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COLLABORATIVE
INCUBATOR
AN ENTRY POINT TO A STORY...
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction: A Pilot Programme
Áine O’Brien, Kim Charnley, Daniela Nofal, Ailbhe Murphy
Investigative Methods and Ways of Working
Ismail Einashe
Place-Based Socially Engaged Practice and Design
Dana Olărescu
Reparative Stories
Ashish Ghadiali
Boundaries of Fiction/Non-Fiction
Kim Charnley
Curated and Contested Spaces/Places
Dominik Czechowski
Journalism as an Encounter: The Uses and Limits of Reporting
Daniel Trilling
Socially Engaged Art: Desperately Seeking Solidarity
Dana Olărescu
Migrant Artists as ‘Historians, Reporters and Storytellers’
Abdullah Al Kafri
Transformative Space – ‘Momentography of a Failure’
Nafis Fathollahzadeh
The Migrant Workers on the Front Line of Europe’s Climate Crisis
Ismail Einashe
Accidental Death of a Young Black Londoner, The Case of Rashan Charles
Rebecca Omonira-Oyekanmi
Growing an Interdisciplinary Virtual Community and ‘Third Spaces’
Kit Braybrooke and Sarah Allen
Notes on Planetary Imagination
Ashish Ghadiali
What Would it Take to Build Something New Together?
Daniel Trilling
The Great Dying
Dana Olărescu
After-Images
Dominik Czechowski
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©Kit Braybrooke
Kit Braybrooke & Sarah Allen
GROWING AN INTERDISCIPLINARY VIRTUAL COMMUNITY
AND 'THIRD SPACES'
Sarah: Welcome to the Berlin Incubator, day two. I'm joined here today
by Dr Kit Braybrook, an artist and researcher. Kit, would you like to
introduce yourself and maybe share with the group something about your
practice?
Kit: It's nice to be here. I am a multi-environmental artist and digital
anthropologist. I work transnationally across Europe, Asia, and Canada. I
have just moved back to Vancouver after ten years in London, and I was
in Berlin for the last year at Technical University, on a project with the
Department of International Urbanism and Design, building Living Labs for
sustainable transformation with urban-rural communities in China and
Germany. I also direct the feminist creative lab We and Us
<studiowe.net>, which explores co-creation approaches for systems
change and has been run by female-identified individuals since 2020.
Sarah: We're delighted to have your input into the incubator, in
particular, because of the way your expertise spans the digital domain
and socially engaged art. As I was reacquainting myself with your work in
preparation for our discussion, I was very impressed with the way that it
melds together a distinctive kind of digital, and in-person work. Would
you be able to say a bit more about the ‘Third Space’, an idea that I know
informs your practice.
Kit: Thanks, Sarah. A lot of my work is quite spatially informed, and it
excites me to find others who are traversing between interstitial zones in
their own ways. The idea of a ‘Third Space’ was, I believe, first used by
the social scientist Ray Oldenburg, to describe public places that are not
quite home and also not quite work, but somewhere in between.
Oldenburg argues that these ‘Third Spaces’ allow us to make enriching
communities. Examples of ‘Third Spaces’ might be cafes, salons, public
parks and the library. When we meet people in places that feel safe,
which aren't their home or their work, this is where social transformation
and systems change can occur through various modalities of discourse,
interaction and the encountering of difference. Gathering in such spaces
frees us up to think about alternative futures and ways of being. And I
would argue that it does not matter if these encounters are so-called
‘online’ or ‘offline’, especially because today ‘third spaces’ are
increasingly blended. I think that this is a wonderful moment in more-
than-human history, where we can blend physical forms and non-physical
forms - our virtual identities - to try things out in worlds situated
somewhere in between, which explore how pluriverses – or worlds where
many worlds fit, in the words of the Zapatistas – can be built over time.
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Sarah: How important is a sense of place in the digital realm?
Kit: Place is shaped by architectures of bricks and mortar, but it is also a
social construct: that is, it depends on and is constructed from, social
relationships. In the end, our minds often can't fully see the difference
between a physical and a virtual place. The ambiguity that results can
cause trouble, as it sometimes has done when we look at the history of
the internet, but it's also caused all kinds of interesting opportunities and
speculative environments to unfold. For example, some of the very first
digital communities were text-only chat rooms such as LambdaMOO
(multi-user dimension), where people would build a place, and build
characters to inhabit it together, entirely through words alone. Not even
voice was included in the early days. Those who participated in them
described these text-only chat rooms as some of the most real and
embodied worlds that they had experienced. Participants can still
describe visually the kinds of space that they inhabited and shared there,
even though these were exclusively text-based. I think there's something
beautiful in the simplicity of that early kind of digital space, especially in
our current post-Internet world, with digital screens surrounding us
everywhere at all turns, and a push toward different kinds of augmented
reality. The simplicity of the early internet reminds us that we can still
build spaces of refuge, where we can feel safe and connected – even
within the limited construct of this corporate, dark, worrisome internet
that we're currently faced with.
Sarah: On the subject of spaces based largely on text, I would like to
talk to you a little bit about your COVID Creative Toolkit, which is a
resource that contains links for artists explaining how to transfer their
work online, different platforms that they can use and places where they
could find grants. When I first saw it, it was flying across multiple slack
channels, email threads, and different newsletters as this emergent,
slightly chaotic page, as people across the world shared and contributed
to it. I wonder, could you explain a little bit more about what the toolkit
is, why you built it and then where it is today?
Kit: Two-and-a-half years ago, in the early days of COVID, I was living in
London, in Bloomsbury, surrounded by the grounds of beautiful global
universities, which were all completely shut down. No public space was
open. You weren't even allowed to sit in parks like Hyde Park. If you were
sitting, then the police would come up and say: ‘can you please move
along, you're not supposed to be here’. So, there was a strong sense then
that all of our ‘Third Places’, those public spaces that we had gained such
nourishment from, were closing off in front of our eyes. And at the same
time, there was a clear need for a space where creative practitioners
who weren't already half-digitised would feel safe to come online, to
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start putting their work online and perhaps start engaging with digital
communities. The toolkit came out of a global community called Art Tech
Nature Culture <atnc.persona.co>, which I co-founded, which serves
about 500 socially engaged artists and practitioners and technologists
who are thinking about what ecological regeneration can mean in our
work, and how we can respond to the climate crisis through our practice.
Even in a community of people like this, which is entirely based in the
digital realm, I could see there were some struggles to face the new
reality that we would have to be almost entirely online for an indefinite
amount of time.
The toolkit was at first just a Google Doc. I asked all the curators and
creative people that I could think of to get involved. There were about
twenty in the end who came on as its curators, who were mostly
moderating people's additions because the page was completely open. I
learned about so many communities on the fringes and on the margins of
digital space that I'd never heard of. It is very easy right now to feel quite
sad when harkening back to the old days of the early internet and to feel
like the current internet is a corporate space where all of this spirit has
died. This little toolkit reminded us all that there still are interesting,
strange, radical spaces that are flourishing alongside the corporate
conglomerated ones, but sometimes we just need to be reminded that
these spaces are there. Now, the toolkit is a public archive. While its
contents already look outdated, it captures that moment of hopeful
energy.
Sarah: One of the beautiful things about the COVID Creative Toolkit is
that it visualises a community. You could see it being edited in real-time,
you could see all these little icons in this space, adding documents and
making comments. It was emergent, but it was also a way of de-
invisiblising a community that we could no longer see in face-to-face
spaces at that point. What I’d like to ask though, is what part does trust
play in an online place where contributions are anonymised?
Kit: There's a really big element of trust which is required. I would say
that this is the case not only in online spaces but in all kinds of
collaborative work. Socially engaged artists are ultimately trusting
whatever publics we're working with: we're looking towards them in good
spirits. In such collaborations, we're opening ourselves up, and creating
the expectation for others in the project to be open in return. This is like
saying: ‘if you're going to participate in this with us, we're all going to
have to risk a little bit, we're all going to be sharing a space, we're all
going to be building something experimental that might not work out and
might be just processional in the end. But you know, we're all here to try it
out. Right?’ And I think that's really beautiful about socially engaged art:
it is so contingent. It's a bit wild: you never know what's going to happen.
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And a lot of it's just about the vibration of the space at a moment in
history; it's a bit of a timestamp. A lot of my work is extremely
processional and hard to predict in advance, but I would say it's never
been a net negative.
It has always provided me with wonderful interactions, even in the mosh
pits of collaboration that occur when you bring diverse social actors
together in one space. Lately, I've been experimenting more and more
with bringing non-human actors into collaborative work too. This is in the
context of socially engaged art that focuses on ecological regeneration
through the lens of multi-speciesism and post-humanism, where
algorithmic machines, vegetal machines, and animal agencies are invited
as co-designers and as equal actors in an unfolding process. That makes
things even more crazy and wild! But it is also beautiful because we learn
so much about ourselves when we open ourselves to these kinds of new
relations. Especially when we are in digital spaces, as there's an extra
level of opening that can occur when we aren't showing our faces to
each other. Of course, we all know the examples of where this has gone
wrong. But at least in the communities that I've been involved in, I feel like
the entities show up with their best selves, where they can. I think all of us
who have engaged as avatars in a digital realm know what it feels like to
be heard and then not feel safe. I think, therefore, we are especially
conscious these days of ensuring that there is a sense of safety and
nourishment and fellowship because otherwise there's no point in building
such spaces unless we invite that kind of energy into the room.
Sarah: Thanks so much for these thought-provoking reflections on the
nature of ‘Third Spaces’, Kit, and on trust and collaboration. They
resonate very strongly with other contributions to the incubator, while
also providing a very distinctive perspective derived from your work in the
digital realm.
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©Kit Braybrooke
C
O
M
M
I
S
S
I
O
N
Dana Olărescu
How do we create a meeting ground?
How might the commissions map out
the fault lines – dig deep around the
methodologies… enter a speculative
space?
Ismail Einashe
Rebecca Omonira-Oyekanmi
Kim Charnley
Abdullah Al Kafri
Daniel Trilling
Nafiseh
Fathollahzadeh
Kit Braybrooke &
Sarah Allen
Rapporteurs:
Ailbhe Murphy &
Ashish Ghadiali &
Dominik Czechowski
Moderators:
Áine O'Brien
Daniela Nofal
I
D
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A
T
I
O
N
Isabel Lima
Ala Buisir
Juliana Ruhfus
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CREDITS & BIOS
Abdullah Al Kafri, Director of Ettijahat Independent Culture
Sarah Allen, Senior Director, Mozilla Festival
Khaled Barakeh, Artist and Director, co culture
Kit Braybrooke, Transmedia Artist-Designer and Anthropologist
Kim Charnley, Art Theorist and Art Historian
Dominik Czechowski, Curator and Researcher
Hossein Derakhshan, Blogger, Journalist, and Researcher
Ismail Einashe, Investigative Journalist and Writer
Nafis Fathollahzadeh, Artist and Researcher
Ashish Ghadiali, Filmmaker and Writer
Isabel Lima, Socially Engaged Artist and Researcher
Ailbhe Murphy, Socially Engaged Artist, Vagabond Reviews
Daniela Nofal, Coordinator Beyond the Now and Director, SACF
Dana Olărescu, Socially Engaged Artist and Designer
Áine O’Brien, Curator of Learning and Research, Counterpoints Arts
Rebecca Omonira-Oyekanmi, Investigative Journalist
Juliana Ruhfus, Investigative Journalist, Presenter, Filmmaker
Liza Sarris, Researcher and Project Coordinator
Daniel Trilling, Investigative Journalist and Author
Curated and Produced by members of the Beyond the Now Collective
Daniela Nofal, Kim Charnley, Ailbhe Murphy and Áine O’Brien
Designed by Isabel Lima
(CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
Participants and Contributors to the Collaborative Incubator
PROJECT PARTNERS & FUNDERS
Beyond the Now aims to open up new creative cultural and political
affinities/solidarities for a post-pandemic world. We comprise small to
medium arts, civic, research and digital organisations: Counterpoints Arts,
(London); Mozilla Festival (Amsterdam, Berlin, London); Ettijahat-
Independent Culture (Beirut and Brussels); CREATE (Dublin); co-culture
(Berlin): in addition to individual researchers and producers working at:
Open University (UK); Arts University Plymouth (Plymouth - UK).
Re-framing Migrants in the European Media – comprised a cluster of
media practitioners, activists, digital researchers and foundations:
including, Here to Support (Amsterdam); Zemos98 (Madrid); Gazeta
Wyborcza (Warsaw); Eticas (Barcelona); European Cultural Foundation
(Amsterdam) and Beyond the Now (Berlin, London, Brussels/Beirut, Dublin,
Plymouth).