Dominator Culture has tried to keep us all afraid, to make us choose safety instead of risk, sameness instead of diversity. Moving through that fear, finding out what connects us, revelling in our differences; this is the process that brings us closer, that gives us a world of shared values, of meaningful community.
– bell hooks[1]
In Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope (2003), bell hooks draws on her personal experiences as both a teacher and a student to lay out her vision of a learning environment that is free from any form of oppression. She aims to create a space for people to think freely and feel safe enough to make mistakes in the company of one another, and learn from them together. Most importantly of all, the book emphasises the joy of learning and how one must view it as a lifelong process. hooks frequently returns to this idea of learning as a process throughout her text, resisting a model of education that leads solely to qualification.
Reflecting on In-Situ’s ten-year journey from a barely funded practitioner-led research project to fully fledged NPO (National Portfolio Organisation), I am reminded of hooks’ text and the alternative reality she embodies through her teachings. In-Situ isn’t an educational institution, nor are its members teachers, however, its founding principle of ‘embedding art into everyday life in Pendle’ works on a very similar premise. This is to say that the organisation employs artistic practice as a conduit to birth the latent possibilities of the area; possibilities that had previously lain dormant because of the capitalist (un)reality we find ourselves stuck in.
Back to the Beginning
In This Was Something Else, a film made to mark In-Situ’s tenth anniversary, founding members Paul Hartley, Kerry Morrison and William Titley recount the organisation’s beginnings. We learn that the team came together over their shared frustration with the nature of short-term, project-based commissioning models. Funding art in this way does not allow for long-term, embedded approaches to creating with communities; instead, they perpetuate bad habits such as parachuting artists into areas with time-sensitive briefs, and goals and outcomes to achieve. In these instances, there is no time to build any meaningful relationship with the participants and the job feels as if it is set up to fail: the commission becomes a ‘box ticking exercise’, fulfilling a funder’s community consultation requisite,[2] or worse, as artists are expected to perform the role of a surrogate social worker.[3] These frustrations aren’t anything new, nor were they isolated to the team, in fact the histories of these problems and their connected debates can be traced back to the late 1970s and early 80s.[4]
Finding a way to sidestep these unsatisfying ways of working was a priority for the team. They knew that to grow projects that allowed for the needs and concerns of a particular locale to be identified and responded to in full, requires time and relationships built on trust. The artist must also be able to work with a level of autonomy and set their own brief, based on their own research.
Scoping out the framework for In-Situ as a practitioner-led project led the team to attend a conference organised by artist Jeanna van Heeswijk. Known for working with action research methods to instigate the collaborative mapping and reimaging of areas marked for urban renewal, Van Heeswijk has an established practice that embodied much of what the team aspired towards. Presenting as part of this conference was Rick Lowe whose Project Row Houses exemplified the type of live-where-you-work, sustained, longitudinal approach that the team imagined for In-Situ. Later, they would get chatting to Lowe and bag an invite to Houston to see Project Row Houses for themselves.
This conference and the team’s subsequent research trip to Texas, along with their desire to free themselves from the constraints of short-term project-based commissions, laid the foundations of In-Situ. At this juncture, I think it is important to note that whilst In-Situ is specific to Pendle, it joins an interconnected and interrelated web of artists and organisations who seek to employ art as a civic tool or mechanism for democracy. Full disclosure: I too work as part of this web as a Producer for Heart of Glass. I often wonder if it has become the job of organisations like ours to provide a buffer between funding bodies and artists in order to develop and maintain opportunities that afford the time and creative autonomy required for social and collaborative arts practice to truly flourish and have impact.
Navigating the language of funding bodies and finding ways to provide for your activity is an art in itself. At the time of In-Situ’s inception, the country was two years into a period of government enforced austerity and as every penny was being stripped out of public services, Arts Council England (ACE) continued to plod on with its Achieving Great Art for Everyone (2010-2020) strategy. Criticised for its ‘emphasis on access to mainstream culture rather than on cultural democracy’,[5] ACE’s vision for the country’s cultural offer continued to perpetuate the idea of art as an enriching form of entertainment; something to be consumed rather than done. Nowhere in this strategy was the language of co-creation – artists and communities working together – instead, it was a bureaucratic top-down and target-obsessed plan that left little room for cultural diversity.
Within this plan, ACE deemed communities who weren’t regular gallery and theatre goers (read white middle-class) as ‘hard to reach audiences’ that needed bringing into fold via the power of ‘outreach’ and ‘audience development’. (Flashbacks to my time served on the bottom rung at *gallery name redacted* being sent to North Liverpool community centres with exhibition programmes, colouring activities and a bag full of felt tips to let them know that they could do culture too). But as Hartley points out in a 2020 interview with writer Bob Dickinson for The Double Negative, these audiences were not ‘hard to reach’, they just were not served by ACE’s narrow version of ‘culture’. Hartley then goes on to describe an exchange between In-Situ and Lahore University through which artist Zoya Siddiqui was invited to undertake a residency in Brierfield. Siddiqui responded with Geology of a Home – a participatory video work that explored the complex histories of the area’s large British-Pakistani community. Created in conversation with ninety-eight families, Siddiqui’s residency laid the groundwork for relationships between In-Situ and the local British-Pakistani community to develop. This action was not box-ticking community outreach, rather it was a piece of artist-led research, driven by genuine curiosity and in collaboration with a community who’d been previously underserved by ACE.
Skip forward ten years to ACE’s latest strategy, Let’s Create (2020-2030), and collaboration and co-production appears to be its main driver. A hopeful reader of this strategy might think that things have shifted in the favour of socially engaged arts practice. Indeed, In-Situ has recently secured its second round of NPO funding, as has Heart of Glass. However, as Dr Elenore Belfiore points out in her 2021 paper titled ‘Who cares? At what price? The hidden costs of socially engaged arts labour and the moral failure of cultural policy’,[6] our current funding infrastructure is ‘very comfortable using the rhetoric of collaborative, participatory and socially engaged arts practice and of social justice and empowerment but does not follow those principals in its own modus operandi’. This is to say that whilst funders may have cottoned on to the benefits and potential of socially engaged art, there is still little support for the practitioners themselves. Belfiore goes on to describe how the model of short-term, project-based funding still prevails and the health and wellbeing of freelance artists who service this model continues to suffer.
In-Situ has to operate within these funding structures and remaining committed to their vision means that they must find ways to provide for and protect artists and communities, so they may continue to make work together, safely and freely. This has meant that there have been times when the team have put themselves personally on the line, with Morrison describing the organisation’s early years as being ‘hand to mouth’ (from a forthcoming article in The Double Negative). A labour of love, par for the course in this line of work where the personal and professional are often hard to separate. To this end, In-Situ is an active part of a wider effort to improve opportunities and working conditions within the field of socially engaged art practice. An example of this can be found in The Faculty North, which they deliver in partnership with Heart of Glass. This programme (its third iteration currently being planned) is designed specifically for practitioners who work at the intersection of arts and social transformation and provide its attendees with resources, training, a stipend and, perhaps most importantly, a community of peers – ironically, freelance life as a ‘social’ arts practitioner can be incredibly isolating.
When I was invited to write this piece I was asked by Anna Taylor (In-Situ’s programme communications lead) to compose something that would reflect the journey of the organisation as a whole with the understanding that no one piece of work was discrete; projects feed into one another to inform their next step. There is never an end point, only more conversations to be had. Up to this point, I realise that I’ve barely talked about any of the organisation’s actual work, instead choosing to focus on the structures In-Situ must navigate and work within. However, I felt that these were important things to acknowledge – In-Situ hasn’t just magically appeared and the ‘behind the scenes work’ of carving out spaces for conversation, and the time to listen and think with Brierfield has been no quick or easy task.
Increasingly, holding space for conversation feels like a radical act and, perhaps as a slight aside here, it is worth noting that the setting chosen for This Was Something Else was the area’s last remaining Clarion House in Roughlee, near Nelson. Built by mill workers with funds raised through unions, Clarion houses provided respite from the grimy drudgery of their towns and a place to organise.
Hanging Out, Chatting and Shifting Perspectives
To kick off a run of activities that would mark their tenth birthday, In-Situ held their first Thinking Out Loud event last month. Planned as an evening get together over tea, biscuits and huge samosas, a bunch of people who have been integral to In-Situ’s journey so far were invited round to The Garage (In-Situ’s office/ meeting space) for a chat to reflect upon the role art plays in our daily lives. I was also invited to this event as a researcher, not as an In-Situ VIP.
We began by watching Art is Life, a short film made with Mums2Mums (who were also attending as VIP guests that evening) about their journey with In-Situ. We learn how In-Situ provided this group of mothers with the space to explore and permit themselves to try out new things like caving or adventuring around the nearby Forest of Bowland. A seemingly simple act of hanging out and going on trips together shifted the outlook of these women towards something much more positive; they felt less isolated and more confident in themselves. The group would go on to play an integral role in the planning and delivery of a huge banquet as part of the project Shapes of Water Sounds of Hope. The take-away from this film is a sense of the slow and careful process relationship-building entails – trust takes time – and it is upon these kinds of relationships that In-Situ is built.
In the chat that followed a couple of things stood out:
Firstly was the resounding sense that In-Situ’s activity over the past decade had shifted perspectives towards something that resembles hooks’ ideals of a non-judgemental learning environment. To quote one of the evening’s attendees: ‘[In-Situ] inspires you to do things you didn’t know were capable of. It looks for what is possible… Yes, why not see if you can make this happen’.
Secondly was something Morrison said about the role of the artist as a ‘free agent’ and ‘intermediary’ who could move between different spaces and institutional settings to make new connections and open up possibilities. To this end, the artist was as important to a community as ‘a postie or a plumber’. I’m paraphrasing here because my scribbled notes were too interested in what Morrison was actually saying to record a full quote at the time.
Morrison makes an important observation here and highlights why In-Situ is vital to both the area it works in and its field of practice. By respecting artists’ autonomy and the role they can play as facilitators to latent or ‘not-quite-yet’ realities that sit just beneath the surface of the ‘normal way of doing things’, In-Situ creates space for the radical to happen.
Skip back to 2012. Hanging out by the locked gates of derelict Northlight Mill sketching, Morrison invites conversation from strangers (‘What are you doing?’) because it’s not everyday you see a person standing alone absorbed in drawing. She gets talking to the caretaker of the mill and their conversation leads to an invitation to take a look inside. Then, one thing after another, these small acts of curiosity about a bunch of what-ifs snowball. Curiosity is infectious.
In 2013 Morrison teamed up with artist Jackie McGovern to set about exploring the mill as a TAZ (temporary autonomous zone). The pair activate this brownfield site as a place to imagine where things could be different. Then artist Zoya Siddiqui travels over from Lahore and over the course of a month-long residency creates Geology of a Home, which weaves together the histories of the mill with the legacies of the British Empire and Brierfield’s present. Developing new relationships and building upon Morrison’s work, Siddiqui creates a pathway for artist Suzanne Lacy to organise Shapes of Water Sounds of Hope with people of Brierfield in 2016. The entire mill was filled with people once more, and on this occasion, fed by a banquet organised by Mums2Mums. The heritage and memories that had sat between communities, previously confiscated and locked up, became a talking point. Lacy listened and, with help of In-Situ and Super Slow Way, was able to transform these conversations into The Circle and the Square (2017). And so on and so on, it’s a slow process of hanging out and asking questions, building relationships and taking risks. Things don’t always go to plan and unforeseen circumstances can lead to difficult situations, as Hartley describes in This Was Something Else: through no fault of their own The Shop got repossessed without warning, but people cared and came out in protest.
In a 2021 Corridor8 article, artist and researcher Andy Abbott wondered if the ‘seeds for another (art)world [were] embedded within the Post-Industrial North’. Describing the practices of places like In-Situ and Heart of Glass as providing part of the much needed antithesis to the hegemonic narrative of endless progress, Abbott writes: ‘Looking closer, listening more attentively, collaborating differently and subtly shifting perspective can reveal solutions to longstanding challenges previously thought of as insurmountable’.
Abbott is currently working with In-Situ on their new This Is Nelson programme – the art, people and culture strand of Nelson Town Deal. This programme is in its early stages and seeks to radically rethink what a healthy and thriving community means. In-Situ has begun by organising a number of community forum events that include a series of interdisciplinary talks produced by Abbott titled Nelson Reimagined. Planned in conversation with artists, researchers and local experts, Abbott’s series will explore what a post-capitalist future for Nelson might look like. Last month, artist Kathrin Böhm was the first to present and delivered a fascinating presentation on Company Drinks. In the new year artist Owen Griffiths and political activist Keir Milburn (of former Chumbawamba fame) will be delivering their own talks, and I’m looking forward to them already.
To conclude on a personal note: as someone who grew up culturally frustrated in the Ribble Valley (Pendle’s neighbouring borough), I left to seek out community in a city. Knowing that In-Situ is only a few fields and a massive hill away from my Mum’s house is really exciting. Could the seeds for another (art)world be embedded in Nelson and Brierfield? Maybe… Let’s keep supporting In-Situ and find out.
In-Situ‘s headquarters is in Brierfield, Nelson; its work takes place in many settings, libraries and supermarkets, Pendle Hill and surrounding villages, in homes and schools, on pavements and in parks. The team work in an embedded way, through the formation of longterm relationships and dialogue. They celebrated their tenth anniversary on 1 December, 2022.
Natalie Hughes is a writer and producer based in Liverpool.
This exploration was supported by In-Situ.
[1] bell hooks, Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope (NY: Routledge, 2003), p.197.
[2] Titley speaking on his experiences as part of This Was Something Else (2022)
[3] Eleonora Belfiore, ‘Art as a means of alleviating social exclusion: Does it really work? A critique of instrumental policies and social impact studies in the UK’, International Journal of Cultural Policy 8(1), 2002: pp. 91-106.
[4] Sophie Hope, ‘From community arts to the socially engaged art commission’, in A. Jeffers and G. Moriarty (eds), Culture Democracy and the Right to Make Art (London: Bloomsbury: 2017), pp. 203-221.
[5] Leila Jancovich, ‘Great art for everyone? Engagement and participation policy in the arts’, Cultural Trends 20 (3-4), 2011: 271-279.
[6] Eleonora Belfiore, ‘Who cares? At what price? The hidden costs of socially engaged arts labour and the moral failure of cultural policy’, European Journal of Cultural Studies 25 (1), 2021: pp. 61-78.
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Published 15.12.2022 by Lara Eggleton in Explorations
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