London
meetup.
As Marcelo said my name is Lucy I'm
an artist and a researcher
living in Leeds.
And I work for an independent arts
charity called Axis Web,
which is based in Wakefield in West
Yorkshire.
If you don't know about them, Axis
is an online membership organisation
dedicated to supporting artists
and profiling the work that they do.
We have a digital platform where you
can, amongst other things,
find out about opportunities that
are happening, connect
with other artists, share your news,
apply for one of our awards or
commissions.
We have films and podcasts
and access to a vacant space
properties or we did prior to the
lockdown.
And we also offer reasonably priced
public liability insurance in case
you were in the market for some
coming up.
Axis supports artists of all
genres and media, but in
recent years has placed special
emphasis on developing our
provision around Social Practice
in recognition of the fact that an
increasing number of our members
make work in social settings,
at least some of the time.
I've been working with Axis on and
off since about 2015,
but in a more formal role since
January 2019.
It started off working on a research
project, ATP
Knowledge Transfer Partnership with
Manchester Metropolitan University
called Models of Validation, which
was concerned with better
understanding the values and needs
of social practitioners, aware that
such practise has a set of different
requirements and conditions,
more gallerie based practise
or it can do.
And I also helped to coordinate
a parallel programme of commissions
and events called Social Works,
which run alongside that.
I have a Social Practice myself.
So this has been an amazing
opportunity to get more involved
in this amazing community of artists
and to help develop new frameworks
to support the really important work
that is going on out there right
now.
Not so, incidentally, Axis is also
partnering with Social Network.
At the moment, which is a massive
privilege. I'm so happy about this.
And we were recently fortunate
enough to be awarded some funding
to collaborate on a new project
called The Social Artery, and
also sort of a related
project, the Social Library,
which is going to be the subject of
my talk this evening.
So I should probably say before we
even began that the Social Art
library is very much a work in
progress at this stage.
It's the result of a lot of
different conversations that we've
been having over a number of months
now, both within our team Axis
and with some of the artists that
we've been working with as part of
the Social Works Programme.
And it's also something that has had
to be fairly, fundamentally re
envisaged on account of the
Covid-19 crisis.
We were just sort of on the cusp of
putting in a grant to
the Arts Council before the lockdown
happened and it was around more
face to face workshops and meet ups.
And we've had to take a step back
since the pandemic can kind of think
about what what's going to be
possible now and what our priorities
are.
Happily, this hasn't meant
abandoning the project altogether.
I think it's actually meant that
what we're gonna be able to do is
going to be more accessible to more
people than it initially was going
to be. So that's a really good
thing.
It is a really ambitious project.
So that's very exciting, but also
really scary.
So here's the idea.
Is it in progress?
Well, if there was a comprehensive
and fully accessible online
library for and about socially
engaged practise, what
if it included resources to help
make to help people make things
happen in their local communities,
as well as documentation of projects
that have already happened?
What if you could go there to find
out information about
Social Practice, books, articles,
photographs, films, whatever,
and you could submit stuff about
your own projects, too.
So your writings, your photographs,
your material ephemera,
whatever you want to tell the story
of the projects that you are doing
or have done in the past.
And what if there were a series of
residences and commissions that
enabled artists to get involved in
the Social Art Library as kind of
curators, as librarians
to kind of.
Yeah, you know, to really shape
how this thing works and how it
looks. And what if we could amplify
diverse voices within that and make
sure that everyone involved in
projects, not just artists, maybe
participants too, would have an
opportunity to tell their story and
have that made available and shared
with the rest of the community.
This is something that we have sort
of started doing in a in
a very,
very tentative sort of a way in the
past. We had a beta platform.
I'm going to try and share my screen
now to show you.
And this is very, very much
a kind of a.
A basic version.
It's not representative of what
the final thing we hope will be.
I'm just saying. Well, let me share
my screen.
Has anything happened at your end?
Oh.
Well, I think I have to change my
sorry.
Is anything happening?
No.
Yeah, it's on now.
Is it on? Excellent.
I'm sorry, sorry about that.
I'm still very much a Luddite.
This is the first time I've ever
done screen sharing and zoom.
So this is this not library that we
came up with. And this is this is
months old now.
It was just very much a Mock-Up.
And it's not including so many of
the projects that I'm talking about.
This is more kind of resources that
we know to be out there.
So I'll just very quickly sort of
show you a few of the features.
So we have a search
function here at the centre, which,
you know, we wanted to be kind of a
Google thing so that you can put in
a keyword term for something that
you're interested in and maybe find
a bunch of stuff that's going to be
useful for you for
what you're doing.
So I'm going to put in my a lot of
my work has to do with folk arts
and traditions. So I'm going to fit
in folk because that's what you can
bring up my stuff, isn't it?
Well, what word should I put it?
What would be a good thing to have?
Let's go with migration.
If anything comes up to the.
This would be embarrassing if
something comes up on.
So in migration,
something of mine does come up, but
let's ignore that one.
A bunch of different options come
up. So let's click on this
one. This is obviously someone
highly involved in the Social Art
Network. This is Eelyn's Project
Futurist Women from 2018.
And so there'll be a little bit of
information about the project
and then links to more information
and biography details.
There's also links.
They will hopefully be links to
other things that might be related
to this.
Similarly, there is an opportunity
to submit an entry, whether
it actually that we do not know.
So if you want to submit something
of your own, there's a form that you
can fill in to
give details of what it is that you
want to do. Is it going to be
a tool kit, a template, a video,
some research, whatever?
Again, we will kind of determine
what kinds of category we'll use
later on. But
we want to make it as interactive
as possible.
So that's just to give a kind of a
very
loose idea of what we've come up
with so far. But as I say, I think
what we have in mind is something
much more kind of, I think,
more interactive and that will,
you know, be more of a sandbox for
doing a lot of different things, not
just searching things like on
Google.
So why is
a library for Social Practice
important? I know that there are a
few examples of projects like
this happening elsewhere in
different ways.
But I think the reason why
a library of Social Practice is so
important to me is that it starts
with how the history of
Social Practice is told and who gets
to tell it.
I remember when I was starting out
as a social practitioner a few
years ago, but not that long ago I
found it really difficult to find a
lot of information about
Social Practice.
There seemed to be a special lack
of stuff from an artist's
perspective. So I knew about the big
cortex.
I knew about Grant Kester and,
you know, Claire Bishop and Nicholas
Borio.
And they they include the odd
examples of projects that were
happening. But they were often quite
high profile.
And there wasn't a lot that
reflected the kind of work that I
know to be going on.
You know, in the communities around
where I live right now, for example,
though, it just seemed very
difficult to find this out.
And there was even less.
That dealt with, you know,
showcasing the voices of
participants and collaborators in
these projects.
So, you know, I was at that time
working by myself in a community in
the north west of England making
work that kind of didn't look like
art and not really feeling like
I had a suitable terminology for
dealing with that or community that
I could tap into to kind of, you
know, to learn more,
to feel connected.
Social Art Network has been a huge,
huge
movement here in, you know,
to make more of that happen.
And that's really very exciting.
But the research that I've been
doing at Axis over the last couple
of years is kind of suggested that
there's still a long way to go.
Social Practice still lacks
visibility in the art world at
large.
And there's a lack of sort of
infrastructure for artists to
connect with each other in ways that
feel meaningful and kind of opposite
to the values that we have as
practitioners.
And at the same time as the need
for better visibility and the
channels to share what we do.
There's also this issue of producing
documentation of our work in
ways that feel meaningful to us.
And representative of the projects
that we're doing, it sort of strikes
me as one of those ironies of
Social Practice that many of us are
very skilled at
enabling other people to tell their
stories and share their stories.
But we're often maybe less good
at doing it for and about
ourselves.
And to some extent, this is just
part of what Social Practice is.
You know, we're often less
interested in creating objects
and images. We often work on our
own. We're often working
on a lot of things at the same time
or on a very low budget.
And producing high quality
documentation is kind of a step
too far. It's just, you know, it's
something that we don't have the
time to do.
I was saying to myself just the
other day about this, I'm working on
a project on my weekends during
lockdown. It's one of those projects
that I don't get that much time to
work on, but I'm doing the odd bit
here and there.
And, you know, I'm enjoying
it. It's going okay.
And I realised today that I've
actually documented nothing, nothing
whatsoever of it.
I have nothing to show for these
things that I've been doing.
And, you know, there is that thing
of if there isn't a photograph, did
it really happen here?
Of course it did.
But it would be nice to be
making more of a record of these
things, especially so that the
knowledge that all of us have as
practitioners can be shared with
each other. And it doesn't just sort
of go off into the aether.
So I think too often the
documentation that we end up
producing for the projects that we
do, especially for funded projects,
is something that we do for funders
more than for ourselves.
You know what we're doing? It's
demonstrate that we have satisfied
particular preset conditions
and not so much about, you know,
representing the work we've done in
ways that, you know,
in any way come close to matching
the experience of being part of that
project.
At the same time, a lot of that
information is what where it does
exist. There is some really high
quality. Documentation for sure.
Where it does exist.
It's quite dispersed.
We put it on our Web site.
But unless someone knows to go
to look at your Web site, how do
they find out about it?
One of the taglines I saw for this
event today was
our history, our power.
Let's build it.
And I think this idea is amazing.
And it sits at the heart of the
motivation for the station library.
We started drawing up a set of
principles a while back.
And one of the first things that we
put on the list was that the history
of Social Practice shouldn't be left
to academics to define
solely. It should be a shared
concern for all those involved in
social projects, from artists
to producers to the people
that they work with, the communities
that they work with.
And we really want the library to be
this open, an egalitarian space to
everyone to have an opportunity
to define, you know,
Social Practice.
And at the same time, we want to
interpret the idea of library really
broadly.
I think sometimes libraries are sort
of stereotyped to spaces that are
very rule bound.
They're very formal.
You have to be quiet.
Maybe you have to wear white gloves
to handle some of the things.
But actually, you know, I think it
was Marseillais who spotted that in
the Arts Council's 10 year strategy
document.
Libraries are the most far
reaching and utilised cultural
spaces in the country, which
suggests that, you know, there are
also these amazing community hopes
that sites for learning and exchange
that they're fundamentally
democratic.
So we want, you know, our library to
be a kind of radical space.
We want it to be, you know,
somewhere that is accessible
to all, where everyone not only gets
to to come and take something
from the library, but they get to
put something into it in whatever
way they wish to do that.
So having a library card to the
social library isn't just about
accessing materials.
It's about creating them and
organising them as well.
And we know that knowledge about
Social Practice isn't only contained
in written text.
It doesn't have to be a very
formalised document, something
really polished.
It can be something very ephemeral,
you know. And
and that's just as valuable.
We need some way of organising that
and finding ways to tell stories.
But we want to be very
open to lots of different kinds of
documentation styles.
It's an ambitious project.
So I'm gonna shut up now pretty
much. But I just want to say that
the we're just at the very, very
beginning of this project. We've
only just found out that we have the
opportunity to actually make a start
with this with some funding.
I hope you'll forgive the relatively
sketchy plan of it tonight,
but I wanted to share it this
evening with you, even though it is
in this very embryonic form, because
it's an open invitation to everyone
who is here tonight to come on board
with those and help us to shape
it. We want to make this as valuable
and as alive as it possibly can be,
and everything is still up for
grabs. So it would be amazing to
hear from you and to work with you
on this as we go forward with it.
Thank you very much for listening to
me and looking forward the recipes.
Thank you, Lucy. That's fantastic.
It's really exciting.
And actually, there's quite a few
libraries that are out there that
are being built.
And
I know that the Rufus's here.
Somebody attended to about a lover.
They're building as well.
And I think this is really the thing
with social and I think about the
work that we all do is that we
are working in tandem.
We are all supporting each other.
We all want the sector to thrive
because we are committed
to social
justice and community
development.
I'm going to very briefly just add
to Lucy's presentation,
though. Part of the library
is this archive.
But potentially this living space is
linked together with
Axis Web, which is
really there. They're they're
they're rebranding and the
redeveloping and it's, you know,
access web.
One of the places where
was the first places that artist
could have digital representation
before we all had like Web sites.
You know, they started in 91.
So it was quite a big deal.
But now they're engaging
in really a new way of thinking
of how to come together, which is
one of the projects
I'm working on them with.
And that is
how to
develop their
exchange platform.
And within that, something called
the social artery.
The social order, he is
going to be a space where we can
bring collaborative work online
because our medium is working
with people right now during the
lockdown.
We are divorced from our medium.
We don't have the kind of studio
practise where we can just go hang
out with our.
We are working mediums
because we are currently now
divorced from them.
It's very challenging.
So, again, something
that's prototyped.
I will share an image of it
so that you can see basically
what they are building here.
And you can take a look at.
And this is all again.
It's not even a beta version.
It's an alpha version.
I just learnt this before a beta
version of an alpha version.
And it's you know, it's a bit of
Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Docs
all mashed into one place.
So we'll look a bit like this.
It will be a place where you could
potentially run a course.
But more importantly, it will be a
place also where you can have
a live event or happening.
And that live event of that
happening
can be somewhere where we can do
what we are doing now, like this
zoom chat and maybe just drop it
into that space, but we can
maybe bring in a YouTube video,
maybe we can bring in a gallery of
images, maybe we can bring in some
sort of interactive whiteboard.
It is being designed.
More importantly, there's some money
to micro commission across that.
And that is something that will be
happening through Social
Art Network that offer through
access web. And that is fantastic,
as well as populating
the Social Art Library.
So some micro commissions there in
terms of being able to give artists
some funds to think about
how they might specifically
archive.
Can we talk about radical archiving?
How might that be different?
We don't have to have the answers.
We have a hive mind.
We can come up with those answers
together.
So we're trying to take advantage
of us being pushed into these spaces
to be radical and be creative, but
also be participatory.
With that.
Thank you, Lucy.
And we're going to
I'm going to pass the talking stick
over to Dom.
Thank you, Dom, for joining us from
the Museum of London.
Hi, everyone.
Thank you for having me.
Thanks, Marcelo.
And SAN London for for inviting
me. Very excited to be here for
a number of reasons.
Up first, because this is kind of
not my natural environment.
So I'm really, I'm really
interested particularly in the
conversation that we can have later.
And also because I've got lots to
learn from you guys, cause I
come from a museum perspective and
museums are
particularly and traditionally
quite behind
all the discussions about recording
processes and putting processes
at the heart of their or their
activity.
I'm just gonna give you a little bit
of background by myself
and then focus the next
10 minutes on on
about our covid collecting projects
from which I'm responsible,
together with other colleagues.
And then leave you with a couple of
provocations that I
hope that we can discuss in the
breakout room as a
consequence of the of these
sorts of questions that the
team at the museum are being
considering for
doing collecting covid.
And just some background of myself.
So I'm an anthropologist
by training. I've been
working a museum for quite some time
particularly museums holding
collections of ethnography and my
kind of lineage and my kind of entry
point into these discussions is
about the interest in
bringing the process of
museum collecting and of
collaborating with communities at
the heart
of exhibition and display.
This is one of the things that often
happens when
you're walking to an exhibition, as
you know, is that you see
objects and stories
almost completely decontextualised
from  the act
and processes of collecting.
And so my practise had been trying
to sort of investigate
what does it mean to work
with communities and collect and
research together community.
And now we can sort of integrate
these processes, this curatorial
processes into exhibition and
display.
But is fundamentally also about
something else, is fundamentally
about knowledge and sort
of considering museums,
not as the official
or authoritative
knowledge over
a particular subject, but also
is a platform where you can have
a multiplicity of voices.
And when particularly
the knowledge that comes from the
lived experience of communities and
individuals is not only
recognised, but also legitimised
alongside academic academic
practise.
So and basically,
I'm just telling you this to say
I'm kind of an ally on
the ideas and the urgency
of
collecting processes as
well as product.
If you allow me to kind of
simplification and
I think that we in the museum have
gots lots to learn from you and the
discussion that Lucy was
was introducing was very interesting
for particular ffrom this respect,
because we still also lacked the
tools to reflect very thoroughly
on this process,
and to showcase these processess
too. In my own practise I've
developed a particular collaborative
approaches with
refugee communities and
forced migrants
more in particular.
But here at the museum in London, I
lead a team of curators
and researchers that are
particularly concerns with
issues of contemporary collecting in
London. So we are working
all around London
in different areas of
the city to work in collaboration
with community to build that
sort of long term partnership, to
go to collaborate
with communities in the process of
collecting objects and stories, but
then covid happened.
So that happened And our work
that to be remodelled and
to be sort of
adapt to the changing circumstances.
And to some extent we're pausing
the traditional work of Curating
London and
we started to question as
a team what does it mean to
to collect
covid in a times of
personal
and collective crisis particularly.
So I just want to tell you a little
bit about the project the Covid
Collecting Project.
The Covid Collecting Project is
something that all curatorial teams
of Curating London.
They
curators are all involved in Its a
team of about six curators.
And each one have got their own
expertise, of course, which feeds
into the collecting projects.
But we have three main strands
to look at, are collecting
and sort of stories,
and not just in response.
These been of young people, but
we're also looking at digital
collecting and also material culture
and objects that are being suggested
via by our call out.
So you probably are aware that
the museum in London, alongside many
other museums, including Wellcome
Trust represented this evening, has
gone out publicly to
ask Londoners to come back with
suggestions. And we're going forward
it at the moment for this kind of a
very extensive list
of suggestions that come from the
deep experience of individuals.
But what I would like to focus
on this evening and particularly
two questions, one concerning
matters of voices and the
other, what an about a question
of urgency, which is referred to
in the title of the meetup.
When we
start to think about
how to approach collecting called
it, one of the first thing that we
did was to look back.
How are too.
What else do we have in our
collection that reflect past
pandemics? So
I think that not even the Wellcome
Collection possibly has got a strand
that is called  pandemic.
But you might be I might be wrong.
So we had to look kind of deep
at and see basically walk
the stories of past pandemics were
told were
told, and more importantly,
with voices where we
were hearing and this is
particularly important because,
I mean, as we learn from
from Camus and The Plague and
and all of that
in times of pandemics, in terms
of social
social unrest and
a deep structural inequality
come to the surface.
And the matter of reflecting those
voices into the
collection, there is a
fundamental ethical question.
So we also
had a little bit to an expertise
honed on pandemic we
you might be aware of. Like in 2008,
we had a pre-eminent tree
exhibition in a way that was called
Disease X.
What will be called long
term next pandemics illegal.
We three years later, we
phase that the response to the
question. So we had a little
bit of an institutional knowledge
or rather like a
finkin around what?
Well, how can we reflect a broad
spectrum of experiences?
And when I when I refer to voices
that if anyone about the need of
understanding what not art is
reflected.
I'm thinking particularly, but not
exclusively at
.. ..
.. Privilege.
And both our privilege
as a kind of
curators and white curators
of replicating particular views
or of of of
of the pandemic at particular
reflecting a middle class
sensibility, perhaps, which are not.
Which are generally
associated to ..
..
.. .. The museum as
as a kind of a cultural capital
thing.
And so one way of doing
this was to
start thinking about to
work with the communities, some of
the communities we already have
contact with to
administer the diversification
of voices independent.
I can give you an example.
We did in the last month, in
the month of May, which was also
the month of Ramadan, we
we launched three contemporary
collecting projects around Ramadan
and lockdown. So we worked
with extensively with young people
in the community to
to look at to
young Muslims to look at their
experience of Ramadan.
For most immediate projects, we also
looked at experiencies,
family of families, Muslim families
all around London, and also
worked in collaboration with
multiple mothe mosque in Hackney,
which was
a model.
Hackney was one of the few borith,
I believe was actually the only one
to allow exceptionally allow
mosques in the Poro
to perform yardarm play
in the evening.
The sort of the cult to pray.
So we recorded that as well.
And I let that go on in two minutes.
So.
So the second provocation alongside
the one of was voices should
be it could be represented
in a in collecting
a pandemic. Is that the
the other question.
Urgency.
The way I read the urgency in
the context of of of the title
order is actually
incom around conversations
of so-called rapid response
collecting.
And obviously the word
urgency resonates with the word
rapid and rapid response collecting
for those that no, not took
in in the museum jargon
is associated
to that cycle for collecting
that stuff to some degree
was initiated by
DNA a few years ago of
essentially,
you know, responding quite
literally in a rapid fashion
to event emerging
in an inner space
in this context in London.
My question is, will lots slash
provocation around?
This is up.
Can we really do rapid
response collecting in a landscape
of loss control, MA,
and completely
redesigning and reassessing
of individual and
collective identities?
And and what does he
mean to consider
very carefully the tactics
of of of
of response collecting?
And can this be as low
down?
Can it can we think about what sort
of like low food version
of rapid response collecting that
can mitigate
the sorts of
ethical challenges of responding
so rapidly to something like a
pandemic?
And I was to stop that
because I'm aware that probably have
gone off over time,
but I'd be very, very happy to
pick up some of the provocations
in the break room and answer
and any other questions that you
you have about the project.
Great.
Thank you, Donm. That was fantastic.
Lots to think about.
And really
good systems to learn from,
especially the idea of rapid
response collecting while we're
thinking about our own practises
and how we can be engaging
in.
Potentially radical archiving.
I will pass the baton
over to George.
Thanks, George, for coming.
Thank you much. Hello and thanks for
the invitation. It's great to
be with you all and discuss a bit of
my work.
Welcome collection.
And to give you a bit of context
about my background, I'm a curator
and writer primarily in
contemporary art, and I'm more used
to kind of working with
commissioning and exhibition making.
So I feel like I've probably been
quite a different kind of
perspective.
I was invited today to talk
about my work on the Joe Spence
estate, which I've
been involved in on and off over 10
years, and how I met much originate.
So, yeah, I've
I've written a text which I'm going
to read out, and then I'm just going
to try and show my screen and show
you some pictures of Joe Spences
work for those of you that don't
on aware of it.
Yeah. And it should take about ten
minutes. So let me try.
Showing my screen.
Can people see this?
Is that Marcelo?
Like I
say, artists like painting him,
Edward said something to me along
the lines of I want to own space an
institution, not rent it.
I'm paraphrasing from memory, but my
understanding of what he meant was
saying was that invitations
are fine. But until the work of
black artists is properly archived
and collected by national
institutions, there's little actual
progress.
I'm reminded of hermit's words when
reflecting on today's theme around
the agency of collecting socially
engaged and political artworks.
And I've been invited to speak in
light of my own work on the Joe
Spence estate.
So to give you a bit more context
here, I co-curated Joe Spence
and Oreet Ashry Misbehaving
Bodies at Welcome Collection 2019,
a project. It was originally
initiated by the curator Babo
Rodriguez Manyas
and I helped to archive Spencer's
estate in 2012 2013.
And I've worked on shows that space
of our Tiran Richard s tune.
In the seven years since then,
Spences work has become increasingly
visible and acquired by public
institutions.
And I wanted to use this text to
briefly reflect on Spences
work in relation to her own
strategies around archiving
and the possibilities and problems
that this poses institutions.
So Spence was a photographer active
from the mid 60s to her untimely
death in 1992.
A worker dressed in justice and
feminist concerns and a
most significant work that with a
treatment for breast cancer in 1982
and advocacy for alternative
treatments, her work was
direct, critical and often very
funny, using humour to disarm
the spectator and address traumatic
themes.
She sent it to her own body, putting
herself into the picture to use
herself as a kind of nexus
in which to politicise sickness and
explore themes of visibility
through the lens lens of gender,
ageing and class.
Her practise is myriad and complex,
and I urge you, if you haven't
already, to spend more time with it.
Spencer's a documentary, photography
and a later works, which constitute
particularly mainly performances
to camera as a form of therapeutic
practise, which were made in
collaboration with Rosie Martin.
I think can be seen as a type of
canta archives documenting
histories and stories that typically
remain outside the gaze
of the photographers attention
illness, divorce, mental health,
labouring care.
These are subjects that systemically
written out of the archives of
institutions that are marginalised
and silenced and spens
tones. I forensically on these
subjects.
It's important to state that Spence
never saw herself as an artist.
She didn't use that term.
She called herself a cultural worker
and saw her work as educational.
Her work was typically shown in
libraries and community centres.
And she often laminated the works
to strengthen them so that she could
post them through
through to people in the postal
service.
And I encountered many letters in
the archives with Spence complaining
about her work coming back damaged
for tea stains.
And Spencer's work has become
incredibly valuable in the last 10,
15 years. It was never really bought
and sold on these terms while she
was alive.
There's a certain messiness and
eclecticism to the work, which
I would argue is very much parts of
strengths, that Spences strategy.
Photographs are printed and cropped
at different scales, the same.
Jipé is in separate works with
alternative alternate titles.
The photographs are also an
addition. And she went with a
team of collaborators often,
and it's very difficult to ascertain
who took the photographs.
There were no contracts, only verbal
agreements and her archive.
When I first encountered it was just
piles of photographs, negatives and
scrapbooks.
It's very difficult to tell the
difference between the work and the
research and the space between
life and labour was continually
blurred.
Which of the estate now is being
dispersed?
And it's interesting to think that
Spences work is now split between
university archives at Birkbeck
Galleries and museums such as the
V&A, Tate and Welcome Collection.
Charlena Heath.
He's a archivist at the Rice and
Institute, of which they have quite
a lot of the Spens material, now has
called it a kind of anarchist
archive and argues that Spences
archival approach, very much
embedded in a practise as an artist,
is is a feminist strategy
for Spens. The image becomes like a
body and it changes over time.
She returns to create remixes.
It meaning is kept in flux
and Spense undermines the notion of
photographic veracity.
So there's no sense of a singular
truth is kind of a multiplicity of
truths.
Much of the work that you now see
is also printed posthumously.
And this is actually often, again,
quite a deliberate strategy
with her collaborator, Terry
Dennett, tasked with printing the
work from her deathbed.
And there's something about her
trying to defeat the finality of
death. I think in this in this
process.
So I think Spences archival
approach is incredibly important.
And preamps many of the digital
strategies that we now encounter
with images being used as kind of
units of exchange and as a way of
creating communities.
Spence saw her work really as a seed
planted within the viewer in
the name to kind of empower them to
take their own photographs.
And her wish was that everybody
would have a camera in their pocket
to document the good, the bad and
the ugly part of their lives and
narrate more kind of authentic
experience.
And I think, obviously, this is kind
of come to fruition.
But you could argue whether the
ubiquity of the cameras led to
the kind of emancipatory effects
that spending Spense intended.
Suspense is practise.
I think it's influenced a generation
of artists have utilised social
media platforms to record,
publicise and distribute their work
publicly, archiving in real time
and networking their concerns with
their peers.
I think this collapsing of space
between the private and the public
and the opportunities afforded
to people to amplify their voice is
incredibly important, but not
without its own issues.
These platforms are, of course,
centralised and commodities spaces
built on models for harvesting as
much data of people as possible.
I think what's interesting about
Spencer's practise is that we have
to kind of broaden the frame to see
altogether the writing, photography
and teaching and in the absence
of market and institutional support
in her life. These energies were
really a necessary form of self
archiving, with Spence
playing the role of producer,
curator and critic all in one.
Of course, much has changed now.
Her work has been cited by artists,
academics and cultural
practitioners.
But what really surprised me working
on misbehaving bodies last year
was the amount of health care
professionals that knew the work.
There was a lot of people in the in
the broader community that knew the
work, if not the art world itself,
which I think has changed.
The artist and writer Felicity Allen
who's someone else I've worked with,
claimed the term 'the decoeuvre',
which I think is a really
interesting word.
And she uses it to articulate a type
of political and feminist practise
that sits side.
They often sits outside of
institutional archives.
And this word by Allen is
used to kind of articulate
an Hoover that is not recognisable.
It shifts direction and isn't
supported by the market.
So artists often have to take up
positions in education environments
and community spaces.
Take on a salary.
The work is not the work's not often
collected and it's very difficult
institutionally to ascertain
clear create trajectories because
many of these artists often take a
break from exhibiting.
These histories tend to be archived
in people's memories, stored under
people's beds, out
out of date technology and
distributed, I think, through oral
histories, community collections and
online networks.
So what to make of Spencer's
work? Is it a counter archive
or an anarchic archive?
I think it's a desoeuvre, that
leaves many questions unanswered.
I'm working on the estate after felt
much more of a detective than a
curator talking
to previous collaborators and other
artists trying to piece together
Spences motives.
I was left with conflicting
statements and a lot of writing
by Spence that was very
contradictory and she would often
change your mind about things.
So her practise is not how I lived
life, taking twists and
turns, shifts in direction and
changes of heart.
And I think this is a really
important thing to remember as an
institution and as a curator that
nothing is ever that clear.
So how do we move from accusatory
revisionism that tidies up a
person's life and motives to a more
interrogated model that speaks back
to the archive through different
voices?
I wanted to end with a few few
questions that I've been kind of
thinking about, which could
be used as provocations for the
discussion.
So how do we use the logic of Joe
Spences archival impulse
and maintain that logic in an
exhibition or a project?
How do you represent the story
or a story or the stories?
When the archive is fragmented and
contested and not always coherent?
And I know what I think a lot about
is when and where do I put my own
voice or leave my voice out of the
story?
That's also outside of my lived
experience in different ways.
What is lost and gained when
Spence's material enters and
institute institutional setting?
And I think this is the kind of
question in terms of a lot of the
work is being discussed tonight.
So really, it's kind of about the
possibilities and dangers, I think,
of this work coming into
institutions and how we kind
of protect the original
logic of the work and the stories
around it.
So, yeah, that's my kind of brief
presentation.
The whistle stop tour of my work,
which I spent.
And I stop and.
Stop sharing.
Yeah, great.
Thanks for that, that's fantastic.
I was speaking with Newt on,
which is a typical kind of issue we
come upon nowadays, isn't it?
So we're going to
take a couple of questions
and a lot of that is partially
for the benefit. We're going to go
into our kind of open
forum breakout rooms.
But that will be
private.
So we will not be streaming that.
But I think for the benefit of
YouTube live, I think would be
really nice to share some of the
conversation here.
Feel free to meet your mike.
There was a really interesting
conversation that took place in the
chat that I'd like to highlight.
And Ashley asked a question
to Lucy and Ashley, If you're happy,
maybe you could or are comfortable
with it.
Maybe you could just ask it here in
the room for Lucy to answer, because
I think would be really good for
everyone.
That would be on YouTube.
Like to hear it as well.
Hi, can you hear me okay?
Yeah, yeah.
No, I was just asking to lose the
only one we wish had a kind
of baseline for the project she was
working for.
Kind of what material would be
moderating for it?
Socially engaged.
You know, has had forgotten the
ugly. And it really had just to
defer some kind of key point.
Mervat.
There was some kind of what's the
limit? What can be put on the.
It's a really, really good question.
Thank you for that.
And it's one that we don't have a
kind of fixed answer to
at this stage.
I would say that.
Four.
As a starting point, I think
we will want to try to include
as much as we possibly can.
So I don't think we'll have
a I don't think it'll be a
moderation in the sense of kind of
whether we whether we believe it to
be good enough quality or not.
I think there'll be a baseline will
be that it can.
I think my baseline certainly
and we haven't completely agree with
my baseline, would be that there is
something an asset of some kind
is submitted to the library.
You have some artefact.
What that is, I think is
is really open to to
the artists who want to take part in
this to to kind of to help us work
out. The obviously is an online
archive prior
to this when we were thinking of
more of a face to face.
I've lived, you know, meatspace
library. It maybe could've been
different. We were thinking, could
you get a car and, you know, could
get a building in there?
No, probably not.
Whatever it is has to be seen that
we can digitise and get online.
Other than that, I think it would be
great for there to be some short
text or story
to explain the meaning of this.
So I always use the example of, you
know, the Museum of Broken
Relationships in Zagreb, which
I think is a really great example of
how we would kind of envisage this
working, where you were invited
to share an artefact
that represents a broken
relationship in your life.
You can submit a shoe or a bus
ticket or a mirror or a
bicycle, whatever that might be,
as long as it comes with a short
story that explains why you've
submitted the item and what what
your what what your story
was.
And I think that's kind of the idea
that we want with this project, too.
So you can submit something very
ephemeral, you know, as long as you
kind of explain why it's relevant
and what that relates to in your
in your practise. I think that's
fine.
But, yeah, I think in terms of
moderation, I think that would only
happen if if something contravened
our kind of codes of conduct.
We will certainly have, you know.
Regulations of things that
would we would not accept.
But not on the grounds of quality,
only on the grounds of it not being
material that we would want to share
publicly.
Very thank you.
Anybody else have any questions
or comments?
Give a shout out.
Feel free to unmuted and
share something.
We've got
this also from YouTube live,
a conversation happening
about unpacking the distinction
between collecting objects
and artefacts.
A key distinction here seems to be a
difference between collecting
objects and artefacts in times of
trauma as opposed to stories.
And in response to the social
library, you need a new
word.
You know, they're talking about a
museum or library and museum is a
collection that's already accepted
as art in a library's distribution
point. What's already accepted as
art.
So really interesting kind of
provocations and things to think
about.
Anything else that anybody wants to
throw out there.
Yeah, it's a question for Domm,
really.
I was recently I
I
attended the lecture online.
By the way, is the cool
statistics group.
And it was part of history,
X.
And it was a collection of Daito
kind of use of data to
kind of become a tool to fight.
At the time, it was a particular
group that was looking at
people who were being evicted from
their homes.
And a question came up for
Dr Rachel Cohen.
He's not mentioned on the
on the description of the lecture,
which is about fighting the data,
which is quite interesting.
And she talks about how
when you're collecting data, the
idea of collecting data from people,
how could you turn it, say that you
call your allowing people
to general allowing or
enabling people to generate their
own data.
And I'm really interested in that
idea. And I didn't really know.
And we talked about this idea
of people having things
in their pockets and contacts and
dates, you might realise that.
So I just wondered if you had any
thoughts about that.
Really? Right. There's different
ways
of researching writing data.
And there's lots of really.
Thank you, Carol.
And I probably
I've got more, more, more
questions than answers.
I'll tell you what we and I've
been thinking about in relation to
too corporate.
I mean, there is some
we at some point we were very
interested. We were fingered by how
can we collect, for
example, or
data
around mortality rates.
Now, the mortality rates affect
different social demographics
differently.
It is a da...
It's an object itself to reflect
kind of contemporary conversations
around that disproportional
death will of BAME
individuals
in the during the pandemic.
There is like a like technically
there is lots of problems
around even collecting
already formed data.
Because you you end
up into a lots of questions.
Wrong GDP are.
And I'm not even starting going
there about ownership
of retention of individual
theodores for archiving.
And so is a kind of a minefield.
So but one way around it
is to have obviously
artistic intervention or
an artistic an artist
responding to
data and visualise data
without necessarily relying
on the contents of two
dataset.
So I have gotten lots of.
Yeah. One thing I personally was
interested in, in,
in and I'm still pursuing
is to think about.
For example, we you could collect
data for an
mobility's on city mopper
to track down how many
journeys didn't happen or
wheel out the sort of mobility
around long and changed during the
lockdown.
That kind of thing.
But again, my apologies.
I'm not able to give you the
very sort of
a very tough to answer some this.
Thank you.
And I think we'll just do one more
question from Sophie.
Sophie, are you happy to share?
That is quite is quite a good one.
Very provocative.
And I think it's related to
stuff that's come up around this
idea of the good, the bad and the
ugly.
It's been mentioned a couple of
times.
And I think I'm
not sure who it's directed to
see. But it could be to anyone and
know anyone out there.
And the the issue of
positive spin that
an archive
might provoke or
provide.
Not saying that's all bad, but what
if. If.
How to avoid that, how to tell
stories that
don't necessarily always want to be
told told. I guess loosely sort of
connecting to your other each other
sort of hat in terms of
the fate work on failure.
And
for me, these are questions
connected to the question of
governance and not only
which voices are being collected,
but who is.
Making decisions on a on a kind
of structural governance
level for these
institutional spaces or,
you know, artist run led spaces
which are, you know, equally
full of fraught with hierarchies
and power relations and
things.
Yeah, that's another really, really
good question. Thank you for that.
And again, I probably don't have
anything very satisfying to to
to say at this point.
I mean, I hope.
I hope this doesn't sound like too
much of a weak answer, which would
be the at this point.
The aspect of the library,
which is where we are inviting
people to submit
documentation of their projects in
whatever form that that
ends up being,
I see is very much a user generated
activity. So it's an open
invitation.
I hope to to anybody involved
in social projects.
So I guess initially
it will primarily be artists who
who will you know, who will submit
projects potentially for this.
They've already finished.
But I think an aspiration that we
have is that the facility
that we provide on the Web site has
a kind of a way to document
a project in in
in real time.
So there's a kind of private space
where you can be documenting what's
going on. And that project may
have multiple users
who each get to submit their own
kind of.
Things to this to this kind of
documentation package,
and only some
of those things have been made
public.
You know, it doesn't all have to be
immediately made like this can
be determined
as as the project goes on.
But I think we're really, really
keen that there are these multiple
stories even within the same project
where possible, and
that it could even theoretically be
a space where artists and
the people that they're working with
can stay
in touch, can keep it, can can be
negotiating the kinds of stories
that they want to share together
rather than it being the artists.
Does this maybe after a project
is finished? Probably for the
purposes of evaluation.
I don't know quite how that will
work yet. But I think that's
certainly something we want to think
about.
And yeah, and ensuring that that
week we do get a diversity
of different voices, different
projects. Recently, we're going to
have to think really hard about in
terms of how we share this
invitation, how we how we get that
out there.
And if anyone else has any
thoughts about
us, George, to jump
in.
Yeah, my mind's going in lots of
different directions with that one,
really, because,
I mean, the governance of the place
I welcome collection is so
big. And you have the library, the
archive. And I sit within
exhibitions.
I just think of it in relation to
exhibition making.
And I guess we do so much
consultancy work and bringing people
in with lived experience.
And I feel like my role as a curator
is to kind of create platforms
was for as many different kind of
diverse voices as possible to
speak. Backes the material often
actually disagreeing with the
archival material.
You know, I often think, does it
what does it mean to kind of
to exhibit?
Is that a form of advocacy?
You know, working with the Joe
Spense material, it was highly
contentious. A lot of people didn't
actually agree with what you were
saying.
So I wanted to kind of create more
rounded kind of narratives
to kind of roundtable conversations,
working on an extensive public
programme and
sort of removing my voice.
So opening up conversations
rather than kind of having having
writing essays around the show.
But I think it's important to just
kind of constantly question
how we collect and why we collect
and who were collecting for.
Again, Welcome is such an extensive
collection, which is with a social
history collection where artefacts
and artwork sit alongside
manuscripts and books.
It's all kind of treated in the same
way.
So I think it's quite an interesting
it's an interesting example of a
connexion, whereas my background is
really within kind of working with
artists and working with artworks
to really start to like
it all. It gives me the mandate.
I was thinking the artwork gives me
the logic to kind of go and speak to
them as a Mandarin
answer. But it's it's a big
question.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, it's this is
this is a space that's not really
about finding solutions
or being the experts.
It's really a meet up for us
to all come with ideas
of how we might unpack the ways that
we work and the ways that we are
living today, which is an incredibly
complex time.
I'm going to stop the YouTube
livestream. I'm going to put us into
breakout rooms to be able to kind of
speak more about this topic in a
smaller way for a very short amount
of time. And then we'll come back
into the Zoome if you're on the
YouTube live. Thank you for joining
us.
And we will have
the monthly meet ups the third
of the month.
And this is for Social
Network London.
They will all be streamed on YouTube
like that, just the presentations
and it will be captioned afterwards
that is ticketed just to keep the
space small on Zoom so that we
can go into the breakout rooms and
have more kind of complex
conversations around it.
But also there is
a shared document that is on the
Social Network website for
the London to meet up and
each of the meet ups will have their
own share document.
A lot of chats have been happening
both on YouTube live and on Zoome
people and sharing links already.
Really incredible stuff.
A lot of times these things get
lost. We're having a conversation
about medical archiving.
We're going to put that all in that
document. You're also invited to
edit.
