Welcome
I’m back. And this time it’s serious summer.
I have successfully completed the book I mentioned when putting the newsletter on hiatus last Autumn – watch this space for more details but you can see now my name in the otherwise wildly impressive list of poets ‘forthcoming’ from Smokestack Books. Having delivered (as in given birth to) the manuscript, I have decided to devote some time to the newsletter. I’m going to start that fully in September – la rentrée, as you’ll recall – with a slightly different format but the same focus of things to help cultural and creative people and organisations work well and resiliently in and with their communities.
I will also be using Substack’s Notes a lot more as I attempt to get out of the habit of throwing good links and jokes into the failing septic echo chamber Twitter has become. So do subscribe and follow there. I’ll be using the summer to work out how best to use Substack, and I’ll need the encouragement subscribers represent.
To get me and you warmed up, and in the spirit of the holiday reading special, I thought I’d do a round-up of things I’ve written or been involved with that have been published since my last newsletter.
Tactics Tomato #12
As I mentioned I’ve been writing - a lot of writing, all creative I hope, even the business plan sections. Some is mentioned below. Some will be published in due course. Anyway, here’s a pomodoro playlist of favourite songs to do with writing and reading. (Which I couldn’t listen to while writing, ironically, as I can only write to silence or instrumental music.)
Thinking /
The Civic Role of Arts Organisations
Since 2018 I have been a learning and evaluation partner to the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation’s Civic Role of Arts Organisations Programme. Much of this work has gone into understanding the impact and improving how the programme worked, and has not led to external publications. But in June the Learning Report from the phase since Rethinking Relationships and the Foundation’s Inquiry Into the Civic Role of Arts Organisations, was published.
In the report I consider the impact of the programme, which can be summed up, reductively, as contributing to a rising tide of interest in and commitment to the civic, which now finds the sector at a point of potential and risk. Potential in terms of supportive policies, understanding and debate about practice. Risk in terms of co-option of a now mainly uncontroversial vocabulary and a growing field of practice, at a time of stretched business models and social demand.
Many ideas in the civic realm and the creative sector have moved from being seen as radical or even unthinkable to becoming generally accepted policy. Whilst it could not be said that the civic role was ‘unthinkable’ for many arts organisations in 2016, some practices highlighted by the Inquiry and the Programme felt radical back then. Turning a theatre into a foodbank? Letting local people decide on the programme with budgets? Orchards as artworks? Such ideas have gone beyond the socially engaged practice common in the last decade.
The question now is to what extent the Foundation could continue to expand the horizons of the civic, from feel-good participation to civic activism, and how to do so in an extremely challenging funding and political climate for organisations. Culture wars press in on programming choices, organisational structures and how events, public spaces and buildings are designed to be more inclusive. (Even the design and provision of gender-neutral toilets have become controversial in some places.) Brexit continues to make the European aspirations of many creatives more difficult, but no less vital.
I suggest five themes for the Foundation, and the sector, to focus on in the coming years:
EQUITY: From who is involved to how and why - how activist can the civic become?
CO-CREATION: What is specific to co-creation in the civic arts, and how do you do it?
GENERATIONAL SHIFTS: How is the sector evolving to a new mix of generations and frameworks/passions?
CLIMATE JUSTICE: What should the focus be - adaptation, mitigation, activism?
PARTNERSHIPS FOR PLACE: How do we build non-arts partnerships that sustain activity/organisations?
This marks the end of one phase of work for the Foundation, and the beginning of a new one. This will see the Lisbon and London offices working in an integrated strategic structure focused on Sustainability and Equity. The Equity programme aims to help to tackle inequalities in access to culture and in access to care, two key elements of a fairer society. This will include continuing to invest in organisations and people embedding the civic role of the arts in their work, developing the capacity of the networks to deliver peer learning and knowledge exchange, and partnering with organisations to explore how they enhance their civic roles, and how citizens can be directly involved in decisions. The Foundation will also work to embed the civic role into its own cultural venues in Portugal, the Modern Art Centre, the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum and Gulbenkian Music.
Slow Mobility
Last year I was invited to contribute the first of four volumes within a big European research project into artist mobility. The European Cultural Foundation, MitOst and Kultura Nova Foundation project included developing conceptual frameworks for mobility in culture (where I came in), alongside examinations of different perspectives, grants schemes and a scenario for what the authors called ‘slow mobility’.
You can find my paper in Volume 1: Mobility in Culture: Conceptual Frameworks and Approaches. The title, Roots, Routes and Rhizomes: Cultural Mobility and Local Communities gives a flavour of the paper. I connect studies of work by D6 and Museums Northumberland bait to the role international mobility plays in artists’ careers, and the false binaries of fluid and settled and rhizome and tree. I suggest three modes of internationalism, found in Future Arts Centre’s international projects:
Internationalism as Connection and Anti-Isolationism, Encouraging Exchange and Dialogue
Internationalism as Intercultural Solidarity and Collaboration
Internationalism as Exploration and Reflection on Home
Finally I posit a framework for mobility projects with a community focus, which has lots in common with what I’ve argued for elsewhere:
Time ▸ Taking a long-term approach changes how people working together in a place can think about the challenges and opportunities facing that place and its communities. The rushed residency can slip into mutual exoticism.
Trust ▸ Trust matters, because it encourages genuine exploratory dialogue.
Community voice ▸ Having community voice present throughout helps deepen projects.
Listening ▸ A core skill for community practice is listening to the dreams, desires and stories of local people – and also to what they do not say or those who may not immediately come forward.
Partnership ▸ Making the residency a partnership helps as partnership develops common cause amongst diverse interests.
Asset–based ▸ Every local place is rich in creative practice, in ideas and in heritage. These should be part of the focus of mobile artists residencies.
Massive thanks to the editors Nancy Duxbury and Dea Vidović for inviting this non-academic to contribute.
The fourth volume is the most interesting to me, as it puts forward some scenarios for mobility in culture, including a utopian one of Slow Mobility. This includes the suggestion that “Slow mobility encourages short-distance choices wherever possible and travelling less but making more out of the journey. It requires a radical sense of time and space. It refers to getting back in touch with the surroundings while travelling by train or combining it with other forms of eco-friendly and shared transportation. Slow travel involves taking more time for the journey itself and implies stops en route to visit exhibitions or other cultural events, to meet friends and colleagues and so on.” It builds out from there to identify implications for cultural policy. I urge you to read it.
Britten Pears Arts Think Tank
Last July I spent an energising 36 hours at Snape Maltings in Suffolk, chewing over the topic of co-creation. We didn’t resolve anything, or define anything for the ages, but it was interesting to see the spectrum of approaches even in a relatively small group. A summary of some of the discussions has been published.
/ Practice
From the Proverbs of Aurora Boroborealis
As the nights darken, out come the light festivals. I was delighted to be commissioned by Stellar Projects to contribute to Nightfall 2022, which took place in Middlesbrough in December. I helped commission Kirsten Luckins and Angela Readman to create work, and also wrote a poem called “From the Proverbs of Aurora Boroborealis” – the theme of the event being the Northern Lights. My poem was printed out in luminous sand courtesy of the Dutch artist Gijs Van Bom’s Nyx. (Sadly, Santa did not bring me a robot luminous sand printer as I asked. I must not have been a good boy.)
Watch the skies for news of another commission for Nightfall 2023. Meanwhile you can read the anthology of texts or the proverbs, which took two hours to print out as Nyx made its way through Stewart’s Park.
You can also now hire my work “All of this is spelt by stars” - fabricated by Neon Workshop - should you have a light festival or event that needs some extra beauty.
Great Places Tees Valley Principles of Practice
Those of you who have read Tactics for the Tightrope will remember the Tees Valley Principles of Practice, which emerged from collaborative work by people and organisation involved in the Great Places Tees Valley. These have now been published by ARC Stockton as intended in the nifty poster designed by AJ Garrett. The poster also features what I write on conference enrolments forms if I have to put a job title. [This is not the kind of clickbait we asked for – Ed]
bait: Energy
Just before I took a break from newsletting, Arts Council England published a report on learning from 10 years of Creative People and Places. I think this has been helpful to some of the CPPs that began their journey in 2022. Indeed I’ve since enjoyed working closely with one CPP beginning – Make/Shift in the Amber Valley - one renewing itself – Market Place in the Fens – and one closing itself after 10 years – Museums Northumberland bait. As my final act of critical friendship to the team at bait, I wrote a poem for their final publication. It grows in a Fibonacci-style, as I think many CPPs have, slowly at first and then rapidly, and alludes to the coal-mining heritage of South East Northumberland, as well as to the nearby beaches. Here’s section 6 of 9:
We dreamt together, that’s all it was,
Imagined ideas dunching like tubs.
We told stories that whispered, cried, laughed.
We bumped the set from one line of tracks
To another, whose end we did not know.
It ran into the dark and out again, triumphant.
We were new by the end of our shift, tewed.
We looked around at all we’d become, lit up.
bait has been my longest-running client, and it’s been a real pleasure over the years to work with Rachel Adam and her team, and the wider team at Museums Northumberland, good people doing good work through many changes and pretty much everything life and work can throw at a group of people. (I wrote something about the critical friend role a few years ago.) Onwards.
Multiplying Leadership Questions
I have recently updated the Tactics for the Tightrope website so that all the main chapters and the tools are downloadable in easy chunks, as well as the book continuing to be available in digital and hard copy from Future Arts Centres. Here are some Multiplying Leadership questions in case they hit you at the right moment:
v. LEARN
What have you learnt recently?
How widely have you shared what you learnt?
Who are you already connected to with whom you could do more together?
Just One More Thing
As the Sunday papers and the monthlies have failed to ask me, and as this is a summer reading special, here are some top tips for books to read over the summer:
Time Shelter - Georgi Gospodinov. Georgi and I were both part of a Northern England/Bulgaria literary exchange over several years, co-translating poems. So him winning the Booker Prize was a pleasure for a friend and a vicarious thrill. But this is simply a great book.
Trespasses - Louise Kennedy. Stunning debut novel of Belfast now and then.
The Sound of Being Human - Jude Rogers. Made me think about music and its place in our lives differently. She also picks great songs to focus in on.
The Marriage Portrait - Maggie O’Farrell. An author who can do no wrong in my book.