Come & Zoom with Still/Moving on how arts/design empowers communities, in the latest of our "The Elephant Meets…" talks
We’re very happy that the next speakers in our “The Elephant Meets…” series, aimed at showcasing those who are building the next system to come, is with members of the Plymouth art/design collective Still/Moving, via Zoom at Tue, 20th Oct 2020 17:00 - 18:30 BST (click here to sign up).
A/UK has a long-standing connection with the creativity and vitality of Plymouth. Even so, we were startled by Still/Moving’s public illuminated sign, “Speedwell”/No New Worlds, contributing to the city’s Mayflower 400 celebrations, which we profiled a few weeks ago. (Above is Still/Moving’s 8 minute film of the sign’s performance, beaming out permutations on “No”, “New”, “World” and “Worlds”. It’s a very meditative but challenging experience).
Still/Moving’s interests are broad and wide, centrally concerned with how art can empower and transform communities. So we thought it would be great to hear from them about their projects.
But we’d also like to raise a wider question - of how art can raise society’s communal game, our response abilities, as we face our systemic crises. And help us to think and feel our way to build a better system, in response.
The power of the arts is a key input into A/UK’s political experimentations - see our “Artists” and “Create the Feel” tags - and we’d love the artists/creatives who follow our work to come along and use this as an opportunity to explore the challenge.
So come and chat with us, Still/Moving and our A/UK community, on how to make powerful public art in the time of COVID and BLM, on Tuesday, October 20th 2020, from 17.00-18.30. Sign up here, or click on the embedded ticket box below.
Below the box, we’ve commissioned a short explanatory essay from Still/Moving about the work, “Speedwell”, and their way of doing things.
STILL/MOVING on “what a ‘new world’ was, wasn’t, or could be”:
This has been a strange time to launch such a large scale artwork, particularly one in such a public realm, both physically and in the conversations around it.
Its context is the accelerating urgency of the BLM protests, the escalating catastrophe of climate emergency, a nation polarised by Brexit and the uneven experience of COVID-19. And the work does seem to tap into a wider consciousness and growing recognition of how all of these events and processes have been generated by inequality and suppression.
Working within the anachronism of a Mayflower commemoration, in this climate, has challenged us to respond beyond the official remit. So more than marking this date, our work seeks to broaden the space afforded for dialogue around themes - of suppression, migration and home - that remain so pertinent today.
The project began as a pitch in 2017 in response to an open call for ideas from Plymouth Culture (an offshoot of Plymouth Council) that had been tasked with running the commissioning process for the cultural program for the Mayflower 400 Commemorations.
It was our intent from the start that this piece directly addressed the marginalised or overlooked testimonies in and around the Mayflower’s voyage. While recognising how entangled the history of settler colonisation is with climate change.
Working within the framework of a city-wide commemoration of the Mayflower voyage’s 400th anniversary, we wanted people to question their received understanding of the idea of a ‘new world’. We wanted them to imagine what a world could be like that incorporated indigenous systems of knowledge, within a strategy of living sustainably on the planet.
We realised that the main job that the structure could do would be to open up a space for conversation, find common ground within a polarised political climate, enable moving forward together.
We have been heartened to overhear or to initiate conversations with passersby who wouldn’t normally engage with contemporary art. We’ve witnessed families, fishermen and dog-walkers questioning their own understanding of what a ‘new world’ was, wasn’t, or could be.
The bay of Plymouth Sound is a natural amphitheatre into which boats and warships come, linger and go. They trace an iconography of commerce, attack and defence. Onto this backdrop, the illuminated words NO NEW WORLDS play with the impact of their ever-shifting message.
We like to think it’s running at the tempo of a fog horn, but in silence. As an archive of journeys, bio-diversity and trauma, the Atlantic and conjoined oceans creates an incredible canvas upon which to place this work, which we titled Speedwell.
The structure speaks back to the land, but also occupies a liminal space between land, water and sky, reaching out into the past and the future. The text is in constant conversation with the light, ocean and the sky—which are changeable, dynamic, awe-inspiring and humbling.
This conversation seemed a useful way to decentre the anthropocentric point of view, remembering that we share this planet with many other life forms.
Speedwell is an ambitious sculpture which illuminates the idea of voices responding to the time in which we live (a feature shared by many contemporary artworks). Speedwell engages directly with the two most urgent crises that we face - racial justice and environmental crisis - and attempts to open up a space to discuss how we might formulate our response.
Speedwell addresses the historical moment - but additionally, it takes important lessons emerging from how the global rich have commodified land, people and more-than-humans, in our race to dominate. The trauma that emerges from this inequality is a feature in all of our individual practices which variously focus on relationships, land-use and notions of how to navigate this.
Our artistic practice is necessarily socially-engaged and responds to the political, social and natural environment that we find ourselves in. Our work tries to move towards a more equitable and reciprocal practice of communal responsibility.
This is the largest and most significant of the projects we have worked on since formally constituting Still/Moving as a ‘Community Interest Company’. As a collective, we are able to draw on our existing individual artistic practices, as a well as moving into technologies and scales we would be unable to tackle individually.
Our combined practise emerges from a constant shared dialogue and testing of ideas, research and materials. Our different ways of thinking, networking and researching coalesce into a much stronger and resilient practice - one that doesn’t rely on the model of the ’artist as solitary genius’, so beloved by western aesthetic traditions.
Recognising the power of multiple voices and experiences we also reach beyond the echo-chamber of our three-way conversations into multi-disciplinary expertise, constantly questioning, sharing and most importantly, listening.
A major facet of this project has been the site-specificity of the work and the fact that it sits, not within a gallery or museum, but in the public realm—where engagement with the work is not codified by the behaviours of artistic audiences.
Speedwell sits in a much-loved and used public space. It faces both the local, in its vista from the city, and the global in its outlook across the Atlantic.
Working with local communities through partner organisations such as Take A Part and the Ocean Conservation Trust means that we can create a space for those voices within the city to be incorporated into our work as a CIC, now and in the future.
A key feature in the design of Speedwell is its modularity, and hence its capacity to be rewritten in the future, wherever a scaffolding support can be built.
We are working towards the possibility of bringing this pertinent sculpture to the COP26 talks in Glasgow, UK in November, 2021. Its core message in that location will be to prioritise indigenous knowledge systems (emotional, spiritual, physical). These can be the scaffold by which traditional knowledge systems (rational, scientific, intellectual) can be guided towards addressing and tackling the problems of climate emergency.
We are looking for support from any sector in helping to realise this next iteration for the work.