How to make culture more recognised and realised as a question of entitlement, a commitment to express criticism and foster change?
Saturday, June 16,
10:00hrs – 18.00hrs
City (Re)Search
Experiences of Public-ness
Here is a research based on the correct observation that there has been an institutional failure to create conversations between arts/culture and other momentums for social and political rights, and rightly place their efforts in the framework of developing a new consensus about the public value of culture. Project Assessor Report
CONTENTS:
1. What’s being attempted
2. Some notes toward a provocation and a research question
1. What’s being attempted at our first meeting?
2. Some notes toward a provocation and a research question
We have such a modest amount of time (4 days // 3 cities of gathering and 2 days // 1 city to reflect) to find proximity to the experience, desire and imagination of ordinary people and to re-present this somehow to expert knowledge in the city.
So our focus is local knowledge and imagination. Our intention is to hear what insights and apprehensions ordinary people have about culture. We have to deploy our practices, tactics and devices, which reflect a set of much longer term commitments and work developed on your own work bench. The purpose of our inquiry is to make imaginable culture rights. A perspective can take the human rights or equality framework e.g. UNESCO conventions on intangible cultural heritage and local cultural expression.
Our project is focused on cultural rights so it may be helpful to frame a question linked to an existing UNESCO mechanism for Intangible Cultural Heritage (2003) and Diversity of Cultural Expression (2005):
Intangible cultural heritage and creative expression understood and experienced as private practices, representations, expressions, knowledge, skills as well as objects, artifacts and cultural spaces a community of persons recognise as part own culture.
There is some value in proffering a question that may foreground our imaginary court room investigation
How to make culture more recognised and realised as a question of entitlement, a commitment to express criticism and foster change?
Eve Tuck in her Letter to Communities (2009)
advocates for local desire as an antidote to damage-centred research processes. She continueAn antidote stops and counteracts the effects of a poison, and the poison may be the use of frameworks that position individuals and communities as damaged and/or deficient. At a research level the portrayal of individuals and communities as either ‘victims or perpetrators’ “frame our communities as sites of disinvestment and dispossession; our communities become spaces in which under resourced (cultural), health and economic infrastructures are endemic” (italics my own). She continues that “in damaged-centered research, one of the major activities is to document pain or loss in an individual, community, or tribe (…)
Desire, yes, accounts for the loss and despair, but also the hope, the visions, the wisdom of lived lives and communities. Desire is involved with the not yet and, at times, the not anymore. In many desire-based texts there is a ghostly, remnant quality to desire, its existence not contained to the body but still derived of the body. Desire is about longing about a present that is enriched by both the past and the future. It is integral to our humanness (…)
Damage cannot be the only way or best way that we talk about ourselves. A framework that accounts for and forwards our sovereignty is vital. We can practice our sovereignty within a framework of desire but cannot within a damage framework. By this I mean that a framework of desire recognizes our sovereignty as a core element of our being and meaning making; a damage framework excludes this recognition.