Common Practice: Reshape

In the fourth episode of A Culture of Possibility, Arlene Goldbard and Francois Matarasso compare U.S. and European funding systems for community arts. In this discussion they are not interested in who gets funding and whether that funding is deserved. Nor are they concerned with where funding goes. Instead they focus on the underlying bases for making funding decisions in the first place.
They find that both the American and European systems are way too focused on the wrong questions, with results that are politically, ethically, and culturally problematic.
How did this happen? What would be better?
Francois and Arlene have both written a great deal about questions of cultural policy and cultural funding over many years. This discussion can only scratch the surface of their thinking. If you are interested in what they have to say then you should check their websites for articles and links.

This episode begins a trilogy of audio essays concerned with the work of Marshall McLuhan and its continuing relevance in the digital age.
In this first essay, entitled Understanding McLuhan, Owen Kelly offers a brief introduction to McLuhan’s life and work. He offers a potted biography and a quick run through his six most celebrated books, including Laws of Media, edited by his son Eric, and published eight years after his death.
He also sets the stage for the second episode by looking briefly at several of McLuhan’s key concepts from the medium is the message to media tetrads.

The availability (or unavailability) of covid-19 vaccines has become an international issue. Some people have begun asking the extent to which the problems in the supply chains stem from the proprietary nature of the vaccines and the need for exclusivity that this promotes.
At the same time a group of scientists in Finland have developed a nasal spray that they claim will prove cheaper, more effective, much easier to administer, and much easier to upgrade to deal with new variants of the virus. They have developed it as an open-source vaccine and they have found it difficult to find the funding to put it through the necessary Stage 3 tests.
In this episode of Meanwhile in an Abandoned Warehouse Sophie Hope and Owen Kelly discuss some of the issues surrounding the idea of open source vaccines, and the systemic issues they reveal when we start to think about them.

For over three decades, Numbi Arts has been at the forefront of archiving British Somali heritage and has become a significant part of the East London cultural scene. Last year, the organization lost its residency and is currently crowd-funding in order to secure a permanent home for their work.
In this episode of Common Practice Sophie Hope talks with Kinsi Abdulleh, who founded Numbi Arts, and Hudda Khaireh, an independent researcher who is currently an associate there.
They discuss their work, their ambitions and achievements, what drives them, and their plans to create a Somali Museum in East London to document the history of Somali-British arts and culture.

In the third episode of “A Culture of Possibility,” Francois Matarasso and Arlene Goldbard meet Clare Reynolds, one of the founders of Restoke, a group who make performances and events that tackle social issues affecting their communities.
Based in the British city of Stoke-on-Trent, where the founders grew up, Restoke’s work pursues an ambitious agenda in both its artistic and social purpose.
In the conversation Clare describes their work, with particular reference to two recent works: You Are Here and Man Up. She talks about what they do and why they do it and equally importantly, how they do it.
She also discusses The Ballroom, a project that began in December 2020 when “we received a capital grant from Arts Council England to restore and reopen the Ballroom at Fenton Town Hall as a brand new community arts venue for Stoke-on-Trent!”.

This episode concludes Sophie Hope’s trilogy of audio essays, each looking at a different aspect of cultural democracy in practice.
In this conclusion Sophie explores the relationship between arts management education and cultural democracy by introducing epistemological ethnocentrism and the need for ex-centric perspectives. Through examples, she addresses the often awkward connections between employments rights and more informal, embedded relational aspects of making, creating and culturally producing.

In this episode Owen Kelly and Sophie Hope wrap up last month’s discussion about Gamestop and move on to look at a newer internet phenomenon: Clubhouse.
They look at how this audio-only app works, ask how it has gained so much attention so quickly, and ponder about whether it means anything or not from the perspectives of cultural democracy and the open web.
This leads to a broader discussion about the business models behind online businesses and the nature of data-scraping. In the middle of all of this Sophie Hope throws in a reference to Pierre Bourdieu, who approaches power within the context of a comprehensive ‘theory of society’ which includes the concept of ‘habitus’: the way in which ‘society becomes deposited in persons in the form of lasting dispositions, or trained capacities and structured propensities to think, feel and act in determinant ways, which then guide them’.

Sophie Hope and Jenny Richards started Manual Labours in 2013 as a research project exploring our physical and emotional relationships to work. The Global Staffroom grew out of this, and Owen Kelly talks to them about it.
The project reconsiders current time-based structures of work (when does work start and end?) and reasserts the significance of the physical (manual) aspect of immaterial, affective and emotional labour. It has gone through five disctinct phases so far.
As part of the current phases Jenny and Sophie launched a live video podcast on Twitch.tv called The Global Staffroom. This took the form of “a live podcast we hosted involving conversations and interviews with people about what it feels like to care, be cared for, not be able to care at work. Over 14 weeks during lockdown, every Monday lunchtime we brought together guests from different workforces and geographies to discuss architecture of home-work, racialised experiences of lockdown, emotional labour of health workers, social reproduction and remote working.
The podcast was subsequently purchased and archived by The Edinburgh University Art Collection.”