[a work in progress]
UN Day for the Eradication of Poverty
Monday, October 17 from 11:00am - 3:00pm
European Parliament Offices, 43, Molesworth Street, Dublin 1
A New
PACT
Poverty | Arts | Community Transformation
CONTENTS:
1. What’s being attempted?
2. Why now?
3. How will it work?
4. Who is involved?
5. Feedback
1. What’s being attempted?
Attempt 1 : A gathering of people interested in tactics to make real the cultural rights of families and communities living in poverty
Attempt 2 : An energy to develop a proposition for a new proximity of artist and non artist initiatives in the area of human and cultural rights
Attempt 3: A platform to listen to a spectrum of first-hand accounts and reports
Attempt 4: Performing Transformation action and distribution of the Community Arts Petition
2. Why now?
A New Pact Conversation has a short history. Starting out in Fatima Mansions in 2010 we were 90 people, in Thomond Park we had 25 when inserted into the We Are Family Showcase, and more recently for a weekend in Glencree we were 18. Almost everyone who came shared an interest in how to re-set the island of Ireland. Our point of departure is the context of families and Family Resource Centres. But we’ve been joined by others too who are leading exciting local initiatives. Ten years ago, the Combat Poverty Agency identified the need for an arts agency to support families and communities in poverty because community arts was a means to have a voice; having a voice meant making that voice heard and having that cultural voice listened to.
Ten years on, a New Pact Conversation is about the strategic need to create more de-liberation, and proximity between artist and non artist initiatives. Our concerns are:
(1) Having more families and communities participating in their own expressive life and access their own practices of making sense of Ireland today.
(2) Imagining a positive duty for the State’s spending in art and culture to implement positive action measures for families and communities in poverty.
(3) Creating temporary platforms for collective mobilisation of artists and non arts across the culture and equality domains.
3. How will it work?
The next event is not fixed and will not be fixed. It is emerging through conversation. We will proceed by relying on who we are. By saying ‘yes’ to come you say yes to making a commitment to make the event. The list will grow and the programme will move from being only a cartoon into something physical - a precarious mass. Of course, we wish to engage people who care about community arts, poverty and human rights and the contribution of creativity and arts.
We have a puzzle to solve:
-how not to programme parallel initiatives talking but facilitating conversations together?
Arts Initiatives:
Cork: Mayfield Community Arts Centre (Jessica Carson)
Cork Community Arts Link (William Frode de la Foret)
Mayo: Refugees/ Asylum Seekers?? John Mulloy / Vukasin Nedljkovic
Belfast: In Our Time: Creating Arts Within Reach (Jo Egan / Conor Shields / Dave Hederman)
Engine Room Europe (Sandy Fitzgerald / Trans Europe Halles)
Non Arts Initiatives
-European Anti Poverty Network (Paul Ginnell)
-PRAXIS Group (Jean Bridgeman)
-Re-Claiming Our Future (Niall Crowley)
-Spectacle of Defiance (John Bissett)
-Banulacht Gender Network (Eileen Smith)
-Possibilities (Joe Murray)
We’ll inspire
Proffering of a proposition:
· Arts and Non Arts Initiatives – what’s to be gained and what might a platform for proximity and collective / de-liberate action look like?
· Group work response from smaller circles
This could be hothoused by a small group of observers who speak back to us from what hear: Suggestions: Suzanne Bosch (artist), Liz Sullivan (FSA), (Anna Vissner (EAPN), Niall Crowley (Independent), Hugh Frazer (Maynooth), Laurence Cox (Maynooth), John Mulloy (GMIT), Ciaran Smith (Vagabond Reviews), etc etc.
We’ll Act
-Performing Transformation Action and related to the Community Arts Petition 1.30 –3.00pm
This is not a publicity event nor a photo call. Over the last two months Blue Drum circulated a Community Arts Petition in order to gather 1,000 signatures calling for families and commutnities in poverty to be given their slice of the arts spend. It could be a Pizza Petition with a message to prioritise a slice of the arts pizza for families and communities living with less.
4. Who is involved? - List will be updated regularly
Anne O’Shaughness // Leonora O’Halloran, GalwayImelda Clarke, Dublin
Jean Bates, Dublin
Roisin Markam, Wexford
Paul Maher, Dublin
Ed Carroll, Dublin
Sandy Fitzgerald, Dublin
William Frode de la Foret, Cork
Paul Ginnell, Dublin
Vukasin Nedljkovic, Mayo? / Pam Buchanan, Dublin
Fiona Woods, Clare
John Mulloy, Mayo
Conor Shields, Belfast
Dave Hederman, Belfast
Jo Egan, Belfast
Joe Murray, Dublin
Niall O’Baoill, Dublin
Glenn Loughran, Dublin / Hermann Marbe, Cork
Suzanne Bosch, Belfast
Dragan Miloshevski, Belfast
Eleanor Phillips, Wicklow
Jessica Carson, Cork
Jean Bridgeman, Dublin
Niall Crowley, Dublin
Mary Jane Jacob, Chicago
Grainne Lord, Dublin
5. Feedback
(1) Fiona Woods, Clare
You might know already that in recent years, a lot of artists/cultural producers have been turning towards education, particularly alternative forms of education, as a model for cultural actions, because of education’s potential as a genuinely radical, transformative process. These practitioners are using all kinds of private or public spaces as places of dynamic, non-hierarchical knowledge exchange. I’m thinking of the likes of Nils Norman’s Exploding School, Jeanne Van Heeswijk’s work, Thomas Hirschorn’s Bataille Monument, Copenhagen Free University, Home University Roscommon and Leitrim (an Irish version), Ailbhe Murphy's work, Jay Koh’s academy in Mongolia and lots of others too.
In many cases these practices are focused on the need for community transformation, they are about creating proximity between arts and non-arts practices in the interests of change – similar to the aspirations of the PACT document. They have been cleverly grouped together under the term Ekstitutions by the artist Florian Schneider, as a way to emphasise their disaffection with and criticism of the kinds of social and cultural forms that are generated via Institutions, both educational and cultural.
Based on how the conversation has been developing, I’m wondering if we could draw on Education (in the best sense of that word – the transfer of skills and knowledge between people, not a one-way transfer) as the basis of the performative action that Ed is suggesting, because it seems to be a principle that we share in common. The idea is to perform a 'new' or alternative social form so that it can enter into the social imagination, in terms of what is possible.
I have been reading a bit about the role of the Imagination in social transformation, so here is a quote;
“The imagination is no longer a matter of individual genius, escapism from ordinary life, or just a dimension of aesthetics. It is a faculty that informs the daily lives of ordinary people in myriad ways: It allows people to consider migration, resist state violence, seek social redress, and design new forms of civic association and collaboration, often across national boundaries. . . . it is also the faculty through which collective patterns of dissent and new designs for collective life emerge.”
(Arjun Appadurai, Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination, 1998)
I think that any performative action for PACT would be best carried out in a collective fashion (although that can be difficult to organise and to do well, so it requires discussion). It seems as though all of us have some experience in creating educational situations, so that could be a way to make the action itself multi-authored.