Build on Solid Ground Conference – After lunch

 

After lunch the creative practitioners who had taken part in the symposium gave their presentation on their experiences over the ten-day period. I believe that their decision to get all the delegates out of the conference room and onto the lawn outside worked well, though I think that there was the feeling that this idea could have been pushed further, that the delegates would have been happy to engage even more with the process.

 

The statements (which I have blogged about in the post entitled 24th June – Back at the Barn) were read out and the delegates moved around the lawn according to their reactions to the statements. The group then split down to further discuss these issues. I took part in the discussion around ‘Artists must consider the political implications of their work within the community’ led by Pippa Koszerek. Ideas that were thrown around included the amount of power over the project held by different stakeholders and the notion of biting the hand that feeds you. The group then reconvened in the conference room to summarise the discussions that each faction had been having.

 

At 2.45pm the room once again split down into discussion groups, this time for the break out sessions. These sessions were about varying issues related to socially engaged practice and were hosted by different people:

 

• 1. Ethics of socially engaging practice – David Butler
• 2. Collaborative practice – George Lovett
• 3. How can you help people make informed decisions? – Jeni McConnell
• 4. Issues around the control of information/spin – Ana Ospina and Cara Flynn.
• 5. Making connections between community engagement and strategic decisions – Paul Hartley
• 6. The adoption of art process into other professional methodologies – Julie Heron

Unfortunately these break-out sessions did not last as long as first planned as were squeezed other over-running talks earlier in the day. However I believe that they were successful in starting to highlight some of the questions involved in this complex area of socially engaging practice. The break-out session I led looked at the adoption of art process and we started by looking at what ‘art process’ was or had that was different from most other professional processes. One conclusion that came from this was the desire not to reductively say ‘art’ but instead use the words ‘creative practice’ to begin to draw distinctions. What I believe was also interesting was the issues around pre-conceived professional skill-sets and that maybe attempting to draw any kind of distinction is a bit reductive. But then maybe making these sort of basic groupings (ie creative and non-creative) is necessary at the start in order to begin to have this type of conversation?

Tags: Conference, description, workshop