Lady Kitt is a disabled artist and drag king, describing their work as “Mess Making as Social Glue”. Kitt works on long term, collaborative projects driven by insatiable curiosity about how art can be useful.
Projects are usually punctuated by the creation of large-scale, vibrant installations / sites for exchange made from recycled paper, reused plastics and raw clay, which Kitt calls shrines. They use crafting, performance, joy and research to create objects, interactions and events, with the wild ambition of dismantling and mischievously re-crafting spaces and systems they find discriminatory, obsolete or just quite dull.
In this episode Kitt describes a ‘collaborative sandwich’ activity that helps to build relationships at the start of a community project, and ways they make space for listening throughout this work.

This episode begins a mini-series that looks at whether or not we should feel concerned about the digital tools we use and the effects that they have on us. The tools we use and the uses we make of them have changed since the web began in the early nineties. Twenty years ago people created blogs and surfed the web looking for like-minded people. Today most people create personal pages on social media platforms and search inside Facebook to find new “friends”.
Does this difference matter?
Owen Kelly looks at the history of the web and the ways that these changes happened and suggests that we can find a growing movement to reclaim the sense of discovery that used to pervade the web. He suggests that we revive the idea of the curated blog-roll and the collective web-ring, and promises that Miaaw will introduce modern versions of these on its website soon.

On September 23, 2022, we put out episode 20 of Common Practice, in which we talked with Beverley Harvey and Brendan Jackson about the creation of the online Jubilee Archives. Later, in episode 27, we talked with Steve Trow, one of the founders of Jubilee, about the importance of cultural capital.
In this episode we conclude these discussions with a conversation with Brendan Jackson, triggered by the official finale of the Jubilee Archives programme. We ask what the project has achieved, and what Brendan sees as its future now that the construction phase has finished.
We also return to the question of Laundry Line, the community and social arts collective that might serve as a very useful model for other groups needing a formal structure in order to apply for funds.

In Culture of Possibility #36 – the podcast’s third anniversary — Arlene Goldbard and Miaaw.net guru Owen Kelly will talk about cultural work and spirituality.
Some community artists reject non-material understandings, but Owen and Arlene each find their work infused with spiritual ideas and practices — albeit very different ones.
Is spirituality necessarily non-material? What can spiritual practice bring to our work? How can ideas and stories from sacred texts infuse and inform work for cultural democracy? How can they connect rather than separate us?

Sam Metz describes their rationale as responding to “the premise of ‘neuroqueering’ (a term first coined by Nick Walker) which seeks to undermine or subvert dominant structures that remain hostile to non-normative neurodivergent bodyminds. I am interested in exploring the idea of ‘hostile’ spaces through my work with a particular focus on what relational connections mean within ecology.”
They go on to say that “in my socially engaged practice I am interested in exploring/ co-producing and defining new moralities for social structures that are safer for neurodivergent people”.
In this episode of Ways of Listening, Sam Metz describes looking for ways of working that don't privilege vision or verbal interactions, and describes a listening practice that extends through the body. They describe the importance of attunement to micro-cues to pick up on participants’ comfort levels, and consider how relationships affect our ability to act as a ‘receiver’. Sam shares methods from their practice, such as encouraging repetitive touch as a means of connecting with embodied feedback.

Did we succeed or fail in 2023? What could this question possibly mean? Do we have any way of measuring our progress, or lack of progress? Do we need one?
By way of addressing this, Owen Kelly suggests three approaches that we might usefully continue to develop in the coming year, and (spoiler alert) none of them involving wearing Fitbits.
As always he attempts to provide some interesting concrete examples and contemporary references rather than hovering high above the clouds of theory.

We have arrived at the final podcast of 2023, which also happens to fall on the fifth Friday of the fourth month of 2023 with five Fridays in it. We therefore take a final look into the Miaaw past and listen once more to another memorable episode from our short history. This time we listen in to Owen and Sophie dig out their copies of Marxism & Literature and discuss the cultural theory that Raymond Williams develops there in considerable detail.
They reflect on Williams’ insistence on keeping in mind that we live our lives as processes, and that cultural theory needs to avoid turning these into finished products that we can dissect at our leisure.
Next year, Friday Number 5 will have a new focus: one that will provide you with a set of interesting cultural listening from outside our usual orbit.

Based in Bucharest, Raluca Voinea works as a curator and art critic, based in Bucharest and, since 2012 as co-director of tranzit.ro Association. In 2013 she acted as the curator of the Romanian Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale and in 2015 she co-authored, with Alexandra Pirici, The Manifesto for the Gynecene: Sketch of a New Geological Era. The Manifesto subsequently became translated into several languages and included in different publications and exhibitions.
In this episode she talks with Sophie Hope about The Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life, described as “a bet and a promise, an experiment, and an investment into a future we can still shape”.
The station began as “a joint venture of a group of artists, curators, theorists, economists and others, who, together with tranzit.ro, co-own and co-manage a plot of land in the village Silistea Snagovului, 30 km north of Bucharest, in the proximity of a protected natural area (forest and lake)”. Raluca describes its genesis and its evolution.