5 minute read

CARE LAB

Next Article
QUESTIONS

QUESTIONS

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: 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?

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?

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.

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

This article is from: