I. Reading Guide
What happens if you know you don’t know where this is going? And you know that it came into being because of a whole set of contingencies. Then, how do you evaluate this experience? And from that point of view, the practices of bricolage are very important because they allow you to hang on to that temporality of transition, that doesn’t say, “I have an authority because I am the contemporary.” And it doesn’t say, “I have an authority because I am only a stepping stone towards this transformation, I am [an] incomplete process of what is going to be transformed.” It says, “ In my fragility, in my incompletion, I also represent the ground on which people’s feel will have to uncertainly balance. And from which they will observe the world, and from which they will have to create, and from which they will have to write.
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Bricolage is rather an “incubation”. Whenever you think you are at a turning point at history, people always keep using the word “new” - just like now, everything to do with globalization is new: new economies, new telecommunication, new materials. Whenever you hear this word “new” you have to understand that you stand in a very fragile relation of the past to the present, and that is incubation. It is not as if you stand at the end of something or in the middle of a brave new world. It is a middleness of a different kind. It is, in a way, starting from thinking you are always in the middle of something - and that is the incubation- al and the spirit of time, that is part of the movement of bricolage.”
(See the Unresolved Question at the end of this section.)
Homi K. Bhabha (2006)
This document describes what is Arts Collaboratory (AC) and how much further it could go and could become.
The purpose is to identify the principles by which we work together and to describe the structures that have been put in place to make this possible since the first version was published in 2015.
This second version was edited from Dec. 15, 2016 and until mid-March 2017 by a temporary working group whose mission was to incorporate the comments made on the first version and to update the document to reflect the decisions and processes that were established during the Assembly in Kyrgyzstan in 2016.
This continues to be an exploratory working document, not a manifesto, and by its nature will need to continuously evolve. In order to reflect this idea the title was changed from AC Future Plan to AC Ecosystem - Work in Process.
It helps to read this document more than one time to get a clearer sense of the content.
The structure of the document begins with principles and paradigms in section A, B and C (these focus on what we are trying to achieve), then continues with the ways in which these paradigms and principles are manifested practically in sections D and E (how we are trying to achieve them). Unresolved questions are included in different sections of the document and signal questions that Arts Collaboratory still has to figure out. This process should occur as part of the process in the next assembly in Costa Rica in June of 2017.
These are the sections:
Gives the background to how we have arrived at this point. In doing so, it links how each organisation, and the way that we work locally and in AC, has lead to the ideas captured in this document;
Tracks some key points of what AC foresees for a future. This frames why the future of AC is important and what it seeks to do in the bigger picture;
Discusses shared principles among us and the ethics we have in common. It also identifies some specific principles (potentially more akin to some AC organisations than others) that are pivotal to the future of AC and new ways of thinking about what AC could be.
Discusses some specific tools that can achieve the principles and vision expressed in the previous sections. Specifically this section discusses our resources and how we can support and grow them.
Is a new way of thinking about governance and the possibilities of how AC could function in the framework of self-organisation.
All the unresolved questions gathered in this section.
There are some key things that must be taken into account while reading:
Language: There was an agreement that conventional 'funding language' is not adequate for speaking about what AC is becoming. Therefore this document includes a glossary that defines some existing words in a way that we feel better captures what AC is doing. These words attempt to move away from the dynamics of applications/proposals, reports and deadlines but also attempt to rethink ideas of value, of resources and of hierarchy of relations.
Style: the document is written in a theoretical/poetic/political style to attempt to define the wider spirit in which we work. The current version combines the ethical principles and the results of our radical imagination in creating the AC ecosystem, it describes the mechanisms currently in use.
While sections B, C and D are relatively well developed they are of course still very much open to change and discussion. Section E is the current structure of governance of AC, for which the details are refined through practice and reviewed collectively during the Assembly. Finally section F details the questions and issues that are still pending within AC.
A Common Language / Glossary of Terms follows to give descriptions of the language and the intention behind the use of some of the words. This glossary will be constantly and collectively reviewed, developed and expanded as the dynamics of AC are more clearly understood.
Unresolved question:
Audu asks:
The future: How do we envisage it... I feel it must be factored here somehow.
Do we see it as a projective path as Homi will put it, or do we see it as something we are living now?
To him, it’s a form of future anterior that is not far from the now. So this gives postcolonialism as time lag between the now and the envisaged end of this projective past.
In practical terms the colonial period had a start and an awareness of postcolonialism started at some point. Hence, mathematically speaking, one should be able to project a vision of this now or future, in order to be able to be properly
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