Urgent and Necessary: Social Practice at a National/Global Level. Context, Frameworks and Policy – A Tale of Two Countries
Clore 2022 Fellows Kim Wide MBE and Anurupa Roy jointly reflect on social practice in India and the UK and, provocate for a wider sharing of practices.
Social arts practice is different to other arts practice, in that the focus is on process and outcomes. The arts become a vehicle of psycho-social transformation as they engage with a group of people. Nobody needs to be a skilled artist to participate, and yet wonderful art is often created because of the engagement with real stories of people. The art here becomes a testimonial, documenting pain, trauma and resilience. The arts become a mirror and a coping mechanism.
From the positions of a European/Western practice and an Indian/Global Majority space of reflection, Kim Wide MBE and Anurupa Roy jointly reflect on social practice in their base countries, consider global shared approaches that untie the practice, provocate for a wider sharing of practices, and call for a means to unite and champion what is still seen in many ways as a ‘lesser’ art form.
Social Practice: A UK Context (Kim Wide)
In the UK context, governments provide most of the care that we receive (housing, medical, financial etc). Due to this framework of support, social practice as an art form tends to coalesce around community building and wellbeing – less urgent yet important work that adds more value to lives. In a global context (especially in the global south), the social practise is being used to directly provide protection around basic human rights, health care and conflict resolution, in the absence of support from governments with fewer resources or weakened democratic processes.
Within the UK, we are feeling the reverberations of global economic crisis, environmental disaster, COVID and Brexit. Our own systems of care, our own safety nets, are weakening. We are facing deeper divides and increased anxiety as a nation. Social justice is urgently needed.
During my time with Clore Leadership, I have been thinking, looking, listening and questioning: What can we learn from global approaches to contemporary socially-engaged and community practices astute at dealing with these conflicts, these pressures and these stresses? What can we bring into our own UK context to support or ‘future-proof’ the work of social practice? What is working, what is useful and what can we take forward in our own toolkits?
How can we, within our Western approaches, lean into conflict, and support more front-loaded needs of conflict resolution, as our society moves further and further into spaces of critical urgency? Questions of race, economy, class, gender and sexual ‘taboos’ are all urgent. How can we work directly with these issues so we can collectively address them, and work towards a more open, developed and radically generous approach to one another in our nation?
How can social practice be less ‘nice’? And what are the parameters that help and hinder us in regards to this?
Social Practice: The Indian Picture (Anurupa Roy)
During the Clore Fellowship, I had the opportunity to interact closely with the cultural sector in the UK, and to look at my own work against a UK framework. With my secondment at World Cities Culture Forum (WCCF), I had the opportunity to engage with cultural policy in the UK. WCCF asked me to research and present a cultural map of New Delhi and Bangalore, the two major cities of India. What this did was help me investigate Indian cultural policy on both a macro and a micro level, and explore the role of government (at state and central level), big business and private individuals in shaping culture through funding. As a grassroots arts practitioner I have rarely had this bird’s eye view. This reiterated some known facts but also led me to some surprising discoveries.
Arts funding in the Indian context is very small, and limited to government. Unlike the UK there are no dedicated arts councils to fund artistic creations or artistic development at a very large scale. The budget of the Ministry of Culture in India is approximately 0.75% of the total budget of the country. A sharp contrast to China, USA, UK, Singapore and Australia.
There is now a growing group of philanthropists who are funding the arts, but it is a very small number in comparison to the UK. All of these funds are sporadic and small. While this means financial insecurity for Indian artists, it also means learning to diversify one’s artistic work – not just performing in theatres but also performing in communities. So we have learnt to balance art for art’s sake, while also applying the arts in socially engaged arts practices, in public health, in education, in conflict resolution and in peace building. These may be called social arts practices. They are not only sources of funding for artists in India but also are the channel of communication between policy makers and communities. Often policies are made top-down and don’t work at grassroots level – the artist becomes the interpreter of policy or, if the policy maker is willing to listen, the voice of the grassroots.
Shared Understandings
Together, through our time at Clore Leadership, we reflected on our art form and our contexts, and started to note what we share globally in regards to our shared art form:
- Acknowledging that socially engaged arts is a field in itself
It is not an offshoot of the arts but a field where the arts, communities and experts who understand psycho-social interventions come together to create transformation, healing and a space for alternate narratives. In a world of growing binaries this sometimes becomes the only safe space for individuals, especially vulnerable ones, to have a voice.
- Open Conversations Not Stuck In Historic and Closed Narratives
People get stuck on learned behaviours and understandings. Initiating ‘what if’ conversations where you don’t go into a loop of regurgitated history means you look not at what hasn’t worked, but into a future-facing space of possibles.
Using metaphors for difficult areas such as conflict zones or spaces with normative taboos or heightened trauma, such as the “Hero’s Journey”, we are able to explore impossibilities to explore new ways forward. Pretending a better future or being a new observer of an old story can disrupt the dynamic – play and dream beyond.
- Knowing Your Resources and Setting Boundaries
Being up front at the start about what resources we have means we can have conversations about what is realistic, what we have to hand to help us, what we may need to ask for, and what we can build with.
Equally, knowing what is beyond experience, desire, budgets etc means we can work with what is in front of us honestly, and not pressurise ourselves or our collaborators with an unending amount of possibilities. Being too open can set up systems of failure where anxiety and undefined approaches or expectations can create fear.
And when you do know what the resources are (budgets, spaces, people, materials), tell everyone involved what you have – they may have better ideas than you about how to use them than you.
- Honouring Ideas and People Authentically
A critical part of this work is ensuring that the people who put time, ideas and energy into the work are valued, and that the space we work in enables authentic sharing through the arts without judgement. The arts have the ability to create celebratory spaces outside specified social or ritual norms.
This becomes a space of non-conformity and not toeing the line of authority, especially for people who have never been allowed to hold and be valued for their opinions, due to their positions in our world. If someone has an idea, try to find a way to make it part of the project or practice. This builds collaboration and confidence.
5. Celebration IS a Tool of Empowerment
Celebration is a means to disrupt current and normative ways that society sees groups. By celebrating what has labelled a community or a person as less, we create a new ritual around it and we take the narrative back into the hands of those that have been punished by it. By creating carnivals to celebrate the fact a community has been passed over or marginalised, by celebrating that fact or allowing people to openly perform what may be a taboo act (ie, women in Kashmir being able to write Sufi poetry in an area of socio-religious conflict), we allow for the hidden and shamed to be valued.
The socially engaged art form has a global application and one we see has shared thematics, models, methodologies and ethics. It is an essential tool for expression, for understanding one another, for building better communication and understanding, for getting closer to some of the most polarising issues our world faces, and for making space to discuss and explore those issues together.
Socially engaged practice is still challenged as an art form. It is often instrumentalised, misunderstood, maligned as not of quality, used as a bolt-on to create engagement around other and more ‘important’ art forms, underfunded, mistrusted, seen as too political or seen as not political enough.
An artist is not automatically able to engage in socially engaged arts. It requires training, support and years of experience to build up highly social and nuanced skill. As political conflict in oppressive regimes, armed conflict and war, climate conflict and social conflict increase in the world, so does the need for socially engaged artists. Artists want to engage with their communities but often don’t have the training or bandwidth. Most of the work in this area happens in silos, with minimum documentation and sharing with the world. Successful projects are lost because of lack of funds, and then important discoveries and knowledge are lost. It’s imperative, in the current situation across the world (whether it is the war in Ukraine, in the aftermath of earthquakes and floods such as in Turkey and Pakistan respectively, or ongoing situations of violence against women in Afganistan, continued conflict in Kashmir and the situation of refugees in Europe), to create vast networks of people who work in the socially engaged arts sector, not only to learn from each other and provide safety nets through these networks but also to create training programmes for future community arts workers.
What we are feeling and finding as social practice becomes more wanted, more invested in and, dare we say, more trendy, is there is an honest and real fear that it will be mis-performed. And if it is mis-performed, the outcomes will be patchy at best and perhaps dangerous. To protect this craft, and ensure it is recognised and performed well, we need more powerful means to be able to model, champion, perform and develop our practice. More international ways of seeing the art form, identifying it and legitimising it.
What the socially engaged arts sector needs now:
- More international spaces for sharing practice and developing dialogue, so we can create new approaches, learn how to sustain them, and create a global language around our art form and its value, leading to the creation of a network. Often we are people who work in silos, feeling vulnerable and unsafe.
- Longer-term funding without outcomes attached to it, to deeply explore and honour people, issues, ideas and create work that is sustainable – good work takes time and trust.
- A trust from those who hold power that we don’t need to know what the outcome is before we start – this work is starting to happen.
- Space at tables of power and influence, so we can feed upwards to those who set agendas, be they local authorities or more centralised or even with funders, so our art form is understood and partnered with from the inception of larger conversations or new ideas
- A shared language. Social practice has many monikers and people’s understanding of what it is can be confused by a myriad of ways of discussing this type of work, which may be inauthentic (ie participatory practices, art in the public realm etc).
Themes Inclusive Leadership Practice Qualities of Leadership
