After 2 days with 200+ people creating together we suggested a power and privilege working group - funny the only space left was the cafe...It's going to be an interesting journey...
We presented a 2-hour playful examination of privilege, fear and power to reclaim and reframe the cultural value debate.
Over the last two years, as part of Jen’s Australia Council for the Arts CACD Fellowship, we have been thinking about the new - and old - crisis in our sector and what tools we might need for effective change. We have focused on what it means to co-create and how colonizing mindsets can impact our best intentions.
And here are the questions we brought to the event:
• How do we create together equitably in times of crisis, when access and capacity are stratified?
• How can we open up a discussion about reclaiming and reframing values and solidarity, beyond the neo-liberal frames we are all currently trapped in? In the Arts we see it permeate through all levels of involvement, [arts admin, practitioners, participants, stakeholders, audience] with shifts towards risk avoidance and fear-driven self-censorship that inhibit our ability to imagine.
• What would be required to avoid bringing old assumptions and crusty power structures into a new network?
• How can we increase our awareness of the values and beliefs we bring (caring and harmful) and explore how they impact on all stages of the co-creative process?
• How can we co-create a shared vision that clearly separates the values from the hidden and overt violence that manifests in colonial collaborations?
• How do we create a space to consider absent voices and chaos, (the new, the unknown) which arise when creating a collective vision?
We are developing a prototype game to explore how we create better together, to uncover ways to identify old patterns of power and privilege and explore how we can disrupt and reframe those values to collaboratively develop new narratives to work more equitably together. Our aims to develop a wicked world engine for personal and collaborative systemic change, called 'Creating Together - what can possibly go wrong?', to be launched as a standalone initiative with a range of partners in 2017.
This session introduced these concepts:
1. Explore Arts Front current visions and the values that drive socially engaged art projects
2. Explore how we can disrupt internalized and systemic violence, fear and privilege
3. Reframe our power relationships and begin to separate the violence from the values to speak back to bullying on a personal and systematic level