In November 2016, I wrote a blog post for a commission I was working on at Primary in Nottingham, which included the sentence ‘Wider events that have played out as this project has progressed mean that developing tactics for togetherness has become a necessity’. The wider events were the Brexit referendum in June of that year and the election of Donald Trump in the week of writing. I was working towards a culminating event called The Commoners’ Fair (2016), a day focusing on what the commons means in contemporary urban contexts, asking ‘What does everyone have that can be shared? And how do we share it?’. It was an attempt to draw out the mycelium of human communities – the unspoken gestures, daily acts of care and invisible threads that hold us together. I wanted to hold space for this fertile soil, this feral infrastructure of relationships and human needs that transcend economic value, council initiatives and wellbeing policies. I wrote that ‘as we go deeper into a time of crisis, confusion and chaos, these structures will come into their own as completely necessary in a way that has not been seen’ in recent history. I made a series of text pieces entitled Field Notes (2016), the third of which read ‘To challenge the politics of isolation, we need tactics for togetherness’. We had posters printed to give away at the event. On the reverse was a map of the interwoven histories, relationships, conversations and connections that had emerged during the commission. Rebecca Beinart, engagement curator at Primary, looks back on the project:
‘The work addressed the impacts of living in capitalism by making more space for being together. It also asked questions of the organisation, challenging us to think about the ways in which these projects and relationships had genuine legacy. Primary continues to work with models developed for The Commoners’ Fair, including a platform for sharing knowledge and ideas called Tell Me Something I Don’t Know’.
The end of the project marked the beginning of a curious time for me, in creative terms. Having worked for years dovetailing residencies and commissions, I had become increasingly uncomfortable with the prevalent model in the field, in which a non-local artist delivers work in a hyper-local context, with an emphasis on co-authorship. I had come to feel, rightly or wrongly, that there is a fundamental disingenuity to work in which one author is paid to have a temporary stake in the community, and the other, who is of that community, is not. I struggled to envision my own future as an artist in such scenarios. At worst, says Manuel Arturo Abreu, social practice faces the accusation of ‘instrumentalizing people as raw material for one’s art’.[1] I see now that The Commoners Fair was an attempt to address these questions, but in the intensity of the work, there is little space for reflection.
When I did step back, it was this phrase ‘tactics for togetherness’ that I kept returning to. The posters we had produced began appearing on social media independently, mostly shared in the context of grassroots political movements. It became a prism through which to evaluate my work, I used it increasingly in presentations, and wrote about it:
‘To develop tactics for togetherness means to first consider the ways in which care plays out under the radar, in our communities. Care connects us, and once connected, we are entangled. Attempting to strategise this unquantifiable dark matter seems ill-fated, foolhardy even, but how else to resist the relentless erosion of togetherness by capital? The role of those working on the ground could be to draw out and network these small acts of care as a safety net for what is coming, or through a gloomier lens, what has already begun, in the systematic removal of the institutional structures that currently support our society’.
Daniel Russell, artist development programmer at NewBridge Project in Newcastle, shares similar sentiments: ‘The absolute shitstorm we are faced with, this continuing slide into the abyss, has accentuated the need to use art to deal with reality as it is, to bring people together and conjure up some possible non-doomed visions. In recent years artists have grasped the nettle somewhat and now actively, knowingly step in to replace what the state might once have provided instead of accidentally “doing art” in the instrumentalised position of state surrogate’.
I began to think of tactics for togetherness as expanded self-care, wondering what it might mean for artists to come together in their exhaustion and disillusionment.
I engaged with the work of other artists, attending sharing events and the occasional over-subscribed symposium. I began to understand that isolation and burnout were common problems in the field. I began to think of tactics for togetherness as expanded self-care, wondering what it might mean for artists to come together in their exhaustion and disillusionment. Sunshine Wong, curator and art worker at Bloc Projects in Sheffield relates to this: ‘Tactics for togetherness feels so central to my work, which must also account for limits. This means acknowledging what you cannot hold as much as what you can’.
I was approached by artist Eelyn Lee to co-organise what became Social Art Summit (2018), a two-day event held across ten venues in Sheffield and attended by 250 artists and practitioners. Field Notes #3 was used in the run up to the event, gaining a second context as a banner for a thread within Social Art Network that addresses the emotional labour of social practice and aims to strengthen peer support and artists’ development. Lee reflects: ‘We applied tactics for togetherness as an organising principle. Knowing that social art practitioners held such skills, yet were often working in isolation, we invited those artists to come together and share, discuss, develop and reimagine these tactics so we could give voice to them as an act of validation’.
Like most socially engaged artists, my work evaporated overnight with the onset of the pandemic. The art world shut down in shock, with notable exceptions like Mansions of the Future in Lincoln or Slung Low in Leeds, who turned their theatre space into an impromptu food bank. Director Alan Lane wrote in a blog post: ‘At some point I’ve stopped saying “Well I don’t think every theatre should open a food bank, no…” and changed it to “Well I don’t think every theatre should open a food bank, no, but this sector, which prides itself on its imagination, should do something”’.
Higher up the culture sector food chain, I witnessed a somewhat different response. One of the most public of these was orchestrated by Southbank Centre, moving quickly to make around 400 members of staff redundant, disproportionately impacting the most disadvantaged and precarious. Around this time, I learned that British Art Show 9, a subsidiary of Southbank, had released a statement naming ‘tactics for togetherness’ as one of its three key themes. Happy though I was for the phrase to reach wider audiences, I was not alone in finding the duplicitous context troubling. Artists selected by BAS 9 came out in support of the former employees with an open letter to Southbank Centre:
‘British Art Show 9 is framed around the key categories of “healing, care and reparative history; tactics for togetherness; and imagining new futures”. With this in mind, as artists contributing to this exhibition, we refuse to separate the actions of the Senior Leadership Team at Southbank Centre from the work we are being asked to perform. We stand in solidarity with all members of staff directly affected. Arts institutions espousing the politics of anti-racism, class mobility, queer struggle, disability activism, social justice, and the work of liberation must embed these politics within their structures, and not just present them as topics of exhibition or performative statements’.
Now, in the summer of 2022, I cross the Pennines to see BAS 9 in Manchester. Many of the artists have pulled out in solidarity with Alistair Hudson, recently removed as director of the Whitworth by the University of Manchester because of complaints by a group called ‘Lawyers for Israel’ regarding the recent Forensic Architecture exhibition. At the Whitworth, there is a statement from the curators Irene Aristizábal and Hammad Nasar upon entry to the BAS 9 exhibition, defending the right of individual artists to withdraw their work in solidarity with Palestinian struggle. Picking up a catalogue, I am confronted for the first time with acknowledgement that the phrase ‘tactics for togetherness’ is lifted directly from my work, in the form of a post-script footnote in the margins of the introductory essay. In the essay, coincidentally titled ‘Field Notes’, the curators highlight how ‘artists are choosing to experiment … with new forms and systems of support outside the constraints of the art market or institutions’ by ‘forming companies and communes, collaborating with local communities’. The essay ends: ‘This sense of urgency among artists for new ways of living and working has had a profound influence on how we have conceived the exhibition’.
Of the brilliant artists gathered by the curators under the ‘tactics…’ heading, including Kathrin Böhm and Mark Essen, only Grace Ndiritu’s installations are on show, the others having presumably pulled out. Elsewhere, Ndiritu tackles the relationship between museum and world head-on in her 2021 work ‘Healing The Museum’, asking, ‘How can artists influence institutions as they look to address urgent questions of care, social welfare and the legacies of colonialism?’. Here in Manchester, both her installations refer to collective actions outside the walls of the institution and it’s easy to follow the flow of that narrative in her work into this, bringing a passive gallery audience face-to-face with those urgent questions. But Ndiritu’s is a lone voice, and the installation at Castlefield has been censored, to the artist’s clear annoyance on her website.
Who, then, is served by the reversal of this celebrated outward flow of artistic experimentation and collaboration back into the gallery? The intention behind work of this kind is surely to build collective agency in the world. Tactics transform into actions and one day a critical mass of such actions might converge to become the systems that we live by. The work is messy and generative, beset by disillusionment, and prone to brokenness – complexities no touring group show could hope to represent. Artist and activist Jane Lawson expands on this:
‘Tactics for togetherness have to include ways to deal with the inevitable conflict and power imbalances that arise when working with other humans. It’s not enough to just say you ascribe to values of care – what does this look like in practice? How do actions back up aspiration? What do you do when things get sticky?’.
This last question helps me formulate that it is not the unsolicited lifting of the phrase that irks, nor even any longer the appropriation as art-washing by an institution that practices the opposite, but a sadness that, extracted from the bedrock of their original meaning, the words became a hollow simulacrum of their founding intentions, a sad neo-liberally sprinkled spectre of togetherness. It echoes a pattern in which the radical imaginings of social practice, which must acknowledge stickiness, are sterilised for the institution, becoming unstuck in the process, too often with the complicity of pioneering artists and curators in the field. As to whether ‘sticky’ work could possibly happen in the gallery, there are good people in places like Bloc, NewBridge and Primary leaning into that question.
For myself, I now connect with the phrase in a different way. During the pandemic, I helped cook and deliver around 200 meals a week to refugees, asylum seekers, migrants and isolated elders, with a surplus food project called Open Kitchen Social Club. It helped me unhitch my art practice from activist tendencies, and I plotted a course inwards. I spent time in the woods, walked in circles, learnt how to identify medicinal and edible plants, and watched trees at dusk. Tactics became practice, a word that now tilts towards work of a spiritual rather than artistic nature. Togetherness stepped out beyond political frameworks, and into deeper entanglement with the living world. My compass shifted. I am currently running monthly sessions online exploring deep listening as a transformative collective practice. We hold space for grief, for beholding our relationships with the living world, and for that which doesn’t make sense yet. It is quietly generative work but does not define itself by that. Each session begins with the prompt ‘where do you find yourself?’.
So where do I find tactics for togetherness? As always, new growth comes from close to the ground. Wong says that the pandemic has made her ‘more committed to dispersing the focus of art from the gallery space towards the world, reimagining what’s possible’. After stepping down from SAN, Eelyn Lee was one of seven artists of Chinese heritage convened by the Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art (CFCCA) to form an Artists Working Group (AWG), who would co-design a revisioning of the organisation. When institutional racism was laid bare at the heart of the organisation before the process had even begun, CFCCA paused the revisioning indefinitely, effectively ‘cancelling’ the AWG. The seven artists subsequently wrote a report outlining their experiences and launched a campaign to defund CFCCA on account of institutional racism and organisational failure. Lee reflects:
‘We knew that to run an effective campaign we needed to employ tactics for togetherness. We needed to pool our energies, skills and experiences to stand up to the institution and their funders. One of our tactics was to acknowledge the differences amongst us as seven individuals whilst using our points of resonance to galvanise our organising. This togetherness has led to us engaging more East and South East Asian artists to collectively imagine a new arts ecology that will better support us and our practices’.
This chimes with a piece by Andy Abbott, writing for Corridor8 on DIY culture in the post-pandemic North: ‘What I found especially compelling was the world-building potential of this underground, indefinable and spontaneous activity; that the new forms of collaboration and collectivism experimented with in self-organised culture could, and sometimes did, cross over into the creation of counter-institutions, alternative infrastructure and the formation of new commons’.
New commons always emerge out of DIY culture. Capitalist institutions, and those who choose to act at their behest in the interests of their own success within the stacked system of modernity, can only hope to appropriate new ideas when they become visible enough. But in that uprooting, the context is lost, and so too the meaning. Tactics for togetherness are dead, and so this writing must be an obituary. There’s no time to mourn though. Close to the ground, emergent contexts throw up new questions and new considerations, requiring new responses and new forms of co-operation. Down here in the soil, there is plenty to be getting on with.
The British Art Show 9 was in Manchester 27 May-4 September and moves on to Plymouth 8 Oct-23 December 2022. Quotes from Jane Lawson, Eelyn Lee, Daniel Russell and Sunshine Wong were taken directly from conversations with the writer.
Ian Nesbitt is an artist, filmmaker, post-activist and pedestrian based in Sheffield.
This exploration is supported by Arts Council England as part Corridor8’s 2022-23 commissioning programme.
[1] Manuel Arturo Abreu, ‘We Need to Talk About Social Practice’, Art Practical, March 2019.
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Published 20.09.2022 by Lara Eggleton in Explorations
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