I'm part of an insurgent research group, inspired by a visit to MayDay Rooms, we are working through a range of research trajectories, one of which is Cultures of Resilience, and another an emerging Anthropocene Atlas.
My understanding of resilience, is that it's the capacity of a bounded network - a person, bacterial culture, a forest, a city or an economy, to deal with change and continue to develop. It's the capacity to use shocks and disruption - like an infection, financial crisis or climate change, to spur renewal and creative practice.
Resilience is a model to think through sustainable ways to co-exist within our biosphere.
The values of competitive markets dominate contemporary cultural production - especially within the field of art, and increasingly within in art education. Effectively, we inhabit a mono-culture of evaluation that is dominated by 'market forces', and this is not resilient.
Taking our model from resilient ecosystems - where bio-diversity is essential for reproduction- we intend to explore, trace and value different, varied and even conflictual evaluative communities.
Taking the University of the Arts; London as an exemplar, we are researching communities of care, aspiration, loyalty, trust, friendship groups and networks of empathy. Tracing these communities, we're weaving through student and staff interest compositions, our financial entanglements, our aspirations, and our energy flows.
Our intention is to produce evaluative networks, map their interconnections and assess their resilience.
We are meeting regularly in tracing workshops, to research in-real-time, and share the results of that research.
Tracing communities of evaluation: Marsha Bradfield, David Cross, Neil Cummings, Anna Minshall, Neil Farnan, Tobias Benedetto, John Hartley, Xiaoxi Kang, Denzi Paran, Karel Doing, Molly Butt, Claire Mokrauer-Madden and others
See the amazing research trip to Geneva, and the Live Tracing workshop.