anna francis: Rules of Engagement: Presenting Two Sides of a Social Arts Project.

Community Maker, 2017, Stoke-on-Trent.

As an artist working for many years with people in contexts of change, I identify as part of the developing Social Art Network, co-founded by Eelyn Lee and R.M. Sanchez-Camus in 2016 as ‘a UK based community of artists committed to building agency for the field of art and social practice.’[i]

Lab: The Rules of Engagement with Dan Russell and Rebecca Davies during The Social Art Summit, Sheffield 2018.

I was invited to lead a lab at The Social Art Summit, which took place in Sheffield, November 2018. I keenly felt the significance and urgency of a gathering of artists to discuss the issues and challenges in working in this way; particularly in the current climate of cuts to the arts, but also cuts to so many public services across the UK, all impacting on our ability to do our work, and to do it well.

In planning a lab for the Social Art Summit I saw an opportunity to create a safe space for open and honest discussion with other practitioners, to (just for a moment) centralise the position of the artist, in relation to the social contexts we are working within, and to be frank about the challenges, and sometimes personal cost that making the work requires.

Lab: The Rules of Engagement with Dan Russell and Rebecca Davies during The Social Art Summit, Sheffield 2018.

Planning the lab came at the end of a long, and varied summer of action for The Portland Inn Project – which I work on with collaborator and fellow social artist Rebecca Davies, who, with The Newbridge Project’s Dan Russell, delivered the lab alongside me. To briefly set the context, our project is in an area of Stoke-on-Trent, originally earmarked for demolition in the Government’s collapsed Pathfinder Housing Renewal Scheme, and now known to be the area where homes were sold for a pound. As an artist, working with people, often on projects exploring regeneration and the artists role in places of change, I was fascinated by this context, and what I, and my family could bring to it. I believe that artists have an important role to play in society, and that this role is often undervalued, or at least little understood. In successfully applying to be a one pound home owner, I hoped to demonstrate through working where I live, just what role an artist might play in supporting a community to develop (one of the conditions written into the £1 home scheme contract, was that each homeowner should contribute to community life.)

'Raising The Roof' The Portland Inn Project community Co-build project, Summer 2018, Stoke-on-Trent.

The summer on Portland Street had been a mixture of highs, as we worked with the fantastic Baxendale Studio architects, to co-build a temporary community building with residents of the area, to real lows – as we navigated some extreme local problems, including the drug dealing and taking of Monkey Dust, which impacted daily, on our project delivery.

As we put together the slides for the lab, we began to discuss how, particularly with social practice, we tend to show the positive parts of the project, the things that went well, the smiling faces of participants, but rarely do we present the other side of the project; the boring bits, the awful bits where it feels like everything is collapsing, the moments of failure and the dirty bits. We discussed that in leaving out the challenges, we fail to show what really goes into making the work happen and more, we make it easy for the true value of what we do to be missed. It was for this reason then, that Rebecca and I decided to present the two sides of our project; the side we always share, which we are careful to represent thoughtfully but often positively, but also to present the second part which we usually neglect to speak about; the more challenging aspects of making the work.

We felt it important within the lab to set out why we often err towards the positive when representing the work that we do, so we set out our Reasons to be cheerful:

1. Negative stigma In the area where we are working the community has had to overcome and battle with negative press and judgement for so long; part of the work is about rewriting the story with local residents. Although we may want to discuss the problems which the area faces, we are aware that in doing so, we are at risk of adding to the negative stigma.

2. Morale For our project, and projects like ours it can feel important to keep positive, the celebratory aspects of a project are important locally for hope and to keep up morale (of residents and ourselves as practitioners).

3. Conscious of audience It is a concern that funders may see it as a risk to invest in an area with many visible challenges (something we have heard directly from funders about the work we do). This may make them think twice about funding projects if the difficulties faced in delivering the work are openly discussed.

4. Ethics How on earth do you document, share and expose some of the really difficult challenges, for example drug use and dealing which we are navigating within our project, when doing so can be seen as insensitive or at worst, unethical?

We planned in space within the lab to say why now feels like an important moment to share the challenges.

An increasing number of artists are working in this way.

This Means it's ever more important to be truthful and clear about the two sides to the story, that we as artists have to negotiate. It feels important to make the true work more visible in order to benefit the audience and those who want to work in this way.

If we don’t show the full picture, the full impact will never be understood.

In the context of enormous cuts to the arts and public services it is becoming increasingly difficult to secure funding for art projects. In addition, the role and remit of the artist is expanding in some respects, as public sector cuts mean that organisations that would have supported the work previously are no longer equipped to do so. If we fail to demonstrate the true scope of the work that we are doing then we make it easy to undervalue what the impact is. A project's impact isn't demonstrated by how many people came, in most cases, art happening in social contexts is more nuanced and challenging than that. It is Important to be vocal about the gaps we're filling. Our job title is expanding, and the support to do the job is diminishing.

The Portland Inn Project, final day of the 'Raising the Roof' Summer 2018, Stoke-on-Trent.

We then shared the two sides of our project, the successful parts which are making a difference to the community and location we are working within, the brilliant opportunity to bring architects to our area, and really expand the horizons of our project, and the people we are working with. Then we talked through the parts which are really hard to deal with; the moments of risk and failure and the sometimes personally troubling aspects of working in a precarious context. We talked about this summer, and being threatened by drug dealers, having to call the police on a daily basis, due to anti-social and illegal activity in the space we were working on. We talked about the parts of our role which are generally invisible, and genuinely surprising (even to ourselves) as being part of the remit of the arts project – campaigning with our community all summer to have the shit in the phonebox cleaned up, and going to endless meetings, some of which feel like ground hog day. We did our best in the time provided to lay bare everything that had taken place on Portland Street this summer. This opened up space for group discussion, and time to reflect on what Social Artists are juggling, navigating and at times quietly shouldering. From some of the artists and practitioners in the room it felt like a sigh of relief was let out, finally a space to talk about the crap. For others in the room, this felt like a step too far – and even in this space with other social artists, questions were raised about whether it is ever ok to share the shit in the phonebox, or if some kind of unwritten code is being broken if you do.

Finally, the group (consisting of artists, curators, educators and representatives from community projects from across the UK) worked together to form some guiding principles for ourselves and others for the coming years. After the Summit, the longlist of points were put into a survey, to enable a wider group of artists to contribute to the final resource. This has now been published by a-n, as a downloadable poster and also as a written respurce (including some of the context provided by artists on what the points raised were referencing. This is included within the a-n Research paper published to document the Social Art Summit.

The Rules of Engagement: Guiding Principles for Artists working in Social Contexts.

Rules of Engagement, resource illustrated by Rebecca Davies.

Expanding on the resource.
The Social Art Summit Lab included space for discussion around the work that socially engaged artists do, including going over where we access support, issues of representation and the strategies we employ in order to continue to make the work. This led to the putting together of a set of guidelines within the session, which each group talked through. The final 10 for the resource are expanded upon below, to reveal some of the thinking that initiated them, but there were some very good ideas that didn’t make the final 10, when the suggestions were voted on in a survey.

The full 20 are below, (the final 10 and then the ones that didn’t make it). Within the online survey was also a space to add any additional guidelines that artists felt were missing, I have included a few of those below too.