Collective Curating: trying out the new workshop…

On Friday it was such a pleasure to get together at home with (paid) critical friends, artists Kooj Chuhan, Emmanuela Yogolelo, Jackie Haynes and Jane Lawson (left to right) to play with plans for my new workshop Collective Curating. It was a great chance to talk through the ideas and try some of them out, although we ran out of time for the whole workshop. I thought we probably would - time for eating and catching up was needed too.

The workshop brings a group together to explore what principles and structures need to be in place to work together collectively. For Friday I had asked everyone to prepare an example of an artwork to use as the workshop ‘material’ for curating - a printed image or a picture on a phone were fine. In this case I suggested the topic of Climate Justice, as we’ve worked together on that before.

After a brief sharing of each other’s chosen artworks, the group were guided through the start of a process using a consensus workshop method to agree on a set of principles for working together as collective curators. Only when the principles are agreed can the group try out their mini curating project (the bit we ran out of time for!)

The consensus method is something I have been keen to try out since doing some training with Institute for Cultural Affairs on facilitation methods. After Friday’s positive feedback, I’m definitely going to try building this into the Collective Curating workshop and will run a local session for people to book into as soon as I can. Manchester, watch this space…

A cluster of ideas coming together during the consensus workshop stage

Huge thanks to Kooj, Emmanuela, Jackie and Jane for all your critical feedback, ideas and support.