Culture Banked - Our Digital Commons?

Cardboardia - Forming New Communities

Daria Stenina

Ten years ago Sergey Korsakov and his fiancée Viktoria didn’t want to have an ordinary wedding and decided to build a cardboard wedding palace during the Afisha Picnic Festival in Moscow where couples could make public acts of marriage. Sergey remembers: “All of the guests liked this ceremony so much that I had the thought of building a second, bigger and longer existing cardboard town with its own traditions, institutes and economy. We materialized this idea in Moscow in January, 2008 to great public and press acclaim”.

Now Sergey holds the post of Tyran of Cardboardia who always is elected on the non-alternative elections and things may have gone to his head. Together with his wife – Prime Viktoria – they rule their own state with unlimited powers and lead their citizens and lieges towards their dream of conquering the whole world – from America to Australia. Their State, Cardboardia, doesn’t have a territory but already has three permanent Embassies - one in Russia, where it all started, one in UK and one in EU (Riga, Latvia), and mobile ones in Poland, Denmark, Taiwan, Greece, Finland, Slovakia and in various towns around Russia. He has also, somewhat uncharacteristically, decided to declare Cardboardia a cultural commons

As Tyran says, “Cardboardia is the most friendly and creative country around the Earth with headquarters in Moscow, just seven kilometers away from the Kremlin. The State of Cardboardia, that has not been recognized yet, is a community of artists, designers, performers and even managers who make amazing things from cardboard and their imaginations”.

Cardboardia, like any other country, has a governmental structure. Tyran and Prime Viktoria are the leaders, who always set new goals and propose new ideas for their citizens called Personages of Cardboardia. In this country you will encounter the Minister of Education, the Minister of Stupid Ideas, the Minister of Circus, and other interesting people who together build a strong community where each person is important no matter their age or status. As well as the permanent participants in the creative process there is always a population of visitors at the events, participants in internships, and anyone who is interested in realizing his or her artistic potential. Eeach person can become a citizen, a Personage of Cardboardia.

There are two ways to gain citizenship. The first and principal way is to take part in the internships that are regularly held by Cardboardia due to different events either in Russia or other countries. These ‘laboratories’ give an opportunity to learn about the event sphere and creative business from the inside. It’s a good start for the beginners and young specialists in design, architecture and management because, after the internship under the guidance of experienced curators, they can be offered a workplace. It is also a great opportunity for anyone who loves art, creating and making things by hand.

The second way to gain citizenship of Cardboardia is to be at the right place in the right time. As, for example, in England on the day of the referendum on the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union, when Cardboardia opened its Embassy to give out ‘passports’ - Personages Permits - to those who wanted them. Tyran was happy: “A large queue lined up! Now we are planning a big project in England that includes cooperation with local communities and investors, searching for and making initiatives for the creative economy, and we want to build a real cardboard metropolis.”

Cardboardia appears in real towns and cities during festivals, parades or other events and can work from several days to months. The space created by Personages of Cardboardia is always interactive where people can play different roles and be the part of the creation and development of the suggested story.

Tyran insists it’s not only entertainment but a global international socio-economic experiment: “We are trying to build up a stable and live system without being tied to a particular territory, and we are doing this through the interconnection between the creative people and local cultural communities. The main source of this system is the artistic and creative power and not money, petroleum or political issues”.

He remarks also on the effects on the people who have been involved in Cardboardia’s stories. It’s an experience that helps people to realize their ideas; it gives them new possibilities and motivations. “We have a lot of examples of someone who worked with us on the materialization of Cardboardia. It opened their creative side and they continued to develop their ideas in ‘real’ life. We always stay in touch with such people”.

Cardboardia unites the three simple elements of communication, education and entertainment to make events and festivals together with local communities. Local

people in coordination with professionals make unique things and spaces for telling different stories and for paying attention to different problems. By making cardboard towns and the other materializations of Cardboardia, people are getting involved in research into new solutions and gaining inspiration and a new vision of the world around them.

In 2016 in Hebden Bridge (UK) Cardboardia joined Handmade Parade57 to work with the local community who earlier in the year had suffered from flooding. During one month, Cardboardia and local people were making costumes, constructing the characters and thinking out how to tell this story. As a result, they made a mobile city with a huge toilet in the middle accompanied by polluting pipes, chimneys, cars and even a group of bureaucrats to not only show nature’s dirt but all those things that make our lives so messy and unclean. Cardboardia in cooperation with others always looks for stories to tell, traditions to reveal and problems to solve. The main idea is to make life bright and interesting through cooperation, art and creative action.

Cardboardia has already made 11 cardboard towns in Europe and took a part in 17 national feasts. The biggest materialization was in 2013, in the Russian city of Perm, where it was a huge cardboard city with shops, transport, theatres and museums, banks and its own currency, and everything that can be found in concrete or wooden cities. It existed for three weeks and was visited by more than 400 000 people. This year Cardboardia celebrates its 10th birthday and Tyran says that it is only the beginning. He is sure that one day Cardboardia will become the most visible country on the world map.

No 11 Arts in Birmingham - An Instance of Cultural Commoning

Tom Jones

Sometimes It seems that theory and practice run parallel with each other - like two sides of a ladder where it’s the steps linking them that enable us to progress. Written as just such a step, this paper describes an instance of ‘thinking-by-doing’ which is - and not coincidentally - the basic methodological discipline of the arts. The aim is to show that the way in which local arts practice, which is currently evolving in Birmingham, contributes to shaping and evolving the theory of cultural commons.

In 2010, Birmingham City Council had become aware that its hitherto extensive and successful community arts service was no longer sustainable. In going out to tender with community-based groups, council officers took a first vital step towards democratising arts provision in the city. Accordingly, ten small arts groups of a variety of types were commissioned to manage Local Arts Forums. With a Forum in each of its ten Districts, Birmingham has created a local arts structure embedded in a notably wide range of socio-economic locations. Significantly, Forums were led by artists who were resident in their respective Districts.

Because of this physical and management structure, the Forums were able to generate local arts activities in a notably different way. Systematically employing co-design methodologies, artists functioned as facilitators with the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of creative activities determined by what citizens perceived as appropriate for them. The full impact of this approach soon became evident. Questions arose about the relative importance of process and product, and the consequent issue of how quality could be assessed and by whom. Tensions emerged about the role of the Forums. As commissioner, the local authority saw them instrumentally as a vehicle for delivering the city’s cultural offer in wards and neighbourhoods that it had designated as priority locations. Major arts organizations in the city tended to cast the Forums as localised agents for their outreach and audience development programmes. Ironically in all this, the Forums were weakest where they were

strongest. Physically localised, spread across the city, and operationally preoccupied, they were disconnected and thus vulnerable to divide and rule tactics. The earlier promise that Forums would develop a radically citizen-based approach to the arts was beginning to be undermined by institutional interests of the cultural establishment.

The turning point came with two developments. In 2014-16, and alongside councils from Bristol, Bradford and Burnley, Birmingham participated in Connecting Communities through Culture, a project funded by Arts Council England and the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. The Forums were tasked with co-designing arts activities to encourage socio-cultural interaction between otherwise disengaged communities. However, in generating arts activities with citizens simultaneously in widely differing neighbourhoods and communities of interest across the whole of the city, the ten Forum leaders became fully aware of the exciting potential of the Forum structure. They resolved to form an independent company that could speak with one voice for all Forums, raise funds in its own right and champion citizen-led arts. They named the company No11 Arts after the famous Birmingham bus route with the symbolism that it too links outlying microcommunities and, as a circular route, does not radiate from the centre. At more or less the same time, arts organizations in Birmingham - large and small theatres, production companies, galleries, concert halls, etc. - followed a similar path to the Forums and came together to form their umbrella organization, Culture Central. No 11 Arts and Culture Central are currently engaged whole-heartedly in exploring how they can co-operate on equal terms in future. Thus, we now have a strong platform for radically re-thinking the identity, place and functions of the arts in the City of Birmingham.

Whilst continuing to hold the council commission to manage the Local Arts Forums in Birmingham, No 11 Arts now receives funds from other sources. Codesign methodology is a key factor in this respect. Through this process No 11 Arts employs a wide range of art forms to enable citizens to articulate and share not only how they see themselves, other citizens and the worlds around them, but also how their perceptions and those of others might change in future. In this way, No 11 Arts is actively re-shaping where the arts lie in the wider socio-cultural profile of a major European city. Through practice, the case is being made that the arts form common land and an integral feature of the daily lives of all citizens alongside a field owned by professional providers and privileged consumers.

The capacity of the arts to mesh with other aspects of daily life and with wider social issues is evidenced by a recent No 11 Arts commission from a consortium of West Midland universities. We were asked to conduct open-ended ‘creative consultation’ with citizens about re-shaping urban services, such as transport, policing, housing etc. Artist-facilitators co-designed activities with contrasting resident groups, enabling them to articulate how they saw themselves in relation to the provision of urban services. The groups chose to engage in yarn-bombing their neighbourhood, composing rap lyrics about the buses and creating a community quilt highlighting what they valued in their environment. Citizen perspectives on urban service providers, revealed through these activities, were notably different from the ways in which providers see citizens.

But how does the practice of No 11 Arts help to evolve the theory of cultural commons? There are indications that a more democratic approach to culture is emerging. Socially loaded hierarchical values are deeply embedded in our ideas about culture. Consider, for example, the values associated with ballet and zumba classes. Through its structure, ways of working and its place in the Birmingham cultural spectrum, No 11 Arts is in a position to set up change-making and place-making dialogues across such divides. Employing co-design methodology enables citizens to benefit from artists’ creative skills and cultural insights, whilst simultaneously developing their creative capacities, without surrendering their own sense of socio-cultural identity.

To conclude, No 11 Arts is engaged in Birmingham-based practice that is helping to shape two processes of cultural commoning. We are fostering a power balance between two forms of authority - rigour that comes from professional capability in the arts, and relevance that comes from citizens’ lived experience. We are also engaged in realising the idea of creative ‘place-making’ by demonstrating that any venue housing an institution dedicated to the arts is no more a centre of culture than any other city location where citizens live, work or gather together.

Garvagh People’s Forest - A Commoning Practice

Karin Eyben

“I was in the forest today and I came out taller than the trees”

Garvagh (from Irish: Garbhach, meaning “rough place” or Garbhachadh meaning “rough field”) is a village in County Londonderry. It was developed in its current layout by the Canning family in the 17th Century, following the 1640s rebellion with land confiscated by the Crown from the O’Cahans.

Garvagh once lay on the edges of the famous Glenconkeyne Forest which stretched from north-west from Lough Neagh, down the Bann valley, nearly to Coleraine, and across to the Sperrin mountains in the east. In 1607 this area was described by Sir John Davys, the Irish attorney-general, as “well-nigh as large as the New Forest in Hampshire and stored with the best timber in Ireland.”58 It formed in its day one of the biggest, and possibly the densest, oak forest in the country and became notorious for the hide out of the woodkernes - “a race of outlaws driven from their miserable dwellings by the Norman invaders, rarely emerging from their retreats in the impenetrable forests except in pursuit of plunder.”59 They became the most formidable enemies with which the first planters in Ulster had to contend with. By the end of the 17th century the woods of south Derry had become mostly depleted with the woods exploited by the Crown with the timber used for casks, barrels, buildings and ships.

Garvagh Forest today is a ~600 acres mix of broad leaf and conifer forest. This piece of land has evolved through different forms of ownership and management - from its time as land ruled by different chieftains in Gaelic Ireland and managed through the Brehon laws, to the period of private ownership through the Canning family who built the ‘big house’ in the forest, to being owned and managed as a commercial forest by the state from the 1950s.

Understanding this history and the complexity of people’s relationship with the land and the forest is a key underpinning of the Garvagh People’s Forest project. The story of the project began with the closure of Garvagh High School (also sitting on the former Canning estate) in August 2013. There was significant level of community grief and anger at the time which was gradually shifted to exploring the potential of a community asset transfer of the land from the Department of Education to community management. The feasibility of this is still being explored. However, as part of this process of exploration, a new conversation began - a conversation that noticed the asset of the neighbouring forest and to what extent understanding the value of the forest could contribute to wider community wellbeing. A year was spent testing out different possibilities in the forest - such as creative community events and establishing a collaborative relationship with a number of local primary schools to explore the value of young people learning outside. This work, led by Garvagh Development Trust (GDT), a local development trust, with the support of Corrymeela Community, established enough evidence to allow GDT to apply to the Big Lottery for five years funding to grow the project. We were successful in this bid with this new chapter of the story beginning in August 2017.

Garvagh People’s Forest (GPF) has as its mission to grow value in the forest with and for local people with a simple premise: time outside makes us feel better (if warmly dressed lol) and when we feel better we are in a better place to do interesting things for ourselves and with others. We have five strands to the project:

1. Developing a Forest School - This is being done in collaboration with six local primary schools and three pre-schools with the ambition of increasing the time young people learn and create outside. The work involves growing the skills and confidence of local educators in the processes of connecting young people to the outdoors.

2. An adult education programme - We organise ‘classes in the forest’, where people with skills give time to share and teach those skills with others. An example is a 5 week course, Unplugged in Garvagh Forest, where participants learn basic woodworking skills using reclaimed wood and making useful household items. A Library of Tools & Forest Resources is developing from this strand of the project.

3. Growing community with imagination - This strand focuses on using the forest for community events that invite people to look at the world around them differently in the medium of the forest. For example, in August 2018, we organised a Time Travel Festival, exploring the layered histories of the Garvagh area through an interactive adventure and challenge from Mesolithic Times to the Future through different sites in the forest.

4. Contributing to greater physical and mental well-being - relating our work five

indicators of well-being: Notice; Learn; Give; Move; Connect.

5. Reflection, Learning, Evaluation, Community and Advocacy.

Garvagh Forest is already well loved by individual walkers, mountain bikers and families. Garvagh People’s Forest is building on these relationships with an invitation to shift from individual connections to exploring the potential of collaboration between individuals and local groups - sharing if not shifting the sense of ownership and responsibility with the Forest Service, local government and the State. Our dream is that, after the project’s five years, there is a communityled integrated plan for Garvagh Forest – a plan informed by knowledge of how the forest works - its biodiversity, social and commercial interests - and, most importantly, how it is understood, shaped and used by local people through activity contributing to the wider common good.

We have crowd-funded for the purchase of nine copies of Lost Words, by Robert McFarlane and Jackie Morris, for Garvagh Forest schools. All over these islands, there are words disappearing from children’s lives. Words like otter, bramble, acorn, dandelion, bluebell are gone from many dictionaries disconnecting young people from the heritage, history and landscape around them. The loss of words is the loss of a relationship and the loss of the art of noticing and learning from our natural world and understanding our place within it. We hope that, in the period ahead, we can shape our programme of work and activities in the Forest to help with recovery of the words that have been lost to the people around it.

So how does Garvagh People’s Forest fit into the ‘cultural commoning’ movement? The initial decision that began the project was a small act of creative courage as it was driven by intuition as opposed to any evidence. The intuition was that the forest is a key aspect of shared cultural heritage and well-being and that so much more value could grow from people’s relationship with the forest and the local environment if we worked collectively. The forest offers a difference space and tangible focal point for all kinds of commoning work as well as giving value to the work that is happening across Garvagh. We also firmly believe that the sharing of responsibility and ownership of the forest will be better for people, the environment and the place of Garvagh.

Hebden Bridge Handmade Parade: Our Big Day

Andrew Kim

Handmade Parade60 is a company of parade artists, puppeteers, stilt walkers, performers and community organisers based around Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire. The company creates high-impact participatory events.

The first Hebden Bridge Handmade Parade happened in 2008. I had moved to England from the USA in 2006 and my wife and I had started a puppet theatre company called Thingumajig Theatre.61 We had found ourselves performing here and there but with no opportunity to perform locally. At the same time, we met lots of artists who were also looking for a way to share their work in their locality. So I proposed a community parade where local artists created parade art with people from their own community. We found some friends who supported us and helped us raise some money. A local commercial landlord let us use a disused office space and we put the word out.

For our first parade, we offered two weeks of free parade costume workshops and had about 300 costumed participants. Last years, for our 9th annual parade, we had about 1000 participants in our parade. Hebden Bridge has a population of about 5500.

From the beginning, I wanted to do something a little different from other small town carnivals. So I borrowed some rules from the Fremont Solstice Parade,62 which I had worked on in Seattle. The approach of Fremont Solstice Parade resonates with how I understand a cultural commons could work in the world of carnival.

Our rules are that no written words or logos are allowed, and no motorised vehicles. Taking cars and decorated flatbed trucks out of the process makes the event human-sized and allows us to slow it down to a child-friendly walking speed. Making things human-sized also makes it easier for people to make exciting and impressive costumes. By forbidding written words and logos, we take commerce and advertisement away and it becomes more about the celebration of people and their creativity. We also take away the means to divide people according to

their everyday groupings. In our parade, you are not representing your school or your church or your social club. Instead you represent the parade section you have chosen. You might be in the section with all the other wolves or the flying pigs or the space aliens. This way, different ages and types of people mix in surprising ways and celebrate together.

We begin each year with a Spark Day. This is an open community meeting where anyone can come and offer ideas of what they would like to see in the parade. This might be about a pressing local issue or a big something they’d like to see walking down the streets.

The lead artists will then take the ideas away and settle on a theme. We will then break down the theme into sections and a different artist will design his/her parade section. Each section will have two or three signature pieces, which the lead artist and assistant artists design, and an easily constructed costumed ensemble, which the community participants will make. Our parades usually have three or four sections with a different lead artist heading up each section.

When parade participants come to their first open workshop, they see all the parade section designs in parade order, like a storyboard. They decide which sections they want to be a part of and which costumes they’d like to make and then go to the table where the artists and volunteers will help them to make their costumes. This way of structuring and presenting ideas to participants was inspired by my work with the MayDay Parade63 in Minneapolis. It encourages respect for the imagination of the people who are coming to contribute and enables them to find a part in the common cause of the production. Some people will come and make their costumes in just one 2-hour session but most come to three to six different sessions. Sessions are free but we suggest a donation.

The mix of artist-led design, dedicated volunteer help and involvement of citizens is the bedrock of how our parades are put together. The motivations for each person may be different. But both the idea of making a parade with others and the prospect of adding colour and celebration to a particular place is of interest to everyone. Their sense of common cause is the glue that holds people together. Having this solid foundation also helps us create additional opportunities for people to get involved.

We have workshops in schools, senior centres and community centres to reach out to people who may not necessarily feel comfortable coming to our workshop space. We also set up workshops for teens and adults in Samba drumming, stilt walking and put together a women’s dance ensemble and a street theatre group so that we can create as many opportunities as possible for people to participate

Over the years, we’ve also welcomed many international guest artists from USA, Denmark, Sweden, Ireland and last year a company from Russia called Cardboardia64 who created a whole section of the parade. These partnerships are excellent opportunities to share skills and approaches for working with communities and audiences. They also add fresh energy and open new ways of seeing the event.

The result is a parade which is mix of community participation and individual creativity with strong, artist-led design. In nine years, the Hebden Bridge Handmade Parade has become a core part of our town’s identity. It’s our big day, when we let our creativity flow, dance down streets with our friends and neighbours, and show the world just how funky our town can be.

A New Role for the Artist

John Fox

Population growth, global warming, scarcity, religious and cyber wars, famine, environmental degradation, nuclear proliferation and refugees, signal emergency. As our financial and religious frameworks are also collapsing, and our media drives anxiety, depression looms. So how do we celebrate what is worthwhile and gives us peace of mind? Traditionally some artists have offered inspiration. In our consumer culture however, many of us, including artists, are hi-jacked by spectacle, novelty and celebrity, and encouraged to create investment product.

In this unsettling time we must look to process to find the ground rules of a culture, which may be less materially based, but where more people will actively participate and rejoice in moments that are wonderful. A culture where more of us grow and cook our own food, build our own houses, name our children, bury our dead, mark anniversaries, create new ceremonies for rites of passage and devise whatever drama, stories, songs, music, pageants and jokes that enable people to live more creatively.

Dominant fashionable so-called art, currently perpetuated by a small number of cultural gate-keepers, their institutions and their manipulative dealing, needs to be re-colonised as a mode of intuitive knowledge with a vernacular root. (vernacular - any value that is homebred, homemade, neither bought nor sold on the market). A new role for the artist is called for – the artist as catalyst, hands on facilitator and celebrant who recognises the artist in us all. In a society where re-generation is of the soul and not of economics, the innate creativity of people of every age is liberated through participation and collaboration.

In 1968 Welfare State International (WSI) was born in Bradford proposing An Alternative, an Entertainment and a Way of Life. The sixties were Vietnam, apartheid, Paris protests, the Situationists, art school sit-ins. And then, in the 1980s, there was Thatcher’s destruction of mining communities. We wanted to extract art from the ghettos of theatres and galleries and restore it to participating communities. As our new manifesto states, we still do.

WSI continued to 2006. We trucked on, from street theatre with rough Punch and Judy, Mummers Plays and the Arabian Nights to invent influential prototypes of site specific theatre in landscape, fire-shows, installations, lantern parades and new ceremonies for secular rites of passage. We became an Arts Council England RFO (Regularly Funded Organisation) with, in 1999, a £2m Arts Lottery refurbishment of our Old National School in Ulverston, so creating Lanternhouse, a hands on producing venue.

The full story is in Engineers of the Imagination and Eyes on Stalks. 65 Briefly, after creating world-wide celebratory mayhem with scores of shows from Poland to Vancouver, mainly outside at festivals, we ended our touring phase with Raising the Titanic on Limehouse Dockside for the London International Festival of Theatre (LIFT) in 1983. This was an allegorical three-act pageant, including lantern boats and a public dance, reflecting Thatcher’s Britain mirrored in the arrogance, class structure and disaster of the Titanic.

Barrow in Furness is where BAE build Trident submarines. Through participatory workshops during1983–90 we created the 60 minute film King Real, Adrian Mitchell’s Cinderella version of King Lear located in a nuclear submarine; a Tattoo for the Town Hall’s 100th anniversary with Queen Victoria on an elephant gun carriage; a Tapestry of Shipyard Tales, with sit-coms, musicals, song cycles, Brechtian documentaries; and Lord Dynamite, an opera about Alfred Nobel. In the final Golden Submarine event Lord Shellbent fails to achieve Armageddon because the Trident sheds are moved by women with their nuclear vacuum cleaner.

Nine miles from Barrow is the market town of Ulverston with a population of 12,000. When our family moved there in 1979 there were 44 empty shops. Now, following cultural regeneration, much of it generated by our lantern parades, flag fortnights and a comedy festival, it thrives as “The Festivals Town.”

We started the first lantern parade in September 1983. Now it is an annual event when hundreds process in four rivers of light with their large sculptural candlelit lanterns made at home from willow and tissue paper. The skills are in the hands of the community. The quality totally professional. In an entirely non-commercial celebration of place, family and community, the event has become for some a moment of excess and a secular rite of passage. Now extensively copied world-wide, it was originally inspired by a Buddhist/Shinto procession experienced by WSI in Japan in 1982 - a Japanese blessing, a cross between entertainment and a way of life, between spectacle and a significant rite.

Lanternhouse, our customized sanctuary in Ulverston, gave us the space to research such cross-overs and write manuals on secular rites of passage ceremonies for funerals and baby namings. WSI’s last show, created from stories, photographs,