Care Lab Blueprint 2

CARE LAB

How do we centre care in collaborations between artists and communities?

Care is enabling others to reach their full potential. Care is heavy. Care is maintenance work. Care is more demanding than you think at first. Care is the manifestation of your values in behaviour. Care must be people-centred. Care should be embedded throughout practice, processes and systems. Care takes time and attention. Centring care is expensive, under-appreciated and under resourced.

What is Care?

Poem by Deanna Rodger

Reflections

Reflections from Suzanne Alleyne, Care Lab Facilitator Who gets the care and at what cost to others?

Maria reminded us that the creative process is unpredictable and is in opposition to organisational planning and procedures. There’s that tension again! Her letter gave us an intimate insight into a fundamental question - who gets cared for, who gives the caring, who doesn’t get cared for and at what cost to them? What was really interesting for me was that when Maria spoke, I realised that historically a lot of what she said would have been put down to “well that’s the creative process, like it or lump it”. I would argue that thinking “get on with it” is a significant part of why the western world is in the space its in today.

Back to Maria’s provocation. Some of the questions she asked us to think about in the context of care include “what makes artists hesitate to share what they need or think” and what happens when the artist, the commissioner and the producing team focus care on the audience and or participants but do not include themselves? It made me think of two things: what is the impact of this and going a step further, what happens when the artist sits at multiple intersections of lived experiences that often mean being an excluded voice or someone who is cared for. It also reminds me of a conversation with Professor Lisa Feldman Barrett about body budgeting, or its proper name “allostasis”, which is the way in which our bodies budget. Much like our food budget, our bodies have to decide what to do at what cost with a limited resource. We don’t only affect our own bodies’ budgets with the decisions we makewe affect the bodies of those around us. So without doubt there is a clinical cost around being cared for or not.

How can we say ‘I don’t know’ and how might we encourage people to feel more confident in saying this? I wonder what would happen if we ask this question with the aim of co-creating a space of care for everyone in the process? And how might that way of working and living spread out to wider society?

Time for control to go to war with uncertainty

Time to exhale the brief

Time to refresh, reboot to shift and switch tack

Time to stick and get stuck.

Time for solutions

Time for honesty

Time for a chat, a cup of tea and biccy

Time for failure and time for encouragement

Time for manners

Time to say sod off to need to please and time for no thank you

We have got time. We bought it Haggled it. Hassled the powers that be for it

We have time to find the questions

We have time to sit in them

We have time to scrabble for answers

There is always time

Time to run out of time

Time to feel pressurised

Time to think over a deadline

Time to send some idea

Chasing time

Open-ended time

Give up time

Time to unlearn wrong from right

Time to connect first

Time to get ready to start

Time to project concerns

Match time

My time

Your time

Free time

Our time

Funded time

Paid time

Time in lieu

Taking time

Never enough time

I’m time

Me I’m crammed in between a clock and a pot

Revolving, gathering momentum

A potent force to be spent in time

Time: the essence of care

Time: missing in our action

Time leaving on time.

Moving Forward

By Suzanne Alleyne

I was left with the overriding question from these provocations:

How do we take action whilst listening to our bodies and emotions and the bodies and emotions of those around us?

How do we not become rooted in the fear of failure?

What is tension and what is lack of care?

Where do the two meet and overlap and for whom, how and when?

Why is care important between artists and organisations and beyond, funders, wider society?

Three prompts to begin

Sidenote:

Focus on what resonates with you but if you feel a desire to run from something, in this moment, try to think about sitting with your feelings and examining them.

Care and disruption:

Asking to work with embedded care is fundamentally disruptive.

How can we reduce fear around this to encourage disruption?

Relationship:

Usually there is a transactional relationship between artist and commissioner.

How might a brief centre care rather than have a separate agreement?

Change:

All systems need review in order to centre care.

In what ways can we use what we have more usefully?

How can we communicate if systems are not fit for purpose?

How can we start again?

“Care is not just a feeling; it is action, process, practice, impact.” - Tian Zhang, a manifesto for radical care or how to be human in the art.

The creative process is unpredictable and is in opposition to organisational planning and procedures, which requires prediction and control.

As a social artist working in partnership with different groups of people who you haven’t met before, the situation is bound to be full of uncertainties and vulnerabilities because everyone is getting to know each other and trying to figure out what the project is about/for.

It is tricky responding to a brief knowing an organisation and community partner has something in mind, a vision (and mission) which you have been appointed to realise.

I spend a long time with the brief, trying to hold my thinking, your thinking and the group’s thinking with equal weight and respect.

Our practice of care centres the community group, which is without doubt vital.

I am concerned though, at how little thought is given to our care - and I include myself in this omission.

focused on doing the project well - to budget, on time and hopefully with everyone being pleased with the outcome (or outputs, I never know what the wording is and, to be honest, don’t use these corporate-y terms if I can help it). I wanted to make sure the group felt seen and heard. Rarely did focus my attention on my own needs or yours. The intention as commissioned artist and commissioner was to create a nurturing and beneficial experience for the group. We forgot that we were also part of the group. We separated our personal selves from our professional selves, assuming this was the best way to conduct ourselves, but was it?

Our policies and practices aren’t fit for purpose - we need to imagine alternatives together

Creativity can be suffocated by practical and admin considerations

Artists, participants, and funders can all hold space in a project and work together in a multi-relational way

Human centred ideas/behaviours can feel radical

Fundamentally you can’t put care into one space without putting it in other spaces…

We need an Ecology Of Care

Care Labels - a good model of practice to keep everybody’s needs in the room and respected all the time

THOUGHTS

An inclusion rider almost says “this is the accepted normal and here is how I am different” whereas if everyone has a ‘Care Label’ or info card it normalises it and acknowledges that everyone has different ways of working and communicating

Artists briefs - should not be in ‘fundraising’ language, but perhaps should be defined by participants

Artists feel a need to please and find it hard to address conflict when asked to do something a different way

Not taking care of ourselves can mean we can’t take care of others as well.

ARTIST PROVOCATION ACTIONS

How do we centre care in collaborations between artists and communities?

QUESTIONS

How might we prioritise the relationship between artist and organisation as well as artist and community?

How do we hold the scope to change the mission as projects unfold?

Can we create an open space that’s contained (working in a paradox)?

How do we think differently about the need to be on time and on budget, to make space for honesty and discovery?

We are consciously working in forms other than the verbal, how do we carve time for exchange that isn’t just talking?

If the commissioned artist is nurturing and caring for the group who is caring for them?

Is care about who hears you, when they hear you and how they hear you?

Why is the brief focussed on output? How can we take time to share and articulate ourselves clearly?

Does there need to be an inclusion rider?

Do we need to work within the framework of what already exists? What if we all set out our needs, how we prefer to communicate etc., to understand better how each other works before moving forwards on any project.

How do artists help commissioners to learn by sharing their practice, concerns and ways of working?

How do we juggle the balance between the pressure to produce an output and centring care?

What if we could prioritise the way we work together and the relationship being created over potential measurable outcomes/artworks created?

What if I/You/We…

…exploring the complexity of developing and sustaining care-centred practices

Held project meetings with the whole group that were tea, biscuits and chat with everyone sharing ideas, aspirations and life instead of schedules, logistics, marketing, funder reporting and objectives.

Created briefs that centred care rather than requiring a separate agreement

Spent weeks just talking about ideas

Checked-in throughout projects, creating a safe space for honesty. Is it working? Do we need to change direction?

Adopted the practice of working with ‘care labels’, as developed by the Berlin based Feminist Health Care Research Group [FHCRG] who exist to question the internalised, ableist concept of productivity that is rewarded in the art field

Built projects grounded in the ways I/You/We want to be. BEING comes before the DOING

Built in full cost recovery for care in budgets and funding applications

Started projects with relationship building (artists, participants etc), building a shared understanding/agreement, created by everyone involved, about what care is Made inclusion/access/care riders standard practice

Had enough time for project(s) to unfold organically with care

Worked with artists’ briefs that deliberately focussed on the unknown, risk and vulnerability?

Influenced people with power to make change, through spaces for deep listening

Set up a budget line across the organisation to support care and invited artists into the codesign process (paid for time) Thought creatively about how evaluation can place value on care rather than other outputs