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Judith Butler. Towards Collective Study in Times of Emergency. (2023). 

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Judith Butler. Towards Collective Study in Times of Emergency. (2023). 

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L’Internationale - Editorial: Towards Collective Study in Times of Emergency

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L’Internationale Online, the publishing platform for the museum confederation, offers perspectives at the intersection of art, politics and institutional practice.

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Gargi Bhattacharyya. 'We, the heartbroken' (2023)

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Gargi Bhattacharyya. 'We, the heartbroken' (2023)

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In this blog, Gargi Bhattacharyya writes on the state of being for a revolutionary in 2020. Inspired by a younger comrade admitting to heartbreak arising from the business of trying to make something better in the world, and a group of comrades discussing the irritations of over-certainty, of dogmatism, of the whole ugly landscape of left 'slebs' and online point-scoring. Through this landscape, she points to perhaps, what younger comrades need to hear.

-----

Heartbreak is at the heart of all revolutionary consciousness. How can it not be? Who can imagine another world unless they already have been broken apart by the world we are in?

The heartbreak ripples along underneath and beside the other less dramatic business of political life. A meeting here, a picket there. Something to draft, something to collect, something to deliver. A statement to sign, a hand to hold. Speeches. And more speeches. And still more speeches. A falling out. An election. A split (or two or three) and the odd mourning of denouncing former comrades. And, of course, some more speeches.

But alongside all of that, the relentless busyness that buoys us along, there is always heartbreak. Perhaps we all know that this is the thing we are running from, the thing that must not be said, lest we all break apart completely. No-one devotes the time and the energies and the sheer bloodymindedness that we do unless running from something.

I am calling this something heartbreak because I feel the ache in my chest and the sense of standing at the edge of an abyss and the loss upon loss of the truly heartbroken. And when I feel it, the grief of my own life, the small but devastating losses of any life, the terrible costs of our humanness - all of that ripples out to join the oceans of grief of others. Some others might think of this as a form, a more expansive form, of class consciousness. Let me suggest, only in part to annoy, that to be heartbroken is the true class consciousness of racial capitalism.

Heartbreak is the moment when we see our pain as only a moment in the battle between the will to live and love and the will to destroy.

Heartbreak is when we commune with those who have been broken apart by state violence and we understand that this violence is also meant for us.

Heartbreak is when we realise that there is no remedy, no repair, no way back and nothing to fix this. That whatever comes next these histories and presents of violence cannot be put right. That the destiny of the heartbroken is to wish something better and completely new for those who come next.

Because it is only we, the heartbroken, who can truly battle and long for a world where no-one ever feels like this again.
The jouissance of solidarity
The brokenheartedness of revolutionary consciousness requires a redirection towards the collective. Perhaps some gather here in search of solace. Others simply for distraction. Others still looking for meaning, for a new quest, for something to cancel out their sense of lack. What they have in common is the understanding, often barely articulated, that pain must be turned outwards. That survival, if possible at all, must be in togetherness. Of course, people also guard themselves as they can or must. We also move in and out of the spaces of self-medication, anger and despair. Fall in and out of love and bed with the wrong people. Push away those who nourish, pull close those who harm. Mess things up again and again, but still somehow get up to try once more.

But, at the same time, brokenheartedness thins our skins so we become open to others. The boundaries between us can seem to dissolve, just momentarily. Your pain becomes my pain becomes our pain and the extent of us and the pains we are carrying and the long, long way back and the traces across oceans, across centuries, across my street and across your kitchen, all of it overwhelms. I'm awash with it all and I can't remember me. Too late to find myself, because I have already merged into all of you.

And in a version of the most ancient of stories, the rush into a kind of oblivion leads to a form of ecstasy. In its best everyday forms, the drudgery of political work becomes a falling in love and we are, once again, entranced by each other. Sometimes we reach a little further, enraptured by the jouissance of losing ourselves. Who we were - which identity or which faction, which analysis or which mis/gendering, which skin, which god, which acronym - fades away in the face of who we could be together. And then together doesn't even make sense anymore, because in the world we are dreaming and making, there is no me and you, there is only us. Just us forever. And it feels like nothing on earth. Nothing on earth yet.

Gargi Bhattacharyya is Professor of Sociology at University of East London. She is the co-author of the forthcoming Empire's Endgame: Racism and the British State (Pluto, 2021), as the author of Rethinking Racial Capitalism (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), Dangerous Brown Men (Zed, 2008) and Traffick (Pluto, 2005).

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In this blog, Gargi Bhattacharyya writes on the state of being for a revolutionary in 2020. Inspired by a younger comrade admitting to heartbreak arising from the business of trying to make something better in the world, and a group of comrades discussing the irritations of over-certainty, of dogmatism, of the whole ugly landscape of left 'slebs' and online point-scoring.

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Gerald Raunig. ‘Instituent Practices: Fleeing, Transforming, Instituting’. Transversal texts (2006)

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Gerald Raunig. ‘Instituent Practices: Fleeing, Transforming, Instituting’. Transversal texts (2006)

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Fleeing, Instituting, Transforming

Gerald Raunig

Translated by Aileen Derieg

When we posit in our project transform the provisional thesis that, following the two phases of institutional critique in the 1970s and the 1990s, a new phase will emerge[1], this thesis is based less on empirical findings than on a political and theoretical necessity, which a look at the deployment of institutional critique makes evident. Both strands of the meanwhile canonized practice of institutional critique had their own strategies and methods conditioned by the context, were simultaneously similar to one another (more similar than the delimitations of the art history canon and the art criticism canon would suggest) and different from one another, depending on the social and political circumstances. In particular, the circumstances have changed tremendously, since Michael Asher, Robert Smithson, Daniel Buren, Hans Haacke, Marcel Broodthaers and others introduced the first wave of what came to be known as institutional critique, which led almost seamlessly into the multiple branches of artistic projects circulating under the same name in the late 1980s and the 1990s. If institutional critique is not to be fixed and paralyzed as something established in the art field and confined within its rules, then it has to continue to develop along with changes in society and especially to tie into other forms of critique both within and outside the art field, such as those arising in opposition to the respective conditions or even before their formations[2]. Against the background of this kind of transversal exchange of forms of critique, but also beyond the imagination of spaces free from domination and institutions, institutional critique is to be reformulated as a critical attitude and as an instituent practice.
In his lecture entitled "Qu'est-ce que la critique?" in 1978, Michel Foucault described the spread and replication of governmentality in Western Europe in the 16th century, claiming that along with this governmentalization of all possible areas of life and finally of the self, critique also developed as the art not to be governed like that. Even without going into more depth here on the continuities and breaks between the historical forms of developing liberal governmentality and the current forms of neoliberal governmentality[3], it may be said that the relationship between government and not to be governed like that is still a prerequisite today for reflecting on the contemporary relationship between institution and critique. In Foucault's words: "[...] this governmentalization, which seems to me to be rather characteristic of these societies in Western Europe in the 16 th century, cannot apparently be dissociated from the question 'how not be governed?' I do not mean by that that governmentalization would be opposed in a kind of face-off by the opposite affirmation, 'we do not want to be governed, and we do not want to be governed at all.' I mean that, in this great preoccupation about the way to govern and the search for the ways to govern, we identify a perpetual question which could be: 'how not be governed like that, by that, in the name of those principles, with such and such an objective in mind and by means of such procedures, not like that, not for that, not by them'."[4]
Here Foucault insists on the shift from a fundamental negation of government toward a maneuver to avoid this kind of dualism: from not to be governed at all to not to be governed like that, from a phantom battle for a big other to a constant struggle in the plane of immanence, which - as I would like to add - is not (solely) actualized as a fundamental critique of institutions, but rather as a permanent process of instituting.
Foucault continues: "And if we accord this movement of governmentalization of both society and individuals the historic dimension and breadth which I believe it has had, it seems that one could approximately locate therein what we could call the critical attitude. Facing them head on and as compensation, or rather, as both partner and adversary to the arts of governing, as an act of defiance, as a challenge, as a way of limiting these arts of governing and sizing them up, transforming them, of finding a way to escape from them or, in any case, a way to displace them ..."[5]
These latter categories are the ones I want to focus on in terms of the transformation and a further development of the question of contemporary forms of institutional critique: transformations as ways of escaping from the arts of governing, lines of flight, which are not at all to be taken as harmless or individualistic or escapist and esoteric, even if they no longer allow dreaming of an entirely different exteriority. "Nothing is more active than fleeing!", as Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet write[6], and as Paolo Virno echoes almost literally: "Nothing is less passive than the act of fleeing, of exiting."[7]

If "the arts of governing" mean an intertwinedness between governing and being governed, between government and self-government, then " transforming the arts of governing" does not consist simply of any arbitrary transformation processes in the most general sense, because transformations are an essential quality of the governmentality setting. It is more a matter of specifically emancipatory transformations, and this also rescinds a central aspect of the old institutional critique. Through their emancipatory character these transformations also assume a transversal quality, i.e. their effect goes beyond the particular limitations of single fields.
Counter to these kinds of emancipatory transversal transformations of the "arts of governing", there is a recurring problem in art discourse: that of reducing and enclosing more general questions in one's own field. Even though (self-) canonizations, valorizations and depreciations in the art field - also in debates on institutional critique practices - are often adorned with an eclectic, disparate and contradictory selection of theory imports, these imports frequently only have the function of disposing of specific art positions or the art field. A contemporary variation of this functionalization consists of combining poststructuralist immanence theories with a simplification of Bourdieu's field theory. The theories that argue on the one hand against an outside in the sense of Christian or socialist transcendence, for instance, and on the other for the relative autonomy of the art field, are blurred here into the defeatist statement, "We are trapped in our field" (Andrea Fraser). Even the critical actors of the "second generation" of institutional critique do not appear to be free from these kinds of closure phantasms. Fraser, for instance, conducts an offensive self-historicization in her Artforum article "From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique" (September 2005) with the help of a brief history of the terms, ultimately limiting all possible forms of institutional critique to a critique of the "institution of art" (Peter Bürger) and its institutions. In reference to Bourdieu, she writes: "... just as art cannot exist outside the field of art, we cannot exist outside the field of art, at least not as artists, critics, curators, etc. And what we do outside the field, to the extent that it remains outside, can have no effect within it. So if there is no outside for us, it is not because the institution is perfectly closed, or exists as an apparatus in a 'totally administered society', or has grown all-encompassing in size and scope. It is because the institution is inside of us, and we can't get outside of ourselves."[8] Although there seems to be an echo of Foucault's concept of self-government here, there is no indication of forms of escaping, shifting, transforming. Whereas for Foucault the critical attitude appears simultaneously as "partner" and as "adversary" of the arts of governing, the second part of this specific ambivalence vanishes in Andrea Fraser's depiction, yielding to a discursive self-limitation, which only just allows reflecting on one's own enclosure. Contrary to all the evidence of the manifold effectivity not only of critical art practices throughout the entire 20th century, she plays a worn-out record: art is and remains autonomous, its function limited to the art field. "With each attempt to evade the limits of institutional determination, to embrace an outside, we expand our frame and bring more of the world into it. But we never escape it."[9]
Yet exactly this would also be a point in Foucault's concept of critique, the critical attitude: instead of inducing the closure of the field with theoretical arguments and promoting this practically, thus carrying out the art of governing, a different form of art should be pushed at the same time which leads to escaping the arts of governing. And Foucault is not the only one to introduce these new non-escapist terms of escape. Figures of flight, of dropping out, of betrayal, of desertion, of exodus, these are the figures proposed - especially against cynical or conservative invocations of inescapability and hopelessness - by several different authors as poststructuralist, non-dialectical forms of resistance. With these kinds of concepts Gilles Deleuze, Paolo Virno and several other philosophers attempt to propose new models of non-representationist politics that can equally be turned against Leninist concepts of revolution as taking over the state and against radical anarchist positions imagining an absolute outside of institutions, as well as against concepts of transformation and transition in the sense of a successive homogenization in the direction of neoliberal globalization. In terms of their new concept of resistance, the aim is to thwart a dialectical idea of power and resistance: a positive form of dropping out, a flight that is simultaneously an instituent practice. Instead of presupposing conditions of domination as an immutable horizon and yet fighting against them, this flight changes the conditions under which the presupposition takes place. As Paolo Virno writes in The Grammar of the Multitude, the exodus transforms "the context within which a problem has arisen, rather than facing this problem by opting for one or the other of the provided alternatives."[10]
When figures of flight are imported into the art field, this often leads to the misunderstanding that it involves the subject's personal retreat from the noise and babble of the world. Protagonists such as Herman Melville's "Bartleby" in Deleuze and Agamben or the "virtuoso" pianist Glenn Gould in Virno are seen as personifications of individual resistance and - in the case of Bartleby - of individual withdrawal. In a conservative process of pilferage and reinterpretation, in art-critical discourse these figures are thus so far removed from their starting point that flight no longer implies, as it does with Deleuze, fleeing to look for a weapon. On the contrary, here the old images of retreat into an artist hermitage are re-warmed, which are not only deployed in neo-cultural-pessimistic (art) circles against participative and relational spectacle art, but also against collective interventionist, activist or other experimental strategies; for instance when the head of Texte zur Kunst, Isabelle Graw turns to "the model of the preoccupied painter working away in his studio, refusing to give any explanation, ostentatiously not networking, never traveling, hardly showing himself in public", the reason for this is allegedly to prevent the principle of the spectacle from "directly accessing his mental and emotional competencies".[11]
Although Graw refers to Paolo Virno directly before the passage quoted, neither Virno's problematization of the cultural industry nor his concept of exodus tends toward these kinds of bourgeois expectations of salvation by the artist-individual. With the image of the solitary painter, who eludes the "new tendency in capitalism to take over the whole person"[12] by obstinately withdrawing his person, Graw links a contemporary analysis with an ultraconservative consequence. Even after the countless spectacular utilizations of this stereotype, it appears that the same old artist image - counter to Virno's ideas of virtuosity - can today still or once again be celebrated as anti-spectacular.
What the poststructuralist proposals for dropping out and withdrawal involve, however, is anything but this kind of relapse into the celebration of an individual turning away from society. The point is to thwart dichotomies such as that of the individual and the collective, to offensively theorize new forms of what is common and singular at the same time. Particularly Paolo Virno has lucidly developed this idea in A Grammar of the Multitude. In allusion to the concept of the General Intellect, which Karl Marx introduced in his Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy, Virno posits the concept of the "public intellect". The assumption of Marx' concept indicates that "intellect" is not to be understood here as a competence of an individual, but rather as a shared tie and constantly developing foundation for individuation. Thus Virno neither alludes to media intellectuals in the society of the spectacle, nor to the lofty ideas of the autonomous thinker or painter. That kind of individualized publicity corresponds more to Virno's negative concept of "publicness without a public sphere": "The general intellect, or public intellect, if it does not become a republic, a public sphere, a political community, drastically increases forms of submission."[13]
Virno focuses, on the other hand, on the social quality of the intellect.[14] Whereas the alienated thinker (or even painter) is traditionally drawn as an individual withdrawing from idle talk, from the noise of the masses, for Virno the noise of the multitude is itself the site of a non-state, non-spectacular, non-representationist public sphere.
This non-state public sphere is not to be understood as an anarchic place of absolute freedoms, as an open field beyond the realm of the institution. Flight and exodus are nothing negative, a reaction to something else, but are instead linked and intertwined with constituent power, re-organizing, re-inventing and instituting. The movement of flight also preserves these instituent practices from structuralization and closure from the start, preventing them from becoming institution in the sense of constituted power.

What does this mean in relation to the artistic practices of institutional critique? From a schematic perspective, the "first generation" of institutional critique sought a distance from the institution, the "second" addressed the inevitable involvement in the institution. I call this a schematic perspective, because these kinds of "generation clusters" are naturally blurred in the relevant practices, and there were attempts - by Andrea Fraser, for instance - to describe the first wave as being constituted by the second (including herself) and also to attribute to the first phase a similar reflectedness on their own institutionality. Whether this is the case or not, an important and effective position can be attributed to both generations in the art field from the 1970s to the present, and relevance is evident in some cases that goes beyond the boundaries of the field. Yet the fundamental questions that Foucault already implicitly raised, which Deleuze certainly pursued in his Foucault book, are not posed with the strategies of distanced and deconstructive intervention in the institution: Do Foucault's considerations lead us to enclose ourselves more and more in power relations? And most of all, which lines of flight lead out of the dead end of this enclosure?
To make use of Foucault's treatments of this problem for the question of new instituent practices, I would like to conclude this article with a longer recourse to the later Foucault, specifically to his Berkeley lecture series "Discourse and Truth" from fall 1983 and the term parrhesia broadly explained there.[15]

Parrhesia means in classical Greek "to say everything", freely speaking truth without rhetorical games and without ambiguity, even and especially when this is hazardous. Foucault describes the practice of parrhesia using numerous examples from ancient Greek literature as a movement from a political to a personal technique. The older form of parrhesia corresponds to publicly speaking truth as an institutional right. Depending on the form of the state, the subject addressed by the parrhesiastes is the assembly in the democratic agora, the tyrant in the monarchical court.[16] Parrhesia is generally understood as coming from below and directed upward, whether it is the philosopher's criticism of the tyrant or the citizen's criticism of the majority of the assembly: the specific potentiality of parrhesia is found in the unequivocal gap between the one who takes a risk to express everything and the criticized sovereign who is impugned by this truth.

Over the course of time, a change takes place in the game of truth "which - in the classical Greek conception of parrhesia - was constituted by the fact that someone was courageous enough to tell the truth to other people. [...] there is a shift from that kind of parrhesiastic game to another truth game which now consists in being courageous enough to disclose the truth about oneself."[17] This process from public criticism to personal (self-) criticism develops parallel to the decrease in the significance of the democratic public sphere of the agora. At the same time, parrhesia comes up increasingly in conjunction with education. One of Foucault's relevant examples here is Plato's dialogue "Laches", in which the question of the best teacher for the interlocutor's sons represents the starting point and foil. The teacher Socrates no longer assumes the function of the parrhesiastes in the sense of exercising dangerous contradiction in a political sense, but rather by moving his listeners to give account of themselves and leading them to a self-questioning that queries the relationship between their statements ( logos) and their way of living ( bios). However, this technique does not serve as an autobiographical confession or examination of conscience or as a prototype of Maoist self-criticism, but rather to establish a relationship between rational discourse and the lifestyle of the interlocutor or the self-questioning person. Contrary to any individualistic interpretation especially of later Foucault texts (imputing a "return to subject philosophy", etc.), here parrhesia is not the competency of a subject, but rather a movement between the position that queries the concordance of logos and bios, and the position that exercises self-criticism in light of this query

In keeping with a productive interpretation for contemporary institutional critique practices, my aim here is to link the two concepts of parrhesia described by Foucault as a genealogical development, to understand hazardous refutation in its relation to self-revelation. Critique, and especially institutional critique, is not exhausted in denouncing abuses nor in withdrawing into more or less radical self-questioning. In terms of the art field this means that neither the belligerent strategies of the institutional critique of the 1970s nor art as a service to the institution in the 1990s promise effective interventions in the governmentality of the present.

What is needed here and now, is parrhesia as a double strategy: as an attempt of involvement and engagement in a process of hazardous refutation, and as self-questioning.

What is needed, therefore, are practices that conduct radical social criticism, yet which do not fancy themselves in an imagined distance to institutions; at the same time, practices that are self-critical and yet do not cling to their own involvement, their complicity, their imprisoned existence in the art field, their fixation on institutions and the institution, their own being-institution. Instituent practices that conjoin the advantages of both "generations" of institutional critique, thus exercising both forms of parrhesia, will impel a linking of social criticism, institutional critique and self-criticism. This link will develop, most of all, from the direct and indirect concatenation with political practices and social movements, but without dispensing with artistic competences and strategies, without dispensing with resources of and effects in the art field. Here exodus would not mean relocating to a different country or a different field, but betraying the rules of the game through the act of flight: "transforming the arts of governing" not only in relation to the institutions of the art field or the institution art as the art field, but rather as participation in processes of instituting and in political practices that traverse the fields, the structures, the institutions.
Thanks to Isabell Lorey and Stefan Nowotny for critical remarks and advice.
Literature:

Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota 1988.

Gilles Deleuze/Claire Parnet, Dialoge, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp 1980.

Michel Foucault, What is Critique?, in: Sylvére Lotringer and Lysa Hochroch (Eds.), The Politics of Truth: Michel Foucault,. New York: Semiotext(e) 1997, 23-82.

Michel Foucault, Diskurs und Wahrheit, Berlin: Merve 1996 [ Discourse and Truth: http://foucault.info/documents/parrhesia/].

Andrea Fraser, "From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique", in: Artforum September 2005, 278-283.

Isabelle Graw, "Jenseits der Institutionskritik. Ein Vortrag im Los Angeles County Museum of Art", in: Texte zur Kunst September 2005, Heft 59, 40-53.

IsabellLorey, "Governmentality and Self-Precarization: On the normalization of culture producers", in: Simon Sheikh (Ed.), CAPITAL (It Fails Us Now), Berlin: b_books 2006.

Gerald Raunig, "The Double Criticism of parrhesia. Answering the Question 'What is a Progressive (Art) Institution?'", http://eipcp.net/transversal/0504/raunig/en

Gerald Raunig, Kunst und Revolution, Wien: Turia+Kant 2005.

Paolo Virno, Grammatik der Multitude. Mit einem Anhang: Die Engel und der General Intellect, Wien: Turia+Kant 2005 [ A Grammar of the Multitude: http://www.generation-online.org/c/fcmultitude3.htm].

[4]Foucault, What is Critique?, 28.

[6]Deleuze/Parnet, Dialoge, 45.

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transversal texts is production site and platform at once, territory and stream of publication − the middle of a becoming that never wants to become a publishing company.

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Chantel Mouffe. The Democratic Paradox. London: Verso (2000)

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Chantel Mouffe. The Democratic Paradox. London: Verso (2000)

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Taey Iohe. Phambinho W/ Taey Iohe - Leaking. (Sounds) (2023)

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Taey Iohe. Phambinho W/ Taey Iohe - Leaking. (Sounds) (2023)

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Phambinho W/ Taey Iohe - Leaking 3rd October 2023

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Playing Field Recordings, Folk, Ambient. Taey Iohe, a London-based Korean artist, returns with a captivating mix of ‘leaking’ sound intertwined with bodies of water. Weaving from tears and milk found in ancient Korean folk songs, passed down through generations by word of mouth, they delves into the realms of fog, rivers, and both old and new rains through use of experimental strings and house music, and meticulously capturing rain patterns through field recordings, Taey expands the abstraction of ‘leaking’ into a sonic space ripe for exploration. (@taey.iohe)

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Jack Halberstam. 'The Wild Beyond: With and For the Undercommons' (2013)

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Jack Halberstam. 'The Wild Beyond: With and For the Undercommons' (2013)

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Audre Lorde. 'Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power' (1978)

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Audre Lorde. 'Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power' (1978)

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Rallying the Commons (2022) Performing Borders, e-journal no. 2.

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Rallying the Commons (2022) Performing Borders, e-journal no. 2.

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Fiona Whelan. TEN – Territory, Encounter & Negotiation, A critical memoir by a socially engaged artist (2014)

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Fiona Whelan. TEN – Territory, Encounter & Negotiation, A critical memoir by a socially engaged artist (2014)

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Ursula K. Le Guin. The Word for World is Forest (1972)

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Ursula K. Le Guin. The Word for World is Forest (1972)

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Ursula K. Le Guin The Word for World Is Forest 1972

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Future Commons: Notes on a year of care connection and conversation (2021-22)

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Future Commons: Notes on a year of care connection and conversation (2021-22)

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Notes on a year of care,

connection and conversation

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Sarah Ahmed. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Duke University Press. (2006)

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Sarah Ahmed. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Duke University Press. (2006)

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Anna Tsing. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Lifein Capitalist Ruins, Princeton University (2017)

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Anna Tsing. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Lifein Capitalist Ruins, Princeton University (2017)

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The Mushroom at the End of the World_ On t - Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

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Graziano, V., Mars, M., & Medak, T., (2019-current). Pirate Care. Available at:pirate.care. 

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We live in a world where captains get arrested for saving people's lives on the sea; where a person downloading scientific articles faces 35 years in jail; where people risk charges for bringing contraceptives to those who otherwise couldn't get them. Folks are getting in trouble for giving food to the poor, medicine to the sick, water to the thirsty, shelter to the homeless. And yet our heroines care and disobey. They are pirates.
Pirate Care is a research process - primarily based in the transnational European space - that maps the increasingly present forms of activism at the intersection of "care" and "piracy", which in new and interesting ways are trying to intervene in one of the most important challenges of our time, that is, the 'crisis of care' in all its multiple and interconnected dimensions.

These practices are experimenting with self-organisation, alternative approaches to social reproduction and the commoning of tools, technologies and knowledges. Often they act disobediently in expressed non-compliance with laws, regulations and executive orders that ciriminalise the duty of care by imposing exclusions along the lines of class, gender, race or territory. They are not shying risk of persecution in providing unconditional solidarity to those who are the most exploited, discriminated against and condemned to the status of disposable populations.

The Pirate Care Syllabus we present here for the first time is a tool for supporting and activating collective processes of learning from these practices. We encourage everyone to freely use this syllabus to learn and organise processes of learning and to freely adapt, rewrite and expand it to reflect their own experience and serve their own pedagogies.

Please Note: The Pirate Care Syllabus is in a permanent state of being work in progress. Some topics and sessions are rather bare and under development, while others are more complete. We welcome suggestions and proposals for collaborations on expanding or re-visiting existing topics.

1. Caring is not intrinsically "nice", it always involve power relations. Processes of discipline, exclusion and harm can operate inside the matrix of care.

2. Care labour holds the capacity to disobey power and increase our collective freedom. This is why when it is organised in capitalist, patriarchal and racist ways, it does not work for most living beings. We are in a global crisis of care.

3. There are no wrong people. Yet, caring for the "wrong" people is more and more socially discouraged, made difficult and criminalized. For many, the crisis of care has been there for a very long time.

4. Caring is labour. it is necessary and it is skilled labour.

5. Care labour is shared unfairly and violently in most societies, along lines of gender, provenance, race, class, ability, and age. Some are forced to care, while some defend their privilege of expecting service. This has to change.

6. Caring labour needs full access to resources, knowledge, tools and technologies. When these are taken away, we must claim them back.

&mldr;

Pirate Care is convened by Valeria Graziano, Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak.

Contributors to the Syllabus: Laura Benitez Valero, Emina Bužinkić, Rasmus Fleischer, Maddalena Fragnito, Valeria Graziano, Chris Grodotzki, Mary Maggic, Iva Marčetić, Marcell Mars, Tomislav Medak, Morana Miljanović, Power Makes Us Sick (PMS), Zoe Romano, Cassie Thornton, Ivory Tuesday, Ana Vilenica.

Contributors and translators of Flatten the Curve, Grow the Care: a collective note-taking exercise: Janneke Adema, Cooperation Birmingham, Maddalena Fragnito, Valeria Graziano, Antonia Hernández, Rebekka Kiesewetter, Katja Laug, Marcell Mars, Tomislav Medak, Tomasso Petrucci, Dan Rudmann, Tobias Steiner.

Contributors to the exhibition Pirate Care: Learning from Disobedience: Laura Benítez Valero, Emina Bužinkić, Maddalena Fragnito (Soprasotto), Iva Marčetić, Paula Pin (Biotranslab/ Pechblenda), Planka, Power Makes Us Sick (PMS), Sea-Watch, Ana Vilenica and Women on Waves.

Contributors to the 2019 Conference at the Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University: Agustina Andreoletti (Academy of Media Arts Cologne) | Mijke van der Drift (Goldsmiths University of London / Royal Academy of Art, The Hague) | Taraneh Fazeli (curatorial fellow, Jan van Eyck Academie and Canaries collective) | Kirsten Forkert (BCU) + Janna Graham (Goldsmiths) + Victoria Mponda (Global Sistaz United) | Maddalena Fragnito (Soprasotto) | Valeria Graziano (CPC) | Derly Guzman (Planka) | Toufic Haddad (Kenyon Institute) | Jelka Kretzschmar + Franziska Wallner (Sea-Watch) | Andrea Liu (Goldsmiths University of London) | Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak (Memory of the World / CPC) | Power Makes Us Sick (PMS) | Gilbert B. Rodman (University of Minnesota) | Zoe Romano (WeMake / Opencare.cc) | Deborah Streahle (Yale) | Nick Titus (Four Thieves Vinegar Collective) | Kim Trogal (UCA) | Ana Vilenica (LSBU) | Kandis Williams (Cassandra Press) | Kitty Worthing (Docs Not Cops) + James Skinner (Medact) | John Wilbanks (Sage Bionetworks/ FasterCures).

Contact: info@pirate.care

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Network of activists, researchers and practitioners against the criminalisation of solidarity & for a common care infrastructure.

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Mia Mingus, Access Intimacy: The Missing Link (2011)

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Mia Mingus, Access Intimacy: The Missing Link (2011)

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Fiona Whelan. Listening, Interpretation, Colonisation and Decentering - Reflection on With For About: Care and the Commons (2023)

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Fiona Whelan. Listening, Interpretation, Colonisation and Decentering - Reflection on With For About: Care and the Commons (2023)

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Mc Kenna, D. et al. Transforming Hate: In Youth Settings (2018)

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Mc Kenna, D. et al. Transforming Hate: In Youth Settings (2018)

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'Compassion Over Competition': Exploring professional development needs for collaborative and social arts (2023)

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'Compassion Over Competition': Exploring professional development needs for collaborative and social arts (2023)

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2023 Compassion over competition report 

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Sophie Mak-Schram & Others. ROBIDA, 'A Longing Lingers: letters to others about Aimee Carillo Rowe's 'Be-Longing' (2024)

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Sophie Mak-Schram & Others. ROBIDA, 'A Longing Lingers: letters to others about Aimee Carillo Rowe's 'Be-Longing' (2024)

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Kate O'Shea & Ciaran Smyth. Gravity Express (2022)

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Kate O'Shea & Ciaran Smyth. Gravity Express (2022)

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Sara Buraya Boned and Ida Hiršenfelder. (2021) Degrowth and Progress

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Sara Buraya Boned and Ida Hiršenfelder. (2021) Degrowth and Progress

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Hale, A. (1885) ON MINES AND MINERS IN KINTA, PÊRAK

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Hale, A. (1885) ON MINES AND MINERS IN KINTA, PÊRAK

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ON MINES AND MINERS IN KINTA, PÊRAK : A Hale : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

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We will keep fighting for all libraries - stand with us!

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Seng, T. C. (2022) Dreaming as A way of knowing and existing

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Seng, T. C. (2022) Dreaming as A way of knowing and existing

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Hunter-Gatherers in Making Meaning and Navigating their Environment | The Big Trip - Tracking New Connections

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A movement that aims to unite a global narrative with a series of first hand interviews with researchers, practitioners and specialists around the globe.

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Seng, T. C. (2022) Hunter-Gatherers in Making Meaning and Navigating their Environment

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Seng, T. C. (2022) Hunter-Gatherers in Making Meaning and Navigating their Environment

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It is said that what you see in your dreams are fed by your daytime visual stimulation. Others say it's your deepest worries, or your highest hopes-an insight into the mind.

Some of the commonly accepted dream theories include those from Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Antti Revonsuo. Freud believed that dreams express our repressed conflicts or desires while the Jungian Dream Analysis allows us to study our dreams, understand our internal conflicts, and find a cure/solution to the conflicts. Revonsuo's Threat Simulation Theory states that dreaming is an ancient biological defence mechanism, which responds to potential future danger by running simulation in our sleep.

But all these theories touch on our fears and struggle per say. What about the dreams dreamt by the indigenous peoples around the world?

In explaining this, there is one concept that stood out: Jung's Collective Unconscious. According to Jung, we carry the memories of our ancestors in our subconscious and through this collective unconscious we assign meaning to the world.

Dreams are a conduit to not only your unconscious/subconscious, but to the otherworldly as well. In this article, we explore how dreams are used by indigenous people to gain spiritually-derived and navigate their daily lives, and to deal with the changes of landscape and intrusion of Others.

Deriving Waking Life Wisdom From The Spiritual

Across many indigenous cultures, dreams carry literal and prophetic meanings to waking life. Here we share examples of some indigenous peoples of the Americas.

To navigate the expansive Canadian bush, the Chipewyan people take guidance from the spiritual realm in order to be successful in their daily life of hunting, fishing and trapping. And to achieve this, they must maintain a harmonious relationship with all beings, which they view as interconnected in a complex communicative interrelationship-especially between humans and 'animal persons1.

The Chipewyan's bush sensibility, or inkonze, comes through dreams from the animal persons. What are 'animal persons' and what is inkonze? Animal persons are essentially a spiritual dimension of personhood that all animals have. Inkonze is a gift from animal persons to humans who respect nature and are active in the bush, but not everyone receives powerful inkonze dreams. For those who do, they dream of visits from animal persons who would impart survival knowledge, skills to be successful in their hunts, fishing, and catching of wild game, as well as weather prediction.

For the Anishinaabe from the Great Lakes region of Canada and the United States, one of their ways of transmitting knowledge and to teach younger people is through dreaming 2. They often share and interpret their dreams and visions. Similar to other indigenous cultures, the Anishinaabe people believe the physical and dreamed worlds are one. Dreams are a guide to waking life.

In Resisting and Preserving Cultural Identity in an Ever-Changing World

Up north of the Peninsular, the Temiar of Kelantan, Malaysia uses dream-songs to construct a musical map of their universe.

Shamans would receive visits from spirit guides, or , who materialise as either things above ground (birds, mammals, flowers), things underground (water-serpent), or from top of the sky (thunder) and impart knowledge and dream-songs.

According to Roseman, dream-songs are "used in ceremonies to call upon the spirit of the birds, thunder, water-serpent, and so on for help in healing - or for the many other uses to which dream-song ceremonies are directed: to mark important moments in the agricultural cycle; to welcome or send off travellers; to mark a mourning period's end; or merely to celebrate the experience of dancing, trancing, and singing with the spirits."3 In other words, dream-songs are the basis for community-wide singing and trance-dancing ceremonies.

However, when the Temiars were caught between the power struggle of the British, Japanese, and Malaya, forced into government 'regroupment' projects and forest-land appropriation, experiencing loss of land and resources, they began to include foreign objects and new technologies into the musical map of their universe.

The Temiars engaged spirits of foreign things and people-spirits of the marketplace, spirit of the dried fish, spirit of the Japanese tunnels, spirit of the Japanese planes dropping bombs, among others. By including these events of history and the new into their dream-song structure, and then performing it, they maintain their position as active agents transforming the world even as they are transformed by it, rather than becoming passive participants.

By doing this, they subvert these external forces and include themselves in the mainstream narrative and conditions of the world as a way to reconcile, as a social suturing, and as an art of survival.
Are We Too Awake Today?
As more and more indigenous communities become sedentary or experience loss of land, taken away from the refuge and sustenance of the dense forests, dreaming too is becoming, or has become, something of the past just as their way of life erodes. Eventually, the spiritually-derived knowledge would cease to exist. But if Jung's Collective Unconscious was true, then these knowledges would never be truly gone as it exists in a sort of cloud system in the spiritual realm.

Listen to the podcast here: Episode 1: Navigation to hear from a Semai, an indigenous tribe under the same group as the Temiar, about what dreaming is to their community and similarly their spirit-guides is also known as .

Contributed by : Wendi Sia

Reference:

1.Smith, D. M. (1998). An Athapaskan Way of Knowing: Chipewyan Ontology. American Ethnologist, 25(3), 412-432. http://www.jstor.org/stable/645792

2. Simpson, L.B. (2000). Stories, Dreams, and Ceremonies--Anishinaabe Ways of Learning. Tribal College, 11, 26-29.

3. Roseman, M. (2002). Engaging the Spirits of Modernity: The Temiars. In Tribal Communities in the Malay World: Historical, Cultural and Social Perspectives (pp. 185-205). ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute.

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Dreaming as A Way of Knowing and Existing | The Big Trip - Tracking New Connections

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It is said that what you see in your dreams are fed by your daytime visual stimulation. Others say it's your deepest worries, or your highest hopes-an insight into the mind. Some of the commonly accepted dream theories include those from Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Antti Revonsuo.

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Gerimis Art Project (2020) Playing songs inspired and given by Nature is a way to remember Her.

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Gerimis Art Project (2020) Playing songs inspired and given by Nature is a way to remember Her.

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The thundering cascades of Lata Iskandar roared and no speech could rise above it, except the sounds of the kereb (bamboo guitar) and pensol (bamboo flute) as the music flowed harmoniously with gushing waters.

It was almost dreamlike, the unity of the sounds and the totality of the tranquil place, as we watched Herry plucking the kereb and his uncle Alang swiftly dancing his fingers across the pensol.

And indeed, it was in a dream that Alang was revealed to the true owner of the song he currently played.

"This is the song of the earthquake spirit, which is my favourite song and was composed by me... I thought so, until one day the spirit came to me in my dream. The spirit came from the mountains, carrying the name of the person who originally made the song. It turned out that this song wasn't mine. Its true owner is the spirit of the earthquake, and that's why I named this song so," Alang explained.

"This world does not belong to us alone. All animals are the same as us. We have to take care of and love this earth and everything that lives on it, be it fellow human beings, the trees, and whatever more."

The relationship between Orang Asli and nature is inseparable, and it is evident even in their music and its instruments.

After all, both instruments are sourced from - and carried the voice of - nature.

Herry (left) with kereb and Alang (right) with pensol

REDISCOVERING ORANG ASLI TRADITIONAL INSTRUMENT: KEREB & PENSOL
If you drove along the trunk road from Tapah to Cameron Highlands, it's hard to miss the magnificent view of Lata Iskandar, cascading over several tiers into a small pool at its last drop before turning into a narrow stream.

This place is Alang's backyard, his village being just a few kilometres away, where they would "suluh katak" for entertainment during the night...and perhaps a feast after. He also forages for rattan and other fibres in the forests surrounding the waterfall.

Herry picked this spot for them to play the kereb and pensol because he wanted the sounds of the waterfall as a background.

"Actually, I just started learning to play this instrument not too long ago," confessed Herry. For him, it's the intention that matters.

"I grew up in KL so I'm not really a 'pure' Orang Asli. When my parents retired and we returned to their village in Perak, I wanted to reconnect with my culture," he explained.

"One of my passions is music. Besides knowing how to play the guitar and other modern instruments, I wanted to learn Orang Asli music. That was why I reconnected with my uncle who taught me how to play the kereb."

We first met Herry and Alang at the 2019 George Town Festival when they came to perform a folklore play as part of our Gerimis exhibition weekend programming. They were introduced to us by Persatuan Kebudayaan dan Kesenian Orang Asal Perak (PKKOAP), who is one of our collaborators.

The two are from the Semai tribe of the Perak side, which is the largest of the Senoi group. The former isn't sure of the history of the instrument, but according to the latter, Orang Asli usually derives ideas and inspirations from their dreams.

The kereb is made from bamboo. Most Orang Asli instruments are made from bamboo, perhaps due to its flexibility and its hollow structure. It is also easily found as bamboo clumps grow in abundance in the forest.

"However, not all bamboos could be used to make kereb. There are specific types of bamboo that we go for to achieve quality sound," said Herry.

Herry explained that there are a few types of kereb. There are short and long ones, and there different ways to hold and play the kereb. You can hold it like a modern guitar, place it on your lap, or at your cheek.

"When you place it on your lap or at your cheek, it's to control the flow of the wind and to achieve different sounds."

The structure of the kereb has two parallel strips facing each other-one long (male) and one short (female). Both ends are secured with a strong rattan ring (like the chenos bracelet) and at which the two rattan strings of the kereb are raised and pulled over wedges to give them the tension needed to produce sounds.

"The two strings are played like the beat of chentong. If you have listened to that instrument, the kereb also follows this beat. This is the traditional way," explained Herry.

Listen to how kereb is played following the beat of the chentong.

"In the old days, kereb was normally played by the ladies," began Herry. "When the girl misses the boy, she would play the kereb to pass time as there were no other forms of entertainment in the forest," continued Alang.

"But today, no youths are playing it anymore so I took it upon myself to learn this instrument. Plus, it makes a nice combination with Uncle Alang's pensol," said Herry.

For Alang, his musical journey was a challenging one, but it's an experience that he places close to his heart.

At as young as 8, Alang already showed interest in the traditional instruments. He recalled the first time he watched the elders playing pensol and how he was drawn to it. In retrospect, he said that it was perhaps because he has a musical soul. But Alang didn't pick up the pensol until he turned 18.

"I was watching the elders playing the pensol at performances and at their homes, and a question came to me... ' How did they make this instrument? What did the inspiration come from?' I asked them and they would always shrug at me, saying that they don't know as well since the knowledge was passed down by the ancestors. It was always the same response whenever I asked the elders," Alang told us.

Nevertheless, his passion did not waver and instead burned brighter. He thought to himself, I'm Orang Asli and I will learn to play the pensol no matter what.

Alang went to look for bamboo in the forest, collected a basketful of them and brought them home. Without a reference or whatsoever, he carved holes into the bamboos and tested their sound-over and over again until he perfected it.

Alang showing his pensol up close. The 3rd and 4th bracelets on his wrist are gelang chenos.

"It took me a long time to get the right tune. Whenever I thought I was almost there, it would still be out of tune. I looked for more bamboo and kept trying until finally, I achieved it," he said.

The pensol usually has 3 to 4 holes, but the latter is more common among the Semai people. Alang explained that if you used 3 fingers to measure the length between the first and second holes, it should be the same measurement throughout.

"But the hardest part wasn't over. Then, I had to compose a song."

NATURE-INSPIRED SOUNDS
Going back to the story of how Alang dreamed the spirit of the earthquake, he stated that he composed the song before he dreamed of it. Here's his story...
"The day after the Acheh tsunami, perhaps I thought about it too much, I had a dream that the earthquake that caused the tsunami happened right here, in a hilly area just like this place and my village. There was a building like the Highland Towers. My family and I were there in the dream and we felt the earth shaking. We were terrified. In the dream, the spirit who came from the mountains came to me with a bamboo in hand. On the bamboo was its name. When we want to summon this spirit, this is the name we should call upon. The bamboo was like the one that we use in our sewang performances to mandi bunga. We would put water, herbs, flowers, leaves, and aromatic plants from the forest in this bamboo. I thought it was just like any other dream. Mainan tidur. I recounted my dream to my father and our hairs stood on end. One day, when my dad came to my home to do sewang, I asked him if I could ask the spirits about my dream. I wanted to leave it to the spirit world to tell me if it's true or not. My father said, "We don't know but let us look for it first." In the sewang, he sang songs of the tiger and thunderstorm spirits while looking for the mountain spirit. Eventually, the mountain spirit came and confirmed my dream. It's true. It is his name and his song. This is the sweetest pensol experience and I will remember it always. We must never forget that we are not the only creatures here on earth."
The bodies of Orang Asli traditional instruments are from nature, and naturally, their music too. Herry said that they don't follow the current Orang Asli musicians as their sound is more to what they hear from being within nature.

Herry telling us about how pensol follows the sound of its body. A metal body sounds different from a bamboo body.

"Like where we are now and what we are hearing, we take inspirations little by little over a period of time. When we have enough, we will compose a song. That is why it takes a long time for us to make music because we want to achieve the right feeling that nature evokes," explained Herry.

Although it can be plucked like the modern guitar, kereb can't be strummed just like it. To play it is to follow the sound of nature-birds, streams, and even waterfalls.

"I've heard the elders playing the sound of water, but I've never learned it," said Alang. "He can play the sound of a type of bird that you commonly hear in the mornings only," stated Herry.

Listen to Alang playing the sound of the bird.

According to Alang, playing instruments at night is a taboo in Semai culture. They believe that it would attract animals such as the tiger. Although the sound can't travel far, and what more penetrate the dense forest, tigers could pick up the sound of the kereb or pensol from afar with their extremely sharp hearing.

There is another taboo whereby they cannot perform spiritual songs as they please because every spiritual song has its owner. If you played the song as you wished, the spirits may take it as an insult, as if you are mocking them.

"After the performances at the George Town Festival and Semarak Muzium event, I invited my father and my siblings to do sewang at my village to thank the spirits for their gift of songs," revealed Alang.

Luheiw Sali Soul (now Luheiw Renaweij) performing a folklore tale at George Town Festival.

"We have spiritual songs and we have contemporary songs as well," said Herry. "To attract the youths, we are trying to modernise the music but it's not easy. Their basics are similar to the modern guitar and flute, but they are not identical."

Herry explained the difficulty stems from the kereb's lack of fraps, which are present on modern guitars. Next, traditional Orang Asli instruments do not share the same chords as modern instruments.

"For example, you can't completely cover the holes on the pensol when playing certain tunes. There are parts that you need to loosely cover, leaving a little space between the hole and your finger," he said.

"That is the challenge we face when we want to harmonise with modern instruments. There are no standard chords in Orang Asli instruments. We play mostly by heart."

The two also started recording tunes so they could easily tune their instruments whenever needed. This way, they are standardising the tunes of the kereb and pensol. With the introduction to technology and the progression of Orang Asli socially, they are beginning to document their culture and traditions.

The higher tier of the Lata Iskandar falls.

THE IMPORTANCE OF CONTINUITY
Herry's initial search for his roots and identity grew bigger than himself as the duo continued to improve and expand their skills, as well as innovate the music and their performances to attract youths to also pick up the instruments.

To Herry, music and its instruments is one of the Orang Asli identities.

"I hope to inspire the Orang Asli youths to learn their own music and instruments. If we do not learn and do not look after it, our culture will go extinct because everything was orally taught and nothing was documented. We must start caring for our culture."

"Beside traditional clothes and lifestyle, music has the power to bring communities closer. It's such a universal thing."

Alang agreed with Herry and said that their culture and traditions must be preserved as long as Orang Asli exists. To him, music is a connection to nature, and nature with us.

"If it's not preserved and maintained with proper care, perhaps Mother Nature would be sad as she might think that we have forgotten her with the disappearance of music. Maybe the mountains would collapse and the world would change," said Alang.

"Playing songs inspired and given by nature is a way to remember her."

Similar to other parts of their culture, the Orang Asli music and instruments clearly show their respect and reverence to nature and its lives.

"The Semai soul, the Orang Asli soul... has a close relationship with nature."

"The upcoming generation must maintain this musical culture because this is our soul and nature is our breath, our everything."

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"Playing songs inspired and given by Nature is a way to remember Her." | Orang Asli instruments: Kereb & Pensol - Gerimis Art

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The thundering cascades of Lata Iskandar roared and no speech could rise above it, except the sounds of the kereb (bamboo guitar) and pensol (bamboo flute) as the music flowed harmoniously with gushing waters.

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Gerimis Art Project (2021) Drawing links between food security, culture and tradition

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Gerimis Art Project (2021) Drawing links between food security, culture and tradition

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A year later, we're back in Movement Control Order (MCO). Although Malaysia has experienced many calamities, such as the devastating 2014-15 flood, disaster relief is something we need to urgently work on. When COVID-19 hit, nothing could have prepared us for the pandemic crisis we are in today-but it's everything that we must learn from.

During the first MCO, a group of NGOs and volunteers came together as Misi Bantu OA to crowdfund and send food aid to Orang Asli villages across Peninsular Malaysia. There were other joint initiatives such as COAC-Raleigh-Impian Malaysia and EPIC-JAKOA. Nothing like #kitajagakita, right?

Nonetheless, none of us foresaw that the MCO would be a recurring nightmare...and with economic and social repercussions.

Piecemeal food aid only provides temporary relief and isn't a permanent solution.

There are communities who were forgotten while some received more than needed. There were cases where the food aid did not arrive in a timely manner. Moreover, daily necessities go beyond food.

It's not only about the access to food, but also Orang Asli's continuous right to food. The key is to guarantee food security and sovereignty to the Orang Asli-and when talking about these two, ensuring land rights is at the core of it.
WHAT IS FOOD SECURITY AND SOVEREIGNTY, AND HOW DO THEY RELATE TO LAND RIGHTS?
In Malaysia, the majority of Orang Asli live in rural areas or in remote parts of the forest, rely on agriculture and subsistence activities to survive, and typically do not own the land that they live, roam and hunt, and cultivate on.

To achieve food security and sovereignty among the Orang Asli, we must ensure that they respectively...

at all times, have physical, social, and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food that meets their food preferences and dietary needs for an active and healthy life

have the right to produce and procure their food using traditional practices and cultures according to their taste preferences, food and cultivation knowledge.

So when Orang Asli are denied access to land, fishing, gathering and hunting grounds, they are deprived of the means and access towards the realisation of the right to food. But when Orang Asli have access to land and the freedom to practice their traditional ways of living, food systems and knowledge, as well as traditional subsistence activities, they are able to achieve a certain degree of food security during the pandemic.

A few of the Orang Asli communities we closely work with have proven that with agency over their land, they can provide for themselves in dignity through their own means, despite the challenges.

Although supply chains were disrupted and wet markets were closed in the first lockdown, the Seletar fishermen at Kampung Sungai Temon, Johor Bahru could still fish and feed themselves, while providing protein sources to the people of Johor. The pandemic has proved that Orang Seletar's intimate relationship and knowledge to the sea are essential to food security.

This poses the question of 'supply':

Which is more important-more developments or protecting the land, seas, and people?

There is an oversupply of buildings in Johor, and these developments are threatening the existence and homes of the Orang Seletar, as well as the coastal marine life.

Nevertheless, not many Orang Asli communities have the same opportunity, especially the ones who live in a forest reserve or who live in remote areas and were unable to sell their produce during the lockdown.

The Semai community at Kampung Kenderung, Pos Lenjang, Pahang still actively plant hill paddy, which heirloom seeds and cultivation knowledge are handed down from their ancestors. It is customary practice to prepare the land in July, and then dibble the land for direct seeding the month after in time for monsoon. Then every new year, in January, is the harvest season.

According to our host family, their rice stock is enough to last up to 6 months when it is a good harvest. In between the harvest seasons, they would grow a variety of plants, one of them being the ubi kayu, which serves as a rice alternative.

They also planted other cash crops such as peanuts, however when the head of the family drove to Cameron Highlands during one of the MCOs, he was unable to find any buyer-also noting there was a drop in rubber sales as no one came into the villages to buy from them.

He said that when they have an excess of raw materials, such as ubi kayu and peanuts, they would look for buyers. Land also means income to the Orang Asli, as they would sell their harvest or forest produce to buy food unavailable in the forest such as salt, oil, flour, and baby milk to achieve the ideal nutritional balance.

Nutritional deficiency among Orang Asli children is not uncommon, as the communities who live in protected areas (Hutan Simpan Kekal) cannot hunt or fish protected species. Plus, they are required to have a permit to sell forest products such as bamboo and rattan, which allows the middleman to profit the most while Orang Asli does the toughest work of harvesting them.

With the excess of ubi kayu and peanuts, there is an opportunity for Bek and his family to turn them into products if they continue to face difficulty in selling the raw material-something which we can learn and apply from the next community.

At Kampung Orang Asli Sungai Buloh, Selangor, Hanim Apeng's ingenuity in creating products from raw materials, and then selling them at markets or word of mouth, has made her quite the entrepreneur.

Besides her best-selling artisanal soap, Hanim makes and sells rempeyek and kerepek pisang as a way to support her family (among other things ranging from crafts to upcycled school bags, and more).

During the first MCO, Hanim and her husband started tending to their garden. The results? They didn't need to shop for veggies and only ate their harvest. Of course, in her words, you have to be motivated and also "kena rajin". As the saying goes, you reap what you sow.

Nevertheless, she noted that she was blessed to have received many opportunities to learn different crafts and to kickstart her home business.

When we went to Pos Piah, Perak early 2020 before the lockdown, the villagers of Kampung Kembok always made sure we were well fed. The ingredients (except oil and santan) were either sourced from the surrounding river and forests or from their kebun-pucuk ubi, pucuk paku, umbut bayas, ikan tengas, ubi kayu...

If you're wondering, umbut bayas is the inside of the stem of Pokok Bayas, or Mountain Nibong Palm that is native to our rainforest. We eat the apical bud of this tree as vegetables, which has a similar texture of jackfruit. Slice it into smaller bits and cook it into soup, and it would have the texture of mushroom.

Deeper into Pos Piah is Kampung Pen, which is the original village before they were moved downstream during the insurgency period. Some villagers eventually went back to their original home after the insurgency.

Here lives an aged man with his wife, who both cultivate the land surrounding their humble abode, growing plants such as corn, spinach, pumpkin, okra, tobacco, and the sacred sekoi. The elders of Kampung Pen told us that the sekoi is considered a sacred plant. They can't have the sekoi planted beyond the village. It was the staple food offered from the divinity way before the Temiar people learnt to consume ubi kayu and hill paddy rice.

According to one of our coordinators, the Pos Piah community received food aid during the lockdown. However, they said that it's not what the community want or need. The type of help they had been asking throughout the prolonged waves of pandemic and lockdown were either taking actions against timber logging in their areas or healthcare and medical issues.
"People do not understand. We are not poor. We have plenty of food. We gather our diet from the jungle, or we plant them in our farm. Our hardship is about the land (rights)," said one of the villagers. THE BIGGER BATTLES BEYOND COVID-19
While we continue our fight against the pandemic, the Orang Asli are concurrently facing bigger battles: deforestation, land grab, and climate change.

The five villages above have shown that with access to land, the villagers are able to feed themselves. It goes to show that land is crucial in achieving household food security for the Orang Asli. Local communities must be given autonomy to maintain control over their food systems in order to build resilience against the risk of future external shocks

If taken away, it threatens not only their right to food, but also their culture and tradition as subsistence-based activities such as agriculture, hunting and fishing form an important part of Orang Asli's cultural identity-tied closely to these activities are handcrafts, harvest festival and its accompanying singing and dancing, and folklores.

That said, heightened attention on and work toward ensuring secure land rights for Orang Asli communities are integral for sustained, universal food security. Not just for our indigenous communities, but also the wellbeing of the nation as a whole.

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Drawing links between food security, culture and tradition - Gerimis Art

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A year later, we're back in Movement Control Order (MCO). Although Malaysia has experienced many calamities, such as the devastating 2014-15 flood, disaster relief is something we need to urgently work on. When COVID-19 hit, nothing could have prepared us for the pandemic crisis we are in today-but it's everything that we must learn from.

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Gerimis Art Project (2023) When we take care of the land, the land takes care of us.

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Gerimis Art Project (2023) When we take care of the land, the land takes care of us.

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'When we take care of the land, the land takes care of us.' - Gerimis Art

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Ghazaly Uju, 47, sat across us, his hand gesturing an outward to inward motion as he explained how their bodies are strong and healthy, that they'll grow old without much complications, when they source food from the land, forests, and seas.

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Morrison, K. et al (2022) Making Socio-Ecological Art and Science Collaboration Work

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Morrison, K. et al (2022) Making Socio-Ecological Art and Science Collaboration Work

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Lacy, K (2023) Labour of Listening in Troubled Times

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Lacy, K (2023) Labour of Listening in Troubled Times

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The Labour of Listening in Troubled Times by Kate Lacey

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“… listening takes work, makes things work, is work in and of
itself …” (Lloyd 2009: 80)

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Tsing, A, L,. (2015) The Mushroom At The End Of The World

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Tsing, A, L,. (2015) The Mushroom At The End Of The World

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D'Souza, R. (2012) “Rights, Action, Change: Organise For What?”

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D'Souza, R. (2012) “Rights, Action, Change: Organise For What?”

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Malathy, N. (2012) A Fleeting Moment in Times of Cognitive Dissonance.

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Malathy, N. (2012) A Fleeting Moment in Times of Cognitive Dissonance.

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D'Souza, R. (2013) 'Listening to the Elders as Keepers of the Water'

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D'Souza, R. (2013) 'Listening to the Elders as Keepers of the Water'

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Whelan, F. (2014). TEN – Territory, Encounter & Negotiation, A critical memoir by a socially engaged artist

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Whelan, F. (2014). TEN – Territory, Encounter & Negotiation, A critical memoir by a socially engaged artist

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Whelan, F., & Ryan, K. (2016) Beating the Bounds of Socially-Engaged Art? A Transdisciplinary Dialogue on a Collaborative Art Project with Youth in Dublin, Ireland

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Whelan, F., & Ryan, K. (2016) Beating the Bounds of Socially-Engaged Art? A Transdisciplinary Dialogue on a Collaborative Art Project with Youth in Dublin, Ireland

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Fiona Whelan and Kevin Ryan.

Introduction
Reflecting on the custom of "beating the bounds" as practiced in central France, Christoph Campos describes it as "a collective proprietorial gesture" - an annual ritual replete with ceremonial symbolism whereby members of the local community survey the boundaries of the territory they inhabit, which is also a way of renewing the communal bond. [1] What might it mean to beat the bounds of socially-engaged art today? Viewed at the intersection of past and present, or more specifically, through the lens of social movement theory, the field of engaged art might be said to be entering the end-stages of a process which is analogous to the life-cycle. According to this "four stages" theory, social movements "emerge" and "coalesce" before passing through a period of "bureaucratization," after which they enter a terminal period of "decline." [2] Interestingly, this final stage need not result in failure brought about by repression or co-optation. Instead it may also follow from a movement's success. If this analytical frame were to be stretched over the history of avant-garde movements, then it would be tempting to conclude that whenever a constellation of experimental practices is given a proper name - whether an "ism" or a paradigm - rigor mortis is soon to follow. Although the field lives on, it loses its capacity to unsettle or transform. In short, beating the bounds is a way of affirming communal identity and territory, but this may come at the price of reinstating the existing order of things.

This might seem like a dismal way to begin a discussion on socially-engaged art, and we hasten to add that it is not a conclusion so much as a point of departure - a working hypothesis might be a better way of pitching it - but in any case a concern that has brought us together with the aim of conversing across the boundaries of collaborative art and sociology. Moreover we have found it necessary to dispense with meta-theoretical frames such as the "four stages" model outlined above, focusing instead on situated practice as a line of approach to a question that follows from our hypothesis: how can socially-engaged art avoid the failures associated with "recuperation" while at the same time surviving its own successes? [3]

The center of gravity for our conversation is a durational project that spans a decade of socially-engaged art practice in one urban context in Dublin in the Republic of Ireland (hereafter referred to as "Ireland"). Traversing collaborative art, youth work, critical pedagogy and activism, this project is documented in Fiona's critical memoir published under the title TEN: Territory, Encounter & Negotiation, which both recollects and re-presents the field of practice as a story that tensions its own history - its own conditions of existence. We believe that deep-dialogical engagement with the context and process encapsulated by TEN offers critical perspectives on the pitfalls and possible futures for engaged practice more generally.
1. Chronos: Historicizing Socially-Engaged Art in Ireland
1.1 Power as a distribution of places and parts
Kevin: In your work as an educator on the MA Socially Engaged Art in NCAD, you have developed a module where you "map the field" with students by approaching the history of socially-engaged art as a multiplicity of "interrelated and overlapping trajectories." I understand this to mean that any attempt to write the history of socially-engaged art can only ever be partial in both senses of that word. While I fully support this standpoint, I'd like to begin by reflecting on one specific genealogical thread. I'm referring to the history and legacies of community-based art in Ireland - that a critical reading of this history might help to unfold the field by examining some of the ways that the past is folded into the present. [4]

During the 1970s, community-based art groups such as The Grapevine Arts Centre in Dublin articulated a deeply political "counter-cultural" ethos. [5] Without wishing to overgeneralize, the thrust of this politicized wing of community arts was framed by the idea - or vision - of "cultural democracy," which of course had international resonance in the context of those times. By the time CAFE (Creative Activity for Everyone) was established in 1983 as an umbrella organization to co-ordinate community arts in Ireland, there was already a tension emerging in the form of a question: what exactly is community art? [6] This question would have the effect of disciplining what had originated as a nebulous and unruly arena of experimental practice. By the mid-1980s all roads seemed to point towards the need for training and accreditation as a way of developing community arts as an organised "sector" (which chimes with the concept of "coalescence" mentioned in our introduction above). This was a long way from the ethos of early community arts practitioners, many of whom were self-taught. [7] Within the space of roughly a decade, the question "what is community art" had been answered and the field had undergone a profound transformation. The radical "commitment to achieving social and cultural equality through creative action" was still in place, yet the method seemed to jar with this commitment to equality. [8] As a self-identified sector community art became a governable entity. It also positioned itself within the space of a paradox in that achieving the core objective of equality through creative action was deemed to necessitate further bureaucratization and professionalization. This eroded the possibility of meaningful equality by instituting a rupture between artist and non-artist, thereby establishing an asymmetrical power relation that would render the very idea of empowerment-through-art deeply problematic. [9]

This distinction between artist/non-artist reappears in your own practice Fiona, though importantly it takes the form of a problem to be explored through collaboration. I'm thinking specifically of your triangulated approach to dialogue. From reading your memoir, it seems that this mode of subject-positioning - whereby each "side" of the triangle is distinct from the others - created a degree of friction. [10] Yet this tensioning of power relations also seems to have been productive precisely because it was given representational form within the context of your collaborative practice. To track this back to when you commenced your work with Rialto Youth Project, I wonder whether your trialogical approach might also be indicative of socially-engaged art entering into a deeper dialogue with its own history, thereby attempting to transfigure the field?

Fiona: In order to address your question I need to first introduce Rialto Youth Project (RYP), a community based youth organization that has hosted me on a twelve year residency. Rialto is a village in the south inner city of Dublin, and RYP was established in 1981 (though its origins can be traced back to the early 1970s). With a local voluntary management team, a manager of over 30 years and a strong diverse staff, RYP has acquired a reputation for taking an independent stance, refusing to endorse the depoliticised language in the State's classification of Rialto as "disadvantaged," and instead adopting the defiant language of "oppression" and "marginalization." [11] Through the 1980s and 1990s, when youth work was being steered by policies with minimal focus on inequality, RYP built a strong capacity for arts-based work committed to the exploration and representation of social issues - including youth incarceration and the HIV/AIDS crisis. [12, 13] Entering this organization as an artist in residence in 2004, I encountered what Kester has described as a "politically coherent community." [14, 15] I engaged with a micro-political economy made up of strong community development groups negotiating with state powers in relation to the physical and social regeneration of the area. [16] After three years of collaboration between artist, youth workers, and young people, What's the Story? Collective (2007-11) was developed as an interdisciplinary group responding to this triangulation of positions that occupied the field. [17]

In the spirit of Rancière's "ignorant schoolmaster," equality became a starting point for our diverse Collective rather than a destination. [18] Holding and working through the complexities attached to each of our points on the triangle was important. Any removal of subject identities presented a risk of suggesting some kind of neutralized equality that would flatten the cultural hierarchy we were working to overcome, a dangerous move towards a model of social "inclusion." So in conscious opposition, the triangle was symbolically laid flat, highlighting our differences in knowledge, class, background and our commitment to a horizontal process. These would be explored in practice over time as the Collective went on to co-develop and co-author a three-year collaborative project exploring power and policing with multiple manifestations, including a series of events engaging the national police force.

I was in dialogue with Youth Work practice and its historical relationship with Community Arts, but importantly I entered this dialogue as a product of the dominant educational tradition supporting signature/market-orientated practice, where terms like "community artist" had become othered. Holding my title of "artist" with absolute determination I had gone on to engage in new postgraduate courses, becoming part of a first generation of professionalized practitioners in the field of community based and public art practice. [19] The development of the triangulated Collective brought youth work practice and legacies of community arts into conversation with contemporary critical discourses occupying the field of collaborative and socially-engaged practice, especially as they related to power. Through our structure and our shared interests, power relations were explored, confronted and embodied while power was grown collectively. Our practice slowly moved in from the points and sides of the triangle, to create a temporary hybrid collaborative space in the center, demanding a complimentary process of learning and unlearning.

1.2 Depoliticizing inequality: empowering the "disadvantaged" subject
Kevin: You've invoked an interesting distinction which is indicative of a power struggle staged on the terrain of language - between RYP's understanding of inequality and the policy discourse of "disadvantage." Reading your memoir I was struck by the fact that some members of the Collective reacted negatively to being discursively framed in media reports and by state agencies as "disadvantaged" and "at-risk" - they seemed to resent and resist being represented in this way. [20] You emphasize listening as well as voice in your practice, and it seems to me that if we listen closely to the young people you have worked with we can detect a deep understanding of the constitutive power of language and discourse - a keen awareness of how the shared meanings we embody in everyday life condition and constrain thought, speech and action.

Fiona: You are absolutely right. Such labeling first came into focus two years prior to the development of the Collective when I traveled to Philadelphia with a group of young people from Rialto (aged 14-16) and a youth worker to work with an arts organization and another youth group on a public mural. Our process there included some engagement with US media and a report later emerged on Fox News in which the Dublin group's interviews about their enjoyment of the art project were interspersed with descriptions of their home place as "the saddest housing project in the city" and "one of Ireland's roughest neighbourhoods." [21] This external framing uncomfortably positioned our practice within what Kester (from James Clifford) refers to as the '"salvage" paradigm in which the artist takes on the task of " 'improving' the implicitly flawed subject." [22] In this context, the US media's representation of the group was a very significant moment as it publicly highlighted a powerful framing that each young person was inherently familiar with and had embodied to some degree. Creating new ways of working that could harness another type of power was necessary, while also developing ways to speak back to such power. The Collective was developed shortly afterwards and many from this group of young people were central to its progression.

Kevin: So the external framing you refer to was also a catalyst for resistance - part of a learning process that has shaped the direction and development of the Collective's work. I'd like us to broaden the context here by returning to your earlier point concerning a "dangerous move towards a model of social inclusion." We've touched on the power of language, but this is also partly about the language of power, which was radically altered during the 1980s and 1990s - not just in Ireland but in the EC/EU: inequality became "disadvantage," poverty was subsumed by the concept of social "exclusion," and the policy of "inclusion" began to articulate what I think of as a sociological thesis of unintended effects. [23] What I mean here is that inequality was reframed as an unfortunate by-product of growing prosperity. Nobody was to blame, and redistributing wealth would only prolong the agony by retarding economic growth, so the best policy was to enable the excluded to make the transition from "outside" to "inside" the structure of opportunities - from "exclusion" to "inclusion." [24]

There is a comparison to be made between community art as practiced during this period and the emergence of neo-liberal workfare regimes, and I want to angle this at the issue of scripted participation versus collaborative approaches to engaged art today. The instruments of workfare attempt to "activate" people deemed to be incapacitated by a passive welfare system that instils habits of dependency. Employability thus becomes the responsibility of the individual, while the state offers a menu of training and back-to-work schemes. In the field of community art, the technique of empowerment became analogous to activation in that it aimed to animate latent creative capacities as a way of enabling disadvantaged individuals/communities to "take control of their lives." [25] Activation and empowerment converge on a disadvantaged subject who is acted upon by others, and I think this goes some way to explaining how the field of community art started to become a type of vocational training regime nested within the now dominant welfare-to-work paradigm. [26] There is however an important difference between acting upon and acting with, and this is arguably the crucial consideration when it comes to decisions as to whether or to what extent engaged art can challenge, resist or subvert existing power inequalities. Does this have any bearing on your avowed commitment to collaborative practice, i.e. as opposed to scripted participation?

Fiona: Yes. When What's the Story? Collective was formed, an examination of power relations was foregrounded as power was examined at the level of our own collaborative structure as I described it above. Concurrently, an important feature of the practice was a collection of anonymous testimonies documenting lived experience of power and powerlessness gathered privately from each member of the Collective. These stories influenced the direction of the project as the theme of policing emerged strongly, leading to a series of live events where power was examined, reversed, and performed. You've mentioned my emphasis on listening as a feature of the practice, which is of primary importance here when speaking about the power of language and practices of activating people. The concept of an authentic voice is well recognized in youth work and community based arts, with many projects uncritically describing the act of "giving voice." As the theme of policing emerged and influenced the direction of our project, young people specifically named that they wanted "to be heard" by Gardaí (Irish police). The resulting series of public works from What's the Story? Collective brought together the authors of the anonymous personal stories relating to power and policing, the stories themselves and multiple publics, constituting acts of voice and listening that were interdependent. The Collective's emphasis on listening was a way of countering the assumption that the opportunity to express a grievance is sufficient when it comes to righting a wrong. The deficiency of this approach is both highlighted and addressed in Alan Grossman and Áine O'Brien's work with new immigrant communities in Ireland. Grossman and O'Brien frame the relationship between voicing and listening as a "working dialectic" that orchestrates movement towards "the politics of impression...a move in which mediated communication more readily presents itself as a relational space of intersecting practices and identities." [27] Inviting those holding state power into a relational space where they would listen to young people was unique, particularly when compared to existing state-sponsored programs between young people and Gardaí, which are largely based on the assumption that young people from so-called "disadvantaged" areas harbor the potential to become future criminals and deviants. [28] In the dialogical encounter The Day in Question (2009), enacted behind closed doors at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA), a newly recruited group of Gardaí seated on one side of a triangle would begin by reading aloud a collection of young people's anonymous testimonies describing diverse and largely negative experiences of policing: in homes, in Garda stations, and in public space. [29] To relate this to Grossman and O'Brien's dialectic: the Gardaí were listening through the act of speaking, and this was further layered, in that the reading was staged in the presence of the Collective who occupied another side of the triangle along with a group of invited witnesses who formed the third side (Fig. 1). The collection of narratives was not encountered by the Gardaí prior to the event as the written "truth," but experienced only through re-enacted live readings in the presence of a group of anonymous authors. Members of the Collective listened to their own "voices" articulated by the Gardaí, while the invited witnesses experienced what is referred to above as a relational space of intersecting identities, after which all parties engaged in a facilitated conversation which unearthed many complex issues.

In this triangulation, temporary reversals of power were enacted and a counter narrative aired, the practice comparable to parrhesia, the kind of speech act described by Foucault as speaking truth to power. [30] Through a series of related public events over three years, representation and listening occurred simultaneously to the individual storytellers, to the Collective, and to a range of publics as part of a continuum of developing and shifting identities that would speak back to the categorization and classification of communities. [31] The project climaxed with the exhibition and residency Policing Dialogues (2010) in The LAB, an art space managed by Dublin City Council, where the cumulative process - presented as an exhibition - served as a backdrop to an active public exploration of complex neighborhood relations of power (Fig. 2 & 3). [32]
Central to this was the closing of the gallery to the public for a two-day dialogue between the same group of Gardaí and the Collective who would identify and examine the conditions that contributed to their beliefs, behaviours and ability to act differently. While the first reading event was controlled by the Collective and had consciously inverted the existing power relationship temporarily, this dialogue one year later was planned by a core representative group of Gardaí, youth workers, young people, and myself and included external facilitators, who identified a "stuck pattern" evident in the behaviour of both groups. The learning from this dialogue and the full program of events was channelled into another space, after-hours in the gallery. Seated on an illuminated triangle, the core representative group would meet regularly to collate the learning and co-develop a training program for new Gardaí assigned to the Dublin South Central district addressing agreed gaps in existing provision (Fig 4). [33]
In addition to speaking to power from below, the act of speaking in public was also central to our collective practice. The latter phase of the project was supported by a transdisciplinary advisory group that represented a combined knowledge base of art, youth/community work, and sociology, who would steer the project at its most public moment while external professionals including a sociologist and public broadcaster were invited to critically engage with the collective's process and emerging content. [34] While multiple discourses were feeding the process, positioning the public phases of the work in contemporary art spaces was intended to break down something of the divide between a signature and co-authored practice and exercise a right to position public issues in public venues.
However, this was not without its problems. The collective authoring reflected our horizontal working relationship but the theme of the work was closely linked to the lives and homeplace of one third of the triangle - young people were both subjects and authors. Their anonymous stories were at the core of the project but they were also central to the mediation of these stories and their representation in the public domain. Holding this representational struggle centrally, we engaged in intensive media training to avoid young people being negatively stereotyped as they spoke of the work. However the theme of the work coupled with the structuring of the Collective as a triangle of subject identities contributed to an occasional reading of the young people's role as "participants" or in one case as merely "subjects." Their non-professional status as "young person" alongside youth worker and artist, skewed the nature of the triangle at its most public moment. I had given much consideration to my position as an artist and the youth workers were operating in their own professional capacity, but due to the nature of the field and the context of our collaboration, one third of the triangle had been appointed their titles from the outset. The residency nature of Policing Dialogues allowed us to talk publicly about this issue as it emerged in the media, with young people publicly questioning the status of their own classification. [35] Acting with young people to collectively explore power relations, we had surpassed the triangulated structure associated with the sector. We also considered a separation of the Collective from Rialto Youth Project which, by association, classified the young people as "youth at risk," thereby exploring the possibilities for young people to self-identify differently and considering ourselves momentarily as an artists' collective.
Kevin: If I could just take stock of this complex and layered process: although the triangle was configured horizontally within the Collective, from the outside - as it entered the public domain - it was interpreted by some commentators as a hierarchical pyramid. To come back to the distinction between scripted and collaborative practice, it might be important to think about how the macro-political context can encroach upon and (de)form the meaning of collaborative art by subjecting it to scripted interpretations. In the context of What's the Story?, the positions of youth worker and artist were publically recognized and affirmed, while the other members of the Collective were "read" through the lens of socially-scripted categories derived from the fields of public policy (youth-at-risk), social science (subjects), and art (participation). [36] If you think your way back to the beginning, and in light of the difficulty of external framing as it emerged much later, I wonder whether there was a missed opportunity to destabilize this mode of representation. If the Collective had - as you suggest - presented itself as an artists' collective and refused to qualify that in terms of academic diplomas, degrees and so forth, might that have been a way of insisting that commentators such as journalists and art critics at least ask (and listen) before jumping to conclusions?

Fiona: The triangulated Collective was developed in response to a youth arts development model, repositioning those well understood roles within the field of practice in a horizontal collaborative structure. In advance of the Collective's most public manifestation - Policing Dialogues - a dismantling of the triangle to reframe as an "artists' collective" would indeed have solved a type of classification that emerged with this public phase of the work, but the structure was bound by its origins, highlighting your original point about the controlled nature of the sector within which the practice has come to exist - youth work is a model of non-formal education committed to "aiding and enhancing the personal and social development of young people through their voluntary participation." [37] In the youth sector there are plenty of rigid models of work where youth are paid, like your earlier examples of back-to-work schemes and training programs. The triangulation came with an understanding that artist and youth worker were professional positions and received payment. By their association to RYP, young people were engaged through their voluntary participation in a developmental process. The triangulated collective was an experiment with this structure to see how far power could be explored and tested. Following the rich dialogical process that unearthed a multiplicity of identities and changing roles over four years, we agreed to disband the Collective in its particular arrangement and proposed a range of other options should we consider reforming (a conversation which remains live). Reframing as an artist's collective mid-project, in advance of this major public phase could have been detrimental. It could not have happened solely in branding terms, but would have required a major process of restructuring including the distribution of funds to all the "artists" which would go against the core youth work principle of voluntary participation. It is also important to note that the youth worker did not want to be an artist, and was committed to the process within her existing professional capacity, while departing from the organization was not an option at that time either due to the level of support they provided the young people in the process. While the lack of a professional status attached to "young person" invited the "socially-scripted categories" that you identify, the reality is that the youth worker and the organizational support for young people were integral to the project (as was my artistic process). It would be dangerous to hide the value of this work, particularly in light of the ongoing problem of funding cutbacks as the Irish State slowly dismantles the youth and community sector while also subjecting practitioners to new modes of evaluation and control. While young people continue to experience multiple oppressive forces, new policy and funding streams place emphasis on practices that promote "youth employability." [38] Creative, opened-ended, collaborative cultural processes are being eroded by policies and programs that exert pressure on young people to think of themselves as "job-seekers" and assume responsibility for their own employability.
2. Reprise: Future Trajectories
2.1 The onto-politics of managerialism: the socially-engaged artist as administrator?
Kevin: I want to engage with the issue you've raised concerning new forms of control, which may have an important bearing on the future of socially-engaged practice. Claire Bishop makes an interesting observation in her book Artificial Hells which has relevance here, and I think it relates also to our earlier exchange on the professionalization of community art. Bishop is referring specifically to Britain and New Labour after the Party took office in 1997, but I think her point has traction on the Irish context too. The practical question built into arts-related public expenditure in the UK was "what can the arts do for society," meaning projects that might ameliorate social problems such as unemployment and crime. [39] The situation in Ireland was broadly similar, though this is much more than dependency on funding - which is one of the ways that an integrated and organized sector becomes governable. Bishop also notes that community-based artists became "subject to managerial control," and one notable manifestation of this in Ireland was the technique of project evaluation. To some extent this was because compliance with evaluation protocols became a condition of accessing public funding for community arts, but the technique was also adopted by practitioners as a means of demonstrating the efficacy of accredited community arts training to funders and policy-makers. [40] From experience I know that practitioners might play the game of evaluation for pragmatic reasons - tick the boxes, file the report, and keep the funding coming so that the project can continue. This might be interpreted as passive resistance, but even feigned compliance can help to legitimize modes of control. Evaluative monitoring ties socially-engaged practice to ends that originate from outside the context of practice itself. But there is an additional complication in that the scope of evaluative monitoring has since expanded enormously and is now part of a signifying chain with links to "accountability" and "transparency," so that to resist being governed in this way is to be seen to oppose core democratic ideals. As educators and artists, it seems we are increasingly obliged (or pressured?) to play the bureaucratic game of transparency and accountability, knowing full well that this entails some degree of surveillance and indirect control. To link this to our earlier discussion on power - this is a particularly perplexing form of power given that it manifests as a paradox of "regulated autonomy." [41]

Fiona: This is a really challenging point. In order to address it, I need to position my work somewhat. To borrow a phrase from artist Jay Koh, my practice could be described as "relationally responsive," operating without the subservience of facilitation but not with the autonomy of intervention. [42] Built in one geographic context over twelve years, my collaborative practice occupies the terrain of direct and dialogical engagement with others as opposed to other antagonisic, protest based or interventionist approaches. It's a space of enquiry, one of not knowing whereby the learning is not prescribed. Over twelve years, short-term funding has been sought from a variety of sources, some youth based, some arts based, depending on the specific phase of work. [43] While a part of the work met the criteria for each diverse fund, it was their succession that was important in feeding the cumulative nature of the work. In the face of a short-term funding landscape, I learned from the manager of the youth project to think long-term. In addition to the issues with arts funding that you describe, I have seen huge changes to the field of youth work over the last decade. While much important developmental work occurs with young people, this increasingly conservative sector (with notable exceptions) often fails to challenge the underlying problem of inequality. The funding landscape has undergone a massive change which I have witnessed first-hand in Rialto, with the governance system you describe leading to the need for a "demonstration model of youth work" to prevail. With the sector now at risk of being eradicated, the RYP is working to communicate the "value" of its non-formal educational practice. Logic models have entered the language of planning and a complex database for assessment now takes up much of a youth worker's time. While the organization works to convey the complexity of its practice, the State continues to cut its budget.

In this context I have come to describe my practice in terms of its distinct features - the practice is ideas led and interest based. The form of a work is not pre-determined but emerges from the process. The learning is also to be found. The terms "Territory," "Encounter," and "Negotiation" that I use in my 2014 book title summarize the philosophical and methodological approaches to collaboration while also communicating a cycle - from any negotiation, new territories emerge, new encounters necessary and so forth. I believe that the arts need to hold open the space of not-knowing in the face of the increasing structures of governance that require practitioners to know, both in advance - in the naming of learning outcomes, and in retrospect - in the summary of effect. The difficulty of this ambition is highlighted in the MA Socially Engaged Art at NCAD of which I am a joint Coordinator, which focuses on the relationship between socially-engaged arts practice and pedagogy. Embedded in this MA program is a further education teaching qualification, necessary for those considering a career as a teacher or facilitator of learning within an increasingly diverse further education sector, one in a state of flux as policy and structural reforms have impacted on provision and pedagogical practices. Some modules on the MA SEA explore educational theory and practice along with curriculum development, while others are concerned with the practice and critical discourse circulating the field of socially-engaged practice. While the transdisciplinary enquiry offers rich potential for students to develop unique radical practices at the intersection of socially-engaged practice and informal, non-formal, and further educational settings, students can struggle to identify new territories for hybrid practices to develop. The level of governance and control that arts and educational practice are experiencing can push them to conform to evaluation and governance structures to secure funding and status. This is further experienced by staff in an increasingly governed higher education sector.

Kevin: In terms of how this new managerialism is impacting on the broader arena of higher education (i.e. not just art colleges), of late I find myself looking to something that Michel Foucault once said in an interview. For me this is a way of remembering what is at stake in a situation where academic freedom is being eroded, but I also think this has a bearing on how you describe both your practice and your understanding of the arts. Asked by the interviewer to label himself (are you a philosopher, historian, structuralist...?) Foucault replied by saying that it wasn't important for him to know exactly what he was, and he continued by explaining that, "The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning. If you knew when you began a book what you were going to say at the end, do you think you would have the courage to write it? What is true for writing and for love relationships, is also true for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we do not know what will be the end." [44] If Foucault were alive today, the response to these words from university management would most likely be to insist on a five-year research plan, with specific attention to detail regarding funding, outputs, and impact. The ethos of openness that you defend - and rightly so in my view - is being erased by forms of surveillance and control that measure and rank comparable entities, whether individuals, projects, services, or organizations, which is also an effective way of instituting the logic of competition. But what makes this technology of power particularly insidious is that it is insulated by the language of "transparency" and "accountability." The modus operandi is about ensuring quality, rewarding excellence and delivering value for money, which requires everything to be transparent so that everyone is equally accountable. But a minority excel only because others are deemed deficient, so this is a serious game of power - one that operates by generating hierarchies and intensifying inequality among equals. [45] As artists and academics, we have the freedom to initiate and manage our own projects, but current trends indicate that these will only have validity and longevity if we can demonstrate verifiable "impact" in the form of tangible social and economic benefits. Increasingly, these impacts must be identified before the project even begins, so that our autonomy is regulated by norms and procedures that direct and constrain what can be done if a project is to continue beyond the current round of funding and review. As argued by Stephen Ball (he is writing about teachers, but this could apply equally well to the field of socially-engaged art) this governmentality does not simply change what artists and academics do, it also changes who they are. In short, evaluative monitoring is not simply a form of indirect control but also an onto-political struggle for the artist's "soul." [46]

Earlier you discussed how RYP has carefully and consciously negotiated the power of language and the language of power ("disadvantage"), and you have also explained how you manage to keep a degree of distance from the encroaching managerialism by using bundles of short-term funding packages to support long-range objectives. And yet, as you point out, the demonstration model of youth work is fast becoming a reality. With respect to the features of your collaborative method - the openness that allows form to emerge through process and for learning to be both generated and discovered through the practice - it seems unavoidable that at some level, whether purposefully or reluctantly, as an engaged artist you must encounter and enter into negotiation with the technologies of power that shape the field (or territory) within which your practice is situated.

Fiona: The professional framing of my practice and the request for it to be funded, place me in the game of power and control that you describe but the constant circulation of ideas prevent despair from setting in. As argued by Freire, one of the most tragic illnesses of our societies is "the bureaucratization of the mind." [47] I value the mind as "a site of a political struggle" in the face of the many forces that try to exercise control over one's consciousness. [48] Within the arts, it is also important to acknowledge the power of the reputational economy that controls the field. For some time, the open ended nature of my durational hybrid practice, with long hidden phases and public moments that traversed any specific sectoral or disciplinary framing, contributed to the marginal position of the practice in the Irish arts scene. Furthermore, the geographic position of the work in a local youth project, away from any major commissioning body or arts festival, remove it from the instruments of power that operate the arts as a reputational economy, and further position the work outside of mainstream critique. As I mentioned, occasionally positioning the work in high profile art venues was a conscious move to engage and confront this power structure. Furthermore, in response to our own collaborative process, we adopted a number of approaches to integrate external layers of critical thinking to complement our own and to gather the learning from the practice as it developed. These included mentoring, transdisciplinary advisory teams, inviting external "witnesses" to engage with the work over time, and collective writing and presentation formats. New knowledge was encountering the cumulative process and emerging from it simultaneously. While a public discourse did emerge from Policing Dialogues on radio and TV in relation to the content and theme of the work, the arts media largely ignored it, with the major arts review show on Irish television reducing it to "youth arts" and refusing to engage with it. My choice to self-publish TEN was to position a story of a decade of durational practice into a critical register and funding landscape more focused on individual projects rather than practice learning. Attempting to collate learning into categories of "impact" is obviously short-sighted. Speaking about the armature of evaluation which is brought to bear on this field of practice and the request to measure impact in particular, artist Ailbhe Murphy asks, "...was there a crash?" She goes on to observe: "In this particular evaluative arena the collision occurs when the institutionally sanctioned technocratic inquiry meets the polyphonic speculations of a relational network and that can only play out and is most often felt as a form of discursive violence." [49] While individual evaluation systems were tolerated as they confronted our collaborative practice, TEN was my attempt to communicate something bigger than a fragmented set of learnings outcomes. The effect of the work is not yet entirely realized, the polyvocal and multi-faceted practice in constant flux as those involved continue to navigate their own individual and collective paths. Significantly for me, it's important to recognize my increased visibility as a practitioner since presenting Policing Dialogues and self-publishing TEN and the effect that has on the funding process, opportunities for the work, and perception of the collaborative process. Furthermore, I now occupy an increased position of power (since 2013) in influencing the field as we understand it, through my role in NCAD. As I re-negotiate my position in the field, my practice is a product of the structures of power, in conversation with those structures and part of shaping them.

2.2 Narrating power/contesting power: doxa and praxis
Kevin: From reading your memoir and conversing with you, I have a sense that you are continually re-negotiating how you position yourself within the field. As a reflexive process on your part, this might be conceptualized as immanent critique, a process that moves along a recursive arc connecting present to past - or as I phrased it earlier, a type of genealogical undertaking whereby we enter into dialogue with the field's conditions of existence. I'm thinking in particular of the method of inquiry that Foucault once described as "historical ontology," which was his way of posing the question: how have we come to be who we are, which also opens out the possibility of thinking ourselves anew. [50] This is partly about conducting a critical diagnostics of the present and partly about constructing a horizon of possibilities. The real difficulty of course commences when it comes to orchestrating the ethico-political step that moves us toward that horizon, because this is the moment when decisions are made concerning what to do and how to do it, which in turn commences a process of foreclosure: some possibilities are organized into the realm of action and experience while others are excluded. The moment of decision is yet another manifestation of power, and is perhaps reason to reflect critically on the relation between theory and practice.

I would see your practice as being grounded in complex and layered negotiations with power/knowledge. On the more tangible level are two forms of relational power: one that articulates inequalities between those who exercise power and those who are subject to power (as with Policing Dialogues), and another whereby power is co-produced through collaboration (within the triangulated space of the Collective). A distinguishing feature of the work you have been doing over the past decade is to create dialogical processes and encounters that bring both types of relational power together. Moreover, there is a volatility to the practice, and your memoir conveys a vivid sense of how working with and through power relations can be challenging for all involved, partly because this entails a type of unlearning and re-perceiving of the "other" (from either side of the power asymmetry), but also because this is a process that tensions the less tangible power of language and discourse. As noted earlier, this is power that constitutes, conditions and constrains the thinkable, sayable, and doable - what you have referred to, from Friere, as the bureaucratization of the mind. To engage with this mode of power is to wrestle not only with the issues and problems we think about, but also with thought itself, or what is sometimes referred to as doxa. [51] To relate this to the idea of folding/unfolding the field, would it be appropriate to suggest that your memoir folds practice back onto itself by taking critical distance from what has been enacted and experienced through practice, and is this what you and Glenn Loughran mean by "praxis of enquiry?" [52]

Fiona: Yes. When I started in Rialto I was absolute in my position as an artist and full of resistance to being institutionalized or instrumentalized. Now twelve years later with the benefits of maturity, the durational experience of the practice, and a critical understanding of the systems that govern and influence the field, I find myself less interested in holding on to anything and more open to being in a constant state of becoming. As soon as TEN was published I questioned my last minute decision to describe myself as a "socially-engaged artist" on the front cover. While I felt "artist" didn't give enough information as to the nature of the content, I'm concerned about what it means to connect one's self to a governable movement. Stories have been a central feature of my practice; the gathering of personal and anonymous lived experience as a way to examine familial, community and State power while also growing communal power in the act of working with the stories collectively and in public. Significantly, the stories are not gathered as data to be frozen. Recognizing the temporality of experience and the intersubjectivity of the act of storytelling, the stories in the projects exist as a vehicle to create movement, re-negotiate one's position, and shift ground. [53] With each encounter, public reading, or visual manifestation, the original story is altered and rethought. I see my practice in a similar vein. Although the specific project we speak about occurred from 2007-11, the knowledge and its value continue to unfold in multiple ways. Methodology and practice learning has fed into a subsequent project called Natural History of Hope (2012-16) between myself and Rialto Youth Project which examines class and gender inequality. The story, and the learning in the work, is alive. I position myself as a practitioner publicly in flux. While the genre of "memoir" is largely associated with an older person looking back on life, I didn't wait to write TEN until I had exited the field and developed an increased reflective position on the decade of work, choosing instead to present the vulnerability of the ongoing practice publicly to be in conversation with a range of others to promote new learning. With theory featuring in the book only as it was in conversation with the practice at a specific time, I am speaking back to this theory and the power structures of the field to keep open a dialogue. Since publishing TEN, I have encountered many new professionals from Psychology, Education, Sociology and Collaborative Arts and subsequent conversations, like our one here, influence current practice and create further movement; the praxis of enquiry remains alive.

Fiona Whelan is a Dublin based artist with a multifaceted practice, committed to exploring power relations through durational, reciprocal engagements with people and place. Her decade long collaboration with a city youth service included an extensive project exploring young people's relationship to power and policing which manifested in multiple dialogical encounters including The Day in Question (2009) in IMMA, Policing Dialogues (2010) at The LAB and Natural History of Hope (2016) at Project Arts Centre. In 2014, she published a critical memoir, TEN: Territory, Encounter & Negotiation as a learning tool for a trans-disciplinary field. Fiona is also joint Course Coordinator of the MA Socially Engaged Art at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin. www.fionawhelan.com

Kevin Ryan is lecturer at the School of Political Science & Sociology, National University of Ireland, Galway and a graduate of the Crawford College of Art & Design in Cork. His research focuses on degrees of freedom, i.e. freedom not as an abstract figure of thought or normative ideal, but rather freedom as an agonistic arena of practice which is conditioned and constrained by historically-constituted relations of power. Kevin is the author of Social Exclusion and the Politics of Order (2007), and co-editor (with Mark Haugaard) of Political Power: The Development of the Field (2012). His articles have been published in Childhood, Critical Horizons, Critical Sociology, the International Journal of Sport Policy and Politics, and The Journal of Political Power.

Acknowledgements
For their time, comments and suggestions, we wish to thank Val Bogan, Roisin Boyd, Eddie Brennan, Alan Grossman, Anthony Haughey, Vukasin Nedelkovic, Giovanna Rampazzo, Fiona Woods, Jim Lawlor, John Bissett, Ailbhe Murphy, and Kim Marie Clark.
Notes
[1] C. Campos, "Beating the Bounds: The Tour de France and National Identity." The Tour de France 1903 - 2003: A Century of Sporting Structures, Meanings and Values. H. Dauncey & G. Hare (eds) (London: Frank Cass, 200) 149-174.

[2] See J. Christiansen, Four Stages of Social Movements, in: Sociology Reference Guide: Theories of Social Movements (Pasadena: Salem Press, 2014).

[3] Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello use this concept to examine "the commodification of difference," but it might also encompass a range of problems more familiarly referred to as "instrumentalization." See L. Boltanski & E. Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism (London & New York: Verso) 441-447.

[4] Though there are comparisons to be made between the history of community art in Ireland and the UK, and perhaps also the US and Australia, much of this work still remains to be done in the Irish case, and something that comes out of the existing literature is that context matters. I also share Claire Bishop's reservations regarding the sketchy nature of source material on the history of community arts in Ireland. As with Bishop's research in the UK, I am relying largely on published reports and evaluations of specific projects and pilot programs. C. Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (Verso: London, 2012) 163, 177.

[5] S. Fitzgerald, "The Beginnings of Community Arts in the Irish Republic." An Outburst of Frankness. S. Fitzgerald (ed) (TASC: Dublin, 2004); City Arts Centre: 25 years 1973-1998 (City Arts Centre: Dublin, 1999) 64-79; P. Clancy, "Rhetoric and Reality: A Review of the Position of Community Arts in State Cultural Policy in the Irish Republic." The Arts Council & TASC: Dublin.

[6] The Arts Council, with financial assistance from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, explored this question through the Arts Community Education (ACE) Project. Chaired by Ciarán Benson, the ACE Project commenced in 1985 and concluded in 1989, and there are some striking contrasts in the final report. Benson wrote in praise of "the commitment of so many people to making the arts a living part of ordinary and personal lives." At the same time, there was a professionalizing emphasis on management, project evaluation, skills, and the need to "train professional community workers and...workers in arts and arts-related processes." CAFE's development as an organization was very much in step with this trend. C. Benson (ed), Art and the Ordinary: The Report of the Arts Community Education Commitee (ACE Committee: Dublin, 1989). On CAFE see J. Bowles, Developing Community Arts: An Evaluation of the Pilot National Arts Worker Course (CAFÉ: Dublin, 1992).

[7] A major landmark in the process of professionalization was the establishment of a Pilot National Arts Worker Course in 1991, which was accredited as an extra-mural diploma from St. Patrick's College Maynooth (J. Bowles, Developing Community Arts).

[8] J. Bowles, Developing Community Arts, vii.

[9] This was pointed out at the time by the Galway-based philosopher Tom Duddy, who wrote an essay for Circa titled "The Politics of Creativity." Adopting the role of "devil's advocate" (his words), Duddy identified "the specter of paternalism...a new type of missionary or ideologue moving in on working-class communities in order to save their creative souls, to convert them to a sense of their own creativity." T. Duddy, "The Politics of Creativity," Circa (67, Spring, 1994) 28-31. Duddy's essay resonates strongly with Grant Kester's "Aesthetic Evangelists: Conversion and Empowerment in Contemporary Community Art," Afterimage (January 1995) 5-11, and Hal Foster's "Artist as Ethnographer in his Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (MIT Press: Cambridge, 1996).

[10] F. Whelan, TEN Territory, Encounter & Negotiation (available from: www.fionawhelan.com, 2014) 75-79.

[11] RYP Mission Statement: "In an age of inequality, where working class people are oppressed, we are working towards bringing about social change, providing an integrated youth service, based on the needs of young people and in particular those most at risk." www.rialtoyouthproject.net

[12] The field of youth work at this time was being steered by a policy framework that now seems broadly progressive, i.e. when compared to more recent policy initiatives (National Youth Policy Committee, Final Report, Stationary Office: Dublin, 1984, also known as the Costello Report after its chair Declan Costello highlighted youth work's concern for social change). Yet looking back at that period, it is notable that there was very minimal focus on inequality, and insofar as the issue of inequality was broached, it was linked to individual and familial influence rather than structural inequality. This was highlighted by Professor Maurice Devlin in Youth Work and the Arts: Continuity and Change, on the occasion of the seminar Territory, Encounter and Negotiation- Collaborative Practice in a Youth Work Context, 5 Nov. 2014, NCAD, Dublin. Available at: http://www.fionawhelan.com/event/ten-seminar-book-launch/

[13] See: www.rialtoyouthproject.net

[14] My entry into Rialto was as an artist in residence in Studio 468, a purpose built artists'studio in St. Andrew's Community Centre, managed by a studio team made up of representatives from the Rialto Development Association, Common Ground; a local arts development organization and the Dublin City Council Arts Office. Beyond the nine month residency, I continued to work with Rialto Youth Project.

[15] G. Kester, 'Aesthetic Evangelists: Conversion and Empowerment in Contemporary Community Art', Afterimage (January 1995)

[16] Rialto includes two large social housing complexes - Fatima Mansions and Dolphin House. Established in 1995 by a Voluntary Board of Management, Fatima Groups United led the successful regeneration of Fatima that has seen the physical and social transformation of the old flats complex. In 2015 Dolphin House began the first phase of physical refurbishment of what is now the largest flat complex in Dublin.

[17] What's the Story? Collective (2007-11) was a collective of youth workers, artist and young people based in Rialto Youth Project Dublin: Gillian O Connor, Graham Dunphy, Nichola Mooney, Nicola Whelan, Garrett Kenny, Jamie Hendrick, Jonathan Myers, Vanessa Kenny, Fiona Whelan.

[18] J. Rancière. The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation (Stanford University Press: California, 1987).

[19] I completed the H-Dip Community Arts Education, NCAD Dublin, 2001-2; MA Art in Public, UU Belfast, 2008-9. I also engaged in The Civil Arts Inquiry (2002-04), a critical phase of work led by City Arts Centre Dublin aimed at formulating the future needs and future direction of community art in Ireland.

[20] TEN, 140-41.

[21] Jane Golden, executive director of the City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program, during a TV interview with Fox News, 2007.

[22] G. Kester, "Dialogical Aesthetics: A Critical Framework for Littoral Art," Variant (9, Winter, 1999/2000); J. Clifford, "The Others: Beyond the 'Salvage' Paradigm," Third Text (3: 6, 1989) 73-78. In a similar vein, UCD Professor of Equality Studies, Kathleen Lynch describes the "charity model of social justice deep rooted in Ireland, based on the institutionalization of unequal relationships," Kathleen Lynch at The Care-Less State: why we need radical egalitarian thinking in Ireland, 5 Nov. 2014, NCAD, Dublin. Audio available at http://www.fionawhelan.com/event/ten-seminar-book-launch/. An edited version of this presentation The Care-Less State of Ireland: Why we need to challenge the Charity model of Social Justice was subsequently published in TransActions #1 and is available at http://transactionspublication.com/2015/06/11/the-care-less-state-of-ireland-why-we-need-to-challenge-the-charity-model-of-social-justice/. Kathleen Lynch is Professor of Equality Studies at the School of Social Justice, University College Dublin.

[23] The community arts sector was a key player in this process of discursive formation in that it began to shoulder the task of administering what might be described as "communities of predicament," such as single-parents, the long-term unemployed, and young people "at risk" of offending or becoming habituated in alcohol and substance abuse. It would henceforth become more difficult to engage in a politics of contestation because the very language of domination - discrimination, exploitation, oppression - was outflanked by the new consensual register of inequality-as-disadvantage. Instituted as a lingua franca used by policy-makers, administrators and activists alike, this lexicon became a solvent that diluted the ideational underpinnings of social conflict, thereby also taming the unruly field of community art.

[24] I have examined this in detail in K. Ryan, Social Exclusion and the Politics of Order (Manchester University Press: Manchester & New York, 2007).

[25] I'm quoting from J. Bowles, Developing Community Arts, 6, 117.

[26] Examples can be seen in the Community Arts Pilot Programme that ran for two years in 1993-94. The final report is saturated from top to bottom (i.e. from funding agencies down to participating groups) with the language of leadership, management, skills, training, and evaluation protocols. Several participating groups define "outcomes" as the need to pay those who participate in the projects. One of the problems here is that people classified as trainees can be paid less than the minimum wage, which is also a key characteristic of workfare and learnfare programs, as well as the more recent innovation of internships. See: Creating a Difference: Report of the Creative Activity for Everyone/Combat Poverty Agency Community Arts Pilot Programme 1993-1994 (CAFE & CPA, Dublin, 1995).

[27] Grossman and O'Brien are here quoting O'Donnell, P., Lloyd, J., and Dreher, T., "Listening, Pathbuilding and Continuations: A Research Agenda for the Analysis of Listening," Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies (23: 4, 2009) 423-39. Grossman and O'Brien have been long time collaborators through their roles as Co-Directors of the Centre for Transcultural Research and Media Practice, School of Media, DIT, Forum on Migration and Communications (FOMACS) and subsequently Counterpoints Arts in London.

[28] The two primary State run programs that bring young people and Gardaí together are the Garda Juvenile Diversion Program and Garda Youth Diversion Projects. The Garda Juvenile Diversion Program aims to prevent young offenders in Ireland from entering into the full criminal justice system. When a young person comes to the attention of the Gardaí because of their criminal activity, they may be dealt with through the Diversion Program. The intended outcome of the program is to divert young people from committing further offences. Children on the program may be referred to the Garda Youth Diversion Projects, which are community-based youth services that provide a range of activities and seek to support good relations between the Garda and the community. Both projects place an emphasis on the young person as being in need of change.

[29] The Day in Question (2009) was a participatory reading event staged in the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin which brought together a group of young people in a dialogical exchange with 26 uniformed police officers during the final phase of their training. The event was built around the reading of young people's anonymous accounts of power and policing, read aloud by Gardaí.

[30] M. Foucault, Fearless Speech (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2001).

[31] What's the Story? Collective produced multiple works over three years; Anonymous: Reading, Narrative, Memory (2008), 12 Anonymous Stories (2009), Section 8 (2009), The Day in Question (2009), Section 8 screens Eight Dublin Lithuanian Stories (2009), Policing Dialogues (2010), The Policing Dialogues Review (2011).

[32] Policing Dialogues (2010) was a six-week exhibition and residency at The LAB Dublin which included an exhibition over two floors by What's the Story? Collective and an extensive program of events aimed at exploring neighborhood relations of power and policing. This included a two-day dialogue between the Collective and Gardaí and the co-development of local training for future Gardaí assigned to the Dublin south central district. The LAB Gallery and Rehearsal Studios is run by Dublin City Council's Arts Office, its ethos that of providing "an incubation space for a range of art forms (http://www.dccartsoffice.ie/the-lab/)."

[33] Two modules in local police training were co-developed by Gardaí and representatives from Rialto Youth Project; Understanding young people's behaviour and Understanding areas of urban disadvantage and poverty. Since the recent re-opening of the National Garda training college after its closure for four years at the height of the financial crisis, myself and the manager of Rialto Youth Project are currently in negotiation with senior staff to position our training as a local induction to Dublin South Central for new recruits graduating from the BA Applied Policing.

[34] What's the Story? Collective created an advisory team in advance of the highly public Policing Dialogues exhibition and residency. This included Niall O' Baoill, Arts Manger FGU; Jim Lawlor, Manager RYP; Annette Moloney, Independent Curator and Ailbhe Murphy & Ciaran Smyth of Vagabond Reviews, an inter-disciplinary platform for socially-engaged art and research practice. During the residency, Sociologist Aogán Mulcahy who teaches Sociology and Criminology at University College Dublin, was invited to be a critical witness for the process.

[35] What's the Story? Collective in conversation with Vagabond Reviews, The LAB. 19 Oct. 2010. A public conversation critically examined the work and practice of What's the Story? Collective with Ailbhe Murphy and Ciaran Smyth of Vagabond Reviews.

[36] The second state-funded Arts Plan, which ran from 1999-2001, articulated a shift from "access" to a "participation strategy" (P. Clancy, Rhetoric and Reality, p. 10-12).

[37] Youth Work Act (2001). Available at: www.irishstatutebook.ie

[38] DCYA, National Youth Strategy 2015-2020 (Dublin: Department of Children and Youth Affairs, 2015). Available online at: www.dcya.ie.

[39] C. Bishop, Artificial Hells, 13, 188.

[40] For evidence of the former see Creating a Difference, pp. 27-29. For the latter see J. Bowles, Developing Community Arts pp. 30-32.

[41] I'm borrowing this from P. Miller & N. Rose, Governing the Present (Polity: Cambridge, 2008) 53-83.

[42] J. Koh, Art-Led Participative Processes, Dialogue and Subjectivity within Performances in the Everyday (Academy of Fine Arts: University of the Arts Helsinki, 2015) 29.

[43] A full list of funders for my practice from 2004-2013 can be found in TEN, pp. 252-253.

[44] M. Foucault, "Truth, Power, Self: An Interview with Michel Foucault." In: L. H. Martin, H. Gutman and P. H. Hutton, eds. Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault (London: Tavistock, 1988) 9-15.

[45] I owe this point to Foucault's analysis of neo-liberalism in The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978-1979 (2008, Palgrave: New York).

[46] S. J. Ball, "The Teacher's Soul and the Terrors of Performativity," Journal of Education Policy (18:2, 2003) 215-28.

[47] Horton, M. and Freire, P. (1990) We Make the Road by Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change. B. Bell, J. Gaventa, and J. Peters (eds.), (Philadelphia: Temple University Press) 37.

[48] On this point see Kathleen Lynch, The Care-Less State.

[49] A. Murphy, "Situation Room: Critical Cartographies for Engaged Practice" (AIC10 event organised by Create, IMMA, 2012).

[50] M. Foucault, "What is Enlightenment." In: P. Rabinow (ed) The Foucault Reader (Pantheon: New York, 1984) 303-319.

[51] There are different ways of conceptualizing constitutive power, but I am thinking specifically about Foucault's work on truth as a regime of power/knowledge, Rancière's conception of the sensible, and Bourdieu's theory of doxa. See M. Foucault, "Truth and Power." Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other Writings 1972-1977. C. Gordon (ed) (Pantheon: New York, 1980) 109-33; J. Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (Continuum: New York, 2004); P. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge UK & NY, 1977).

[52] F. Whelan and G. Loughran. A Tale of Two Cities... TransActions #1. http://transactionspublication.com/.

[53] In her PhD thesis "Negotiation-as-Active-Knowing: An Approach Evolved from Relational Art Practice," artist Chu Chu Yuan explores the domains of "ground," "contact," and "movement" as essential components in processes of negotiation. A summarized essay of the same name is included in J. Koh, Art-Led Participative Processes, pp. 173-199.

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Beating the Bounds of Socially-Engaged Art? A Transdisciplinary Dialogue on a Collaborative Art Project with Youth in Dublin, Ireland

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Fiona Whelan and Kevin Ryan. Introduction Reflecting on the custom of "beating the bounds" as practiced in central France, Christoph Campos describes it as "a collective proprietorial gesture" - an annual ritual replete with ceremonial symbolism whereby members of the local community survey the boundaries of the territory they inhabit, which is also a way of renewing the communal bond.

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Museum Association's Climate Justice Glossary

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Museum Association's Climate Justice Glossary

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Rallying the Commons (2022) Performing Borders, e-journal no. 2.

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Rallying the Commons (2022) Performing Borders, e-journal no. 2.

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Ursula K. Le Guin (1972) The Word for World is Forest

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Ursula K. Le Guin (1972) The Word for World is Forest

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Ursula K. Le Guin The Word for World Is Forest 1972

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Lars Holdhus (2022) Why nothing is being done about climate change

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Lars Holdhus (2022) Why nothing is being done about climate change

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Climate change is the greatest threat the world has ever faced, yet so little happens in politics that you would think the problem does not exist. After COP27, it's clear politicians are incapable of taking radical climate action needed to meet the 1.5-celsius goal from the Paris agreement. We're currently looking at 2.7 celsius, which will be fatal for a large part of the earth.

In an earlier post, I outlined the GDP death drive. The GDP death drive is deeply connected to western governments, and they need GDP growth of at least 2-3 per cent to keep the welfare state running.

Let's take Norway as an example because it has a reasonably functional democracy and a leftist government. Norway's government expenditure in relation to the gross domestic product (GDP) in 2021 was 49 per cent. The state, through its politicians, spend 49 per cent of the GDP on maintaining the welfare state, the military and everything that includes. Politicians (left and right) depend on businesses having enough revenue per year so that enough tax can be collected. The Norwegian state also owns 67 % of the shares in Equinor, an oil and gas company, and receives dividends of around NOK 15 billion.

Most European states are built on the same principle of taxes from GDP growth. Therefore, a politician must keep the growth machine going by pleasing the state's citizens and its businesses so they will produce the growth needed for taxes.
What is needed for climate action to be effective is, the list is not exhaustive:

Reduce consumption drastically

Reduce the use of fossil fuels drastically

Disconnect GDP from the economic model

Build out renewable energy sources at a rapid tempo

Reduce waste in all industries

Pay loss and damage to the Global South

Reduce the use of pesticides and chemicals in all industries

Increase circularity rate drastically

Reduce deforestation and land use

The best way to get these actions done would be through politics. Most of these actions will not benefit businesses' profits-no incentive for a politician to take immediate action regarding these issues. The steps listed above will make the state's income decrease, and most politicians have four years before they have to be re-elected.

Fossil populism

The effect of drastically reducing consumption is that you will not have GDP growth and will enter a recession unless you disconnect the GDP from the economy. The biggest problem with our current democratic model is that the people vote based on what a government provides regarding services and material wealth. In bad economic times, people will become more concerned about problems close to them, such as price increases and energy prices, not more significant issues, such as climate change. This will make them vote for politicians that can "fix" the economy (with quick fixes and environmental damage) instead of governments with a long-term vision. This situation is currently happening in Norway. It can often lead to right-wing politics and, in a worst-case scenario, a fascist government.

Fascism does not care about the environment and will extract (humans, environment) as much as possible to please its citizens. Right-wing politics will favour economic growth to bring back the temporary material wealth that has been there before (make Norway great again) with a superficial concern for the environment.

The Norwegian welfare state was built on environmental destruction through fossil fuels and environmental degradation, and most people still deny that their lifestyle is built on fossil fuels. Politicians need to promise and deliver something similar to the past, which is impossible to fulfil when facing climate change.

Another big issue is that capitalists are keeping a large part of the profits and not distributing the wealth back to society. The ruling class has started to move their wealth from Norway to Switzerland and other tax havens to avoid taxes. This limits possible climate actions politicians can take because of the loss of tax.

Change your mind

This is a fundamental problem of democracy. While Norway's citizens think the solution is to convince the politicians of the severity of climate change, the politicians are fully aware of the effect of climate change but they are also aware of the result of the actions that are needed to be taken. This makes them nod willingly to what is required but will set deadlines far into the future and keep watering down their actions because they need to be re-elected.

This does not mean we should introduce a benevolent climate dictator or turn to violence to solve this problem. This is a democratic problem and also an information problem. We need to change our focus in our society away from material wealth and the welfare state. Understanding the consequences of and joy of a new life that is less materialistic is important to get people more positive to change. This will be the hardest change in relation to climate change because we have spent so much time building a materialistic welfare state up, thinking we were building the "perfect" society.

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Why nothing is being done about climate change

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Climate change is the greatest threat the world has ever faced, yet so little happens in politics that you would think the problem does not exist. After COP27, it's clear politicians are incapable of taking radical climate action needed to meet the 1.5-celsius goal from the Paris agreement.

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AM Kanngieser (2021) To undo nature; on refusal as return

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AM Kanngieser (2021) To undo nature; on refusal as return

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Rosa te Velde & Michelle Kasprzak (Eds). Commissioned Critique

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Rosa te Velde & Michelle Kasprzak (Eds). Commissioned Critique

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Serpentine Synthetic Ecologies Lab, SYNTHETIC ECOLOGIES COMPENDIUM

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Serpentine Synthetic Ecologies Lab, SYNTHETIC ECOLOGIES COMPENDIUM