April 2022
This project has the three questions below at its core:
1. What did we change or operationalise in our daily practice because of the pandemic?
2. How did we enact this change?
3. What did we learn about ourselves and/or our organisations’ capacity and capability for working within limits as a result?)
We’ve continuously spoken about the opportunities and the revelations of the COVID-19 pandemic. In the broadest sense, many artworkers and organisations realised the world didn’t stop turning when we were forced to slow down**. Let’s not lose sight of that. At Deveron Projects, there weren’t many revelations. A travel time of around five hours, door to door, from our office to Edinburgh and Glasgow city centre means that we have always been working remotely, relying on Skype (remember Skype?); and working internationally, often in the Global South, we were constantly contending with the UK’s Hostile Environment, developing projects with artists who were told they couldn’t travel to the UK because there wasn’t sufficient evidence they would return home….
One of our concerns is the ‘solutions’ that emerge from powerful parts of the sector navigating barriers to travel, connectivity, and international working. Not just once I heard a peer suggest that this pandemic has shown us that we can work internationally just as effectively through digital means, saving time, energy and carbon consumption by not travelling around the world constantly. I can’t help but feel that they mean travelling to London to see an exhibition, or Kassel to attend Documenta. While there are clear opportunities for flexible and remote working as a way of managing workload or considering the climate breakdown, a blanket approach to digital working risks shutting down meaningful partnerships with organisations and artists outside ‘The West’. We mustn’t forget that Europe continues to set the precedence for success in the visual art sector: international artists, particularly African and Asian artists, are working hard to develop viable markets in their own place (in practice this is more important and nourishing than operating in European markets) but it doesn’t negate that value is still marked by European residencies and exhibitions. The UK, and Europe, but the UK particularly, continues to nurture a colonial mindset to manifest power in our sector. And so we should be careful with our words. They have the power to reinforce a Hostile Environment, an environment where artists in Africa (countries most featured on the UK’s ‘red list’) find it increasingly difficult to access opportunities that are crucial to career development; and in the absence of a meaningfully international programme, a lot of the work done by cultural producers to break the homogeneity and supremacist shape of visual arts in Scotland, and the UK, is reversed. In the same vein, if British curators are working with artists in the Global South, the significance of being present – understanding the contexts and reference points for which work is being made in – must not be overlooked.
I suppose my point is that as we reflect on the impacts of the last two years – COVID-19, alongside war, the climate breakdown, increasing economic instability – we need to take the ‘opportunity’ to rethink the way we work, but with a global perspective, allowing ourselves to understand the complexity of that work.
Deveron Projects applies a number of principles to build a curatorial methodology that joins internationalism and placemaking, for example, Act Local Think Global, borrowed from Aberdeenshire born town planner, Patrick Geddes. Another inherited principle from Geddes – Live Where You Work, Work Where You Live: similarly catchy, undoubtedly more problematic. When we talk about Sustainable Prosperity at Deveron Projects, in the context of an artist residency programme in a rural market town, and without the invisibility/boundaries that comes from four walls, we need to carefully consider the wellbeing of our team. Hosting in this context can easily, and with the best intentions, lead to 24 hour hospitality and care for artists (people who are often in Scotland, the UK and Europe for the first time, being asked to co-create with residents who live in the same town that they work in).
So, the questions we’ve been asking ourselves at Deveron Projects, and the questions in my mind throughout the last six months of this RSE funded project on Cultural Sustainable Prosperity – across visits to Edinburgh, Dublin and hosting in Huntly – are posed to understand how a team of artworkers can provide the kind of care needed for diverse artists in a small, conservative town, with far less services than the cities, whilst prioritising the wellbeing of individuals, ensuring the long-term sustainability of the organisation.
I am writing this text over a week later than I said I would, on a Sunday morning at 8am – I worked around 50 hours this week, including a few hours yesterday, on Saturday afternoon. I’m quite stressed, fairly happy/content. I’m apparently healthy if you ignore the slow impact of underlying anxiety. I write as from someone operating in a positive working environment, in a well-resourced arts organisation, with a fantastic team who, collectively, have been actively shifting work culture and production to decrease workload. We’ve not cracked it, folks!
Why is it so hard to do less with the resources we originally stretched to every inch? We have raised salaries and artist fees, shifted working hours, created time within the week for gardening, cooking, sharing food, and at the very least spoke about reducing programming. We’ve made a fundamental culture shift within our workplace over the last 12 months, but if all the roles, particularly core operational roles, are not sustainable, then the organisation itself is not sustainable. This of course applies to the communities we work with, too. If the individuals within the organisation are overwhelmed, we can be assured that the communities are too. Community members in Huntly, not unlike other towns and cities I’ve worked in over the last 15 years, have spoken about exhaustive community engagement. Our model requires co-creation within the community, and artists are constantly moving through the town, being introduced to and developing projects with a small portion of the 4500 population of the town. This jadedness is inevitable.
We’re currently working on an international exchange project developing new research on food production between Jakarta and Huntly. Over four digital conversations between communities in both places, and two site-specific events, conversation has been heading towards the idea of a slow revolution. Similarly centring the importance of local action towards global change (climate, economical, cultural and social change – the intersection being the food we eat), that project has decided to focus on hope: the idea that there is a capacity for shifting how we live in the place we are whilst encouraging our international (and perhaps in the case of this research, national) counterparts to do similar work. The aspiration is that we fundamentally change the systems we live in, slowly but surely dismantling capitalism and colonialism for a more equitable and sustainable planet. Regardless of what we’re talking about, in work and in a social context, maybe the answer is always a slow revolution.
**In many situations, artworkers were not able to respond to the pandemic by working less, even in contexts where programming was halted. For many people, pressure and intensity of work and responsibilities increased, and the demands of family life were greater.
Place-Specific Approaches to Sustainable Prosperity in the Arts & Cultural Sector 