How Much is Enough? Kate O’Shea & the Just City Residency

How Much Is Enough?

Kate O’ Shea & The Just City Residency; Reflections on an embedded practice at the intersection of art and activism

Siobhán Geoghegan and Catherine Marshall Karen E. Till Eve Olney and Krini Kafiris John Bissett Damien McGlynn

Half Letter Press, Common Ground, and Create 2023

Table of Contents Foreword 7 Half Letter Press Places and Care, Places and Power Siobhán Geoghegan and Catherine Marshall

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Kate O’ Shea’s Just City: Gatherings, Gifts and Radical Friendships Karen E. Till

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Coming in from the Outside Radical Institute: Eve Olney and Krini Kafiris

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How to do a studio 468 residency during a pandemic John Bissett

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The Gift and Responsibility of Collaborative Arts Practice Damien McGlynn

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Photo captions and credits

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Biographies 45

Foreword Half Letter Press This publication came together in a way that may seem unusual to some but has become quite commonplace in our practice. We’ve never met any of the authors in person and have only interacted with Kate O’ Shea, Common Ground, Create, and some of the contributing writers online. The Covid-19 pandemic has made internet-driven video meetings a normal platform for discussions, planning, events and collaboration, but for years, email alone has been enough for us.

When we connect with people whose ideas and values we share or wish to amplify we find a way to work and hold space together and books are made.

What Kate O’ Shea has done with her residency projects at studio 468, reminds us of our own experiments with initiating non-commercial, openended creative projects at two storefront and office spaces our group Temporary Services rented in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Kate’s work also aligns with our work at Mess Hall—an experimental cultural center we co-founded in Chicago’s Rogers Park neighborhood in 2003. Mess Hall was a tiny storefront that outlasted our own co-direction by some years before closing in 2013. Many of the points articulated in Mess Hall’s ten point manifesto (inspired by the form and clarity of the Black Panthers’ ten point program) feel like they also could have guided Kate’s project. Some examples: “We embrace creativity as an action without thought of profit. Mess Hall insists on a climate of mutual trust and respect—for ourselves and those who enter our space. Mess Hall functions without hierarchy or forced unity.”

Half Letter Press later wrote our own manifesto that guides our publishing practice. Thinking about those items helps us recognize why this collaboration felt so immediately appealing. Three of those points: “We strive to build an art practice that: builds and depends upon mutually supportive relationships; champions the work of those who are frequently excluded, under-recognized, marginal, non-commercial, experimental, and/or socially and politically provocative; insists that artists who achieve success devote more time and energy to creating supportive social and economic infrastructure for others.”

Through Kate O’ Shea’s residency—and by extension—through this booklet, she has created many kinds of space for the work and words of others. We are happy to use our resources to help expand the audience for that story, just as this collaboration with Kate O’ Shea, Common Ground, and Create will introduce our publishing to more readers in Ireland. Making publications with others is a way of spending time together and caring for others’ ideas and concerns. How one does this matters very little. We trust the spirit of our collaboration to shine through.

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Places and Care, Places and Power Siobhán Geoghegan and Catherine Marshall Common Ground has been working since 1999 as a local arts organisation in the complex, constantly changing inner-city areas of Dublin 8. This is where we have formed relationships and partnerships with artists and communities exploring and working through collective responses to issues of spatial and social justice, communities of care, housing development, climate change, ecology and the urban environment, and more recently the impact of Covid-19.

Those relationships have informed Common Ground’s values of social engagement, and our responses to our communities’ crucial questions around equality education, housing and spatial justice through our arts activism and our practice and engagement support resources like studio 468 and residency programmes.

In 2018 one of those responses began with the process of developing the concept and brief for the Just City Residency Award (Counter Narrative Neighbourhood Award) with Create and local community activists and artists. Central to the development of that award was the priority to address spatial justice issues. We wanted the brief, in particular, to respond to the way in which the urban and social fabric of inner-city Dublin is currently threatened and disrupted through the acquisition, development and management of public housing, private rented accommodation and decreased public space. When we formed the brief for the award it was in resistance to how the city was positioning itself and the narratives that were being promoted. In early March 2020 we presented the Just City Residency Award to artist and activist Kate O’ Shea; it was originally planned that Kate would have a live–work space in the Lodge, Common Ground’s new base. We certainly didn’t expect, then, that it would coincide with the emergence of a global pandemic.

It is common in Ireland that places and people are continuously stigmatised, branded and labelled and these narratives deliberately contribute to the growing disconnection between people in neighbourhoods. On a macro level those narratives contribute to clashing ideologies around ‘placemaking’ among professional planning experts and highlight the inconsistent and dismissive ways in which cities and urban spaces are planned and how decisions are made about who gets to be included, considered or engaged with. Planning or developmental approaches and methodologies often seek to erase and ignore the history of the place. In doing so they deepen inequality and alienate communities. Working with artists and community groups and being a part of local development structures has expanded

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Common Ground’s place-based and sited practice substantially and organisationally and facilitated us to build new local initiatives or collectives that go beyond awards or residencies. They inspire, extend and ultimately critique our interdisciplinary practices, influencing how we connect to communities in and beyond Dublin 8.

Since 2020 Dublin 8 has continued to face ongoing hidden social and economic changes as well as the visible ones relating to its physical landscape as an area of continuous redevelopment. The area contends with the histories and realities of slow, failed regeneration of social housing and flat complexes, the development and proliferation of extensive buildto-rent-only apartments and proposed cost rental models (many of which exclude local communities), aparthotels and student housing. The new children’s hospital development at the Saint James’s Hospital site, is also bringing new people, facilities and resources to the area, but also new pressures; consequently, many local people who have lived here for generations feel displaced as the area changes rapidly, while others see these changes as an opportunity to create a more demographically and ethnically diverse community.

As the community and neighbourhoods adjust to these physical and social changes, making space for the arts and creative activities are crucial in encouraging community participation and connectedness.

As we moved through the restrictions imposed in 2020 by Covid-19 to now, including the new reality and difficulties of connecting and working remotely, we spent time with Kate thinking about how we could support her to explore those issues, particularly those specifically relating to change in Dublin 8. Kate began the Just City Collective reading group and began exploring the questions ‘How much is enough?’ and ‘Who is it for?’ online, in film, print, song and spoken word. Kate constructed multiple welcoming spaces both online and in person in studio 468.1 These were carefully planned, safe spaces where all kinds of opinions could be discussed in an inclusive, non-threatening way while at the same time creating and forging deep connections to activists and artists across the world as well as in Dublin City. Kate’s presence facilitated numerous new and positive relationships that endure beyond her residency, including, among other things, the Just City Collective and the Networks of Solidarity online talks series.2 1 studio 468 was established in 2003 in St Andrew’s Community Centre, Rialto. It is

managed and programmed by Common Ground in partnership with the Rialto Development Association.

2 Networks of Solidarity was a series of four monthly online talks co-organised by artist/ organiser Kate O’ Shea and writer/researcher Enya Moore from the Just City Collective in 2021. Four interconnected and overlapping sessions – In the Roots, Through Our Stories, On the Airwaves and Between our Minds – featured presentations and performances

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Working with artists like Kate brings a rigour to Common Ground’s practice and to our sense of and understanding of place.

As John Bissett, Radical Institute and Karen Till (Maynooth University) describe in this publication, there is often a tension when you are an artist going into a place: ‘coming in from the outside’ is often seen as ‘trespassing cultural boundaries’. Working deeply and crossing those boundaries requires adequate time and investment, both for artists and supporting organisations, and to comprehend the complexities of socially engaged practice by bodies like the Arts Council. As we are reminded by the Radical Institute, care is an essential part of that process.

As we emerge from the impact of the pandemic in 2022, we need to consider the labours of care that go into repairing and reimagining our communities and our places and to discuss how our work as an arts organisation with artists, groups and activists is central to that. Silvia Frederici reminds us that ‘creating a feminist commons entails struggle and hard work but the result might teach the importance of community including … liberation and solidarity, of awakening and care and multi-species relations of social– ecological repair and regeneration’.3 We are conscious of and alert to how narratives about Dublin 8 are being circulated and established. We are aware of how judgements are applied and retained, continuing to reinforce stereotyping and stigma. For example, the term ‘Barracks town’, referring to Richmond Barracks (later renamed Keogh Square), was then transferred, with the accompanying stigma and negative opinions that had been formed already, to the former St Michael’s Estate, which replaced Keogh Square in the late 1960s, and its residents.4 Consequently, how a ‘place’ is viewed is not just interesting: understanding it is essential to new branding, both positive and negative. Dublin 8 is now the city fathers’ flagship commodity. A recent article in The Irish Times reported that ‘Dublin 8 is “primed for prosperity”, alongside four other global neighbourhoods’.5 from invited artists, activists, community workers, designers, academics, researchers, writers and filmmakers based largely in Ireland and Australia.

3 Quoted in Till, K. E. (2020). ‘Community Orchards in Dublin 8: Planting Urban Ecologies of Care through Hard/Graft’. In Till, K. E., ed. Earth Writings: Bogs, Forest, Fields and Gardens. Maynooth University Department of Geography: Cassagh Press, 50–59.

4 The term ‘Barracks town’ was presented as part of Common Ground’s presentation at the Arts Council conference Places Matter 2022 in Carlow. It is a commonly used derogatory term for former towns or areas across Ireland that housed former British military barracks. It is used to stigmatise and label neighbourhoods or areas like the former Richmond Barracks, which became Keogh Square and then St Michael’s Estate, in Inchicore, Dublin 8. Similarly derogatory uses of it were applied to areas in Limerick, Athlone, Kilkenny and Carlow.

5 Reddan, F. (2022). ‘Dublin 8 is “Primed for Prosperity”, Alongside Four Other Global Neighbourhoods’. The Irish Times [online]. Available at: https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/homes-and-property/dublin-8-is-primed-for-prosperity-

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While this narrative emerges, it remains true that neighbourhoods in the city that have experienced decades of great neglect and deprivation continue to exist and remain ignored. Common Ground’s work is continuously energised by staying true to the local.We recognise and respond to the complex landscape and interface we are sited in, and since our establishment our place-based arts practices continue to reveal the ongoing, unpredictable and multiple dialectics between power and resistance, art and activism in a complex area like Inchicore in Dublin.

Critically, throughout the last recession and the Covid-19 pandemic, we have found mutual local supports and alliances that are essential to maintaining, expanding and augmenting our work with artists and community groups. The fact remains that we were not ‘all in it together’ as cosy political dialogue would have us believe. We saw this in the way care homes were left in a seriously challenged mess, how online education became inaccessible for the most vulnerable and excluded and how for older and younger people isolation was felt even more deeply.

Covid and the impact of austerity during the most recent economic recession remind us that we have to act in solidarity with each other. Sometimes we need to say no. We need to make spaces that allow dissent to be aired and listened to so that everyone feels their voice is heard and future conflict can be explored and managed in different ways rather than avoided.

Now more than ever, people and communities need safe social spaces where they can gather and create. The arts open up imaginative but safe ways of dealing with challenges, fears, trauma and anxiety as well as joys and pleasures. This is more urgent than ever with the impact of Covid-19 as people orientate to the local to make sense of the pandemic. Our current experience, along with community partners, is that local groups and organisations including Common Ground that will be stepping up to that responsibility over the next five to ten years as we move in and out of the pandemic. The arts create vital, safe spaces, ‘imaginaries’ where you can know or see the worst, challenge and prepare for it and work towards a better future.

Finally, we all need to remind ourselves of Kathleen Lynch’s words: ‘that our survival depends on Love, Care and Solidarity and that affective inequalities are serious political matters. Human flourishing requires caring and loving.’6

alongside-four-other-global-neighbourhoods-1.4823561 [accessed 11 April 2022].

6 Lynch, Kathleen. Care and Capitalism talk online. November 2021, Canal Communities Drugs and Alcohol Task force.

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Kate O’ Shea’s Just City: Gatherings, Gifts and Radical Friendships Karen E. Till ‘Cultures of gratitude must also be cultures of reciprocity. Each person, human or no, is bound to every other in a reciprocal relationship. …Duties and gifts are two sides of the same coin. … What is our responsibility [as humans]? What is our gift?’ – Robin Wall Kimmerer1 ‘That is my biggest learning [in this residency] – in activism, work needs to be enjoyable! Of course, activist work is also hard, but it needs to be nurturing too’ – Kate O’ Shea2 Imagine a gathering with like-minded people from different backgrounds, some of whom are friends, others just meeting each other for the first time. They are invited on a late Sunday morning over tea to discuss a short story, Octavia E. Butler’s ‘Speech Sounds’.3 In the story, Valerie Rye, a former history lecturer at UCLA, confronts her depression after losing her immediate family and her ability to read due to ‘the silence’, a deadly illness that paralysed and killed millions, compromising people’s ability to communicate and to think. Through Rye, Butler invites us to imagine what happens to our worlds when people are suddenly rendered speechless, unable to recognise and relate to one another. Body language and the fear of others have replaced shared intersubjective spaces, and the world is marked now by extreme isolation, with people’s intensified feelings of grief, loss, confusion and loneliness often resulting in violence towards others. After living in isolation for three years to survive, Rye questions her humanity and ventures into the world to find what remains of her family. She faces multiple hostile encounters, shares physical love with a stranger, loses this 1. Kimmerer, R.W. (2013). Braiding Sweetgrass. Minneapolis: MN: Milkweed Editions, p. 115.

2. O’ Shea, K. (2021). Interview with Karen Till and Maynooth MA Spatial Justice and Postgraduate Diploma Geography Students, 3 December. Rialto, Dublin: studio 468. For an edited version of this interview with an introduction, see also: O’ Shea, K. (2022). Interview, Till, K. ed., ‘SJD8 #13: Art and Spatial Justice in Dublin 8: A Conversation with Artist Kate O’ Shea (Part 1). Available at: https:// maynoothgeography.wordpress.com/2022/03/25/sjd8-13-art-and-spatial-justice-indublin-8-a-conversation-with-artist-kate-oshea-part-1/ 3. Butler, O. E. (1983). ‘Speech Sounds’. In Bloodchild and Other Stories. 2nd ed.

New York: Seven Stories, pp. 89–108.

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new partner and rescues two young children who, like her, can speak and listen. In a hopeful ending, they return home with her to make a new family and forge a future together in their damaged world.

Now imagine reading this story two months following the world’s first global lockdown in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. In that context, at a moment of shared insecurity, artist Kate O’ Shea created the Just City Collective, a nurturing space for a diverse group of people across multiple continents. As part of Kate’s Common Ground Just City Counter Narrative Neighbourhood Award residency (2020–22), the group considered our own dystopian world through Butler’s fictional story.4 The reading group allowed us to reflect upon what mattered to us in our new masked world, including challenging already existing forms of violence while contemplating and imagining new modes of relating to one another. For those whose ancestors have been oppressed and othered, our conversations considered care and solidarity as a ‘politics of refusal’5 in the face of systemic violence and spatial injustice.

The [Covid] pandemic thus dramatically exposed the violence perpetrated by neoliberal markets, which has left most of us less able to provide care as well as less likely to receive it. We have, for a very long time, been rendered less capable of caring for people even in our most intimate spheres, while being energetically encouraged to restrict our care for strangers and distant others. No wonder right-wing and authoritarian populism has once again proved seductive.6 Kate described her Common Ground residency as ‘by far the most transformative experience in terms of my practice’7 due to the conditions imposed by Covid. Her work fused new and old practices on- and offline to create environments fostering relationships grounded in trust, facilitating what feminist political theorist Joan Tronto calls ‘caring-with’.8 In this essay, I discuss Kate’s practice created through gatherings, gifts and radical friendships. My partial account draws upon personal experiences learning from and sharing with Kate’s artistic relations that challenged neoliberal capitalist relations and forms of possessive individualism exacerbated during Covid.9 4. In addition to Butler, among the readings we discussed were: Henri LeFebvre,

Right to the City; Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed; Achille Mbembe, ‘The Archive’; Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster; A. M. Gittlitz, I Want to Believe: Posadism, UFOs and Apocalypse Communism.

5. Simpson, A. (2014). Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life across the Borders of Settler States. Durham: Duke University Press.

6. The Care Collective (Andreas Chatzidakes, Jamie Hakim, Jo Litter, Catherine Rootenber and Lynn Segal) (2020). Care Manifesto. London and New York: Verso, p. 4.

7. O’ Shea (2021).

8. Tronto, J. (2013). Caring Democracy: Markets, Equality and Justice. New York: NYU Press.

9. Invited by Common Ground to be an ‘academic witness’, I chose instead to become a

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Gatherings and the Gift of Print I printed fabric and building materials. I realised that making these prints as ever present in the fabric of the studio the whole time was important, whether the prints are finished or not. … As the residency evolved, I felt the prints could be a fabric through which people can come to understand me and the work of my residency. – Kate O’ Shea10 The Covid-19 pandemic hit while Kate was in Kerry, care-giving at home, and she faced the impossible task of starting a residency in one part of Ireland while physically being in another. At the time, Kate was known for the co-creation of shared spaces for people to build alternative forms of exchange and make politics happen collectively, such as the NomNom Café and Gallery in Kerry (2009–14) and the Spare Room with Eve Olney in Cork (2019). She was also known for her print-making and alternative publishing projects, including an international activist chorus Durty Words (2019), edited with Victoria Brunetta. Kate hoped to launch a Dublin 8 ‘People’s Kitchen’, a concept developed further with artist Dawn Weleski (known for Conflict Kitchen in New York) through an Arts Council Artist in the Community Scheme award. Over a shared meal in people’s homes, activists living in Inchicore and Rialto would meet and share their expertise with others. As people raised issues of common concern, their words would contribute to a series of collaborative poster workshops in Dublin 8, co-facilitated with Josh MacPhee, a New York-based cultural worker and founding Just Seeds collective member.

How could she build relations of trust with community groups in Dublin 8 to connect them to her international collaborators without meeting people in person? Kate had to figure out ‘new ways of working and building relationships, which included going to weekly meetings with six different community groups on Zoom’.11 To interrogate her working questions – ‘How much is enough?’ and ‘Who is it for?’ – Kate fostered alternative forms of communication and collaboration to address past and ongoing forms of spatial injustice in Dublin 8 and beyond.

Launching the Just City Collective reading group in April 2020, she brought people together across three continents every Irish Sunday morning/ Australian Sunday evening for 36 weeks. The group began reading Henri Lefebvre’s Right to the City chapter by chapter, and by December, the group had grown to a fifty-person email list. The group was very open and people came as often as they could; in any given week eight to twenty people shared their responses to the readings. Community members from Dublin 8 attended, including mentor John Bissett, and new mentors emerged through participant and partner.

10. O’ Shea, K. (2022). Conversation with the author. 10 March.

11. O’ Shea (2021).

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the group, such as Krini Kafiris. International collaborators originally identified in her residency, including Dawn Weleski, were invited as were others Kate had previously worked with, such as Lisa Crowne and Donal Holland (A4 Sounds) and Conor McCabe (a Spare Room contributor). Kate also extended the group to include people she thought might be interested or ‘needed something like this during this difficult time’.12 The reading group was both gathering and gift. Invited to be vulnerable and try out new possibilities, we became empowered to share our passions, knowledges and practices to imagine a more just world with others. Each week, members shared their handwritten notes and/or visual responses to the readings, and Kate created digital artworks capturing quotes, member voices and insights. Sharing the artworks back to the group, this cycle created its own energy and further broke down boundaries of knowledge production. Recognising one’s own words or those of others in the beautiful prints created confidence in the ability to speak and contribute to the collective. The digital works were later transformed into long poster prints which Kate used to adorn studio 468’s ‘white walls’, which she encountered when finally arriving to Dublin in July 2020. The gift of shared conversations aesthetically transformed the experience of being in the studio, as the online Just City Collective became materially present within the existing community of St Andrew’s in Rialto.

When I asked Kate about the idea of large posters, she explained that her designs often blend past practices with current relations. During lockdown, Kate also worked with young people at the Cork Migrant Centre and the Glucksman Art Gallery, and she was inspired by Joe Caslin’s way of ‘pasting massive drawings onto buildings’. Kate sent digital art reflecting the young people’s conversations and drawings from workshops to be printed digitally (vinyl on glass), and the large prints created a fluid architectural backdrop for their protest performance events in front of the Nano Nagle Centre in Cork. Later, Kate screen-printed a selection of housing struggle archival posters collected by Josh MacPhee’s posters on fabric at Cork Printmakers, laying these out in the grounds of Goldenbridge Cemetery (adjacent to Common Ground’s base at the Lodge, Inchicore) when she arrived. She also covered the sitting room of the first Dublin flat she stayed in when looking for somewhere to live in Dublin, which was under eviction orders, managed by a vulture fund, with print artworks: At the time, I had nowhere to put work, nowhere to exhibit. So I brought this suitcase of fabric and thought: ‘I’ll cover this eviction house with my prints, because that’s very appropriate.’ Then I got the sitting room with all the prints up in them, and also the graveyard, photographed professionally by Alec Moore. Now the photos look really iconic.13 12. O’ Shea (2022). Quotes in this section from this source unless otherwise noted.

13. Ibid.

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She considers these projects as enabling her to rethink what and how she printed during her Just City residency with Common Ground.

In the studio, the printed plates and the posters and other things you see resulted from my learning to make printed works in a digital way, which came from not having access to making things materially. Many I designed during lockdown with the words and handwriting people would send me, when I was in Kerry or here in Dublin, and I sent away my artworks to printers and got them made materially. Whereas before I would have made the works – screen prints – and works would have been the result of a workshop.14 studio 468 became part living archive, with printed posters, plates, jackets and tights, carpets and videos; part working space, with Post-it notes, printing devices, stacked cellular boxes and crates, musical instruments and other items; part sculptural display, with tall wire-frames arranged in various combinations, layered with video projections and soundtracks; and part welcoming community space, with an open door, plates with cookies and fruit, candles and tea, and great music. It was a comfortable, if densely textured, space to walk into, hang out in and explore. The printed artworks felt at once like a social embrace and a call for action – a cacophony of voices, surfaces and possibilities. When installed on walls, draped over furniture or in public spaces as part of an installation, the works/words transformed surfaces into urgent messages about spatial in/justice.

My studio was always intended to be a social space because the best relationships and things happen by accident, so I wanted to create the environment for those connections to happen here.15 Visitors who came to her studio often went home with a poster or other artwork, so that the studio became part of people’s homes. As I write, I see a plate Kate made with printed words about ‘care’, ‘telling our stories’ and ‘zine making’ – something I learned with our Geography MA Spatial Justice students from Kate in special workshops. More than this, the circulation of conversations and artworks online, in the studio and into our homes was a distinctive way for the community and collaborators to ‘take back the city’ through caring-with.

Radical Friendships from D8 to Gadigal Lands Nurturing bonds of community and solidarity is a radical proposal because caring, cooperation and gratitude run against the logic of capitalist and colonial domination.16 When tied to mutual aid, caring-with becomes a form 14. O’ Shea (2021).

15. Ibid.

16. Davis, A. Y. (2016). Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the

Foundations of a Movement. Barat, F., ed. 4th printing. Chicago: Haymarket Books;

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of political participation in which ‘people take responsibility for caring for one another’ to ‘change political conditions … by actually building new social relations that are more survivable’.17 If decolonisation as a process is to be realised, we must build relations from where we are, starting with the hard work at home and moving to building new relations with others in different places.18 Kate created the translocal Networks of Solidarity with lifelong friend and collaborator Enya Moore, a design researcher based in Australia. Running from May to July 2021 they connected their existing radical friendships across two continents ‘to strengthen transnational networks and deepen awareness of place-based struggles reverberating from Dublin 8 to Gadigal Country (Sydney, Australia)’.19 The four curated interconnected online sessions of presentations and performances included artists, activists, community leaders/workers, designers, scholars, researchers, writers and filmmakers largely practising in Ireland and Australia. They wanted to interrogate the overlapping, yet distinct, histories and legacies of colonialism and racism, a conversation emerging from the Just City Collective. At the same time, through sharing art, stories and practice, Kate and Enya hoped Networks might address the parallels and differences in shared themes ‘between the two places, two parts of the world’, including ‘stolen land, gentrification and displacement and class and race, resisting universal narratives’.20 They wove together the ‘thread of a social relation’21 through their poetic titles, demonstrating the need to decolonise – ‘Between Our Minds’, ‘In the Roots’ – and share knowledges to resist injustice – ‘Through Our Stories’, ‘On the Airwaves’. For example, in the first session, speakers focused on land justice: Aunty Rhonda Dixon-Grovenor and Rita Fagan spoke about art and activism, and the joy in the resistance and the pain … Dawn Weleski … described her Mutual Aid work in central New York … which also has been always connected to land too, especially with Conflict Kitchen …. Then of course Clare Cooper played the harp which brought performance and music together with speaking.22 Tronto, J. (2015). Who Cares? How to Reshape a Democratic Politics. Ithaca: Cornell Selects, an imprint of Cornell University Press.

17. Spade, D. (2020). ‘Solidarity Not Charity: Mutual Aid for Mobilization and Survival’. Social Text, 38(1): 131–51.

18. Waziyatawin and Yellow Bird (2012). For Indigenous Eyes Only: A Decolonization Handbook. Sante Fe: School for Advanced Research Press.

19. Moore, E. and O’ Shea, K. (2011). Networks of Solidarity. 4 sessions, Vimeo.

Available at: https://vimeo.com/showcase/9240870.

20. O’ Shea (2022).

21. Moore, E. and O’ Shea, K. (2022). ‘Networks of Solidarity’. Presentation at Places Matter Conference, Carlow Visual, Irish Arts Council. 25 March.

22. O’ Shea (2022).

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Many connections were made between speakers and audiences that continued the exchanges and co-learning before and following events. The sessions were nourishing and inspiring, communicating the importance of feminist anti-colonial practice. When I asked Kate what she learned through Networks, she said it developed her abilities, which began in the reading group, to ‘facilitate and create online nurturing spaces at a deeper level’, giving her confidence ‘in my practice of breaking down hierarchies of knowledge’.23 Making ‘a safe space for these different ways of knowing to intersect’, Networks ‘really proved the thinking of radical friendships, which is how solidarity works’.24

How Much Is Enough?

[T]here’s no single answer that will solve all of our future problems.

There’s no magic bullet. Instead there are thousands of answers – at least. You can be one of them if you choose to be. … The very act of trying to look ahead to discern possibilities and offer warnings is in itself an act of hope. – Octavia E. Butler25 Kate O’ Shea’s Common Ground residency resulted in artworks and relations that sustained ‘the empathetic imagination, the insights, principles, orientations, collective memories that [political] engagement requires’.26 Gift-giving and reciprocity are radical in societies framed by neoliberal policies which rely on possessive individualism, competition and scarcity, and not caring for others. Indeed, the work of reciprocity and discerning possibilities as part of the work of building community is a radical gift of hope.27 Unlike the ‘relational aesthetics’ of socially engaged artists who create arts-based publics,28 Kate’s practice ethically respects the situated knowledges of different local and community experts, and connects intersecting geographical pedagogic communities through supportive relations of trust and solidarity. Recognising that everyone is interdependent, yet has divergent opinions, Kate advances the potential for political and social change by facilitating networks of collaborators who engage in communal dreaming to make new worlds. Becoming part of these gatherings means to learn self-care, gratitude and the importance of receiving and giving care and radical friendships as gifts.

23. O’ Shea (2022).

24. Ibid.

25. Butler, O. E. (2000). ‘A Few Rules for Predicting the Future’. Essence (May).

Reprinted in Common Good Collective. Available at: https://commongood.cc/reader/ a-few-rules-for-predicting-the-future-by-octavia-e-butler/.

26. Solnit, R. (2021). Orwell’s Roses. New York: Granta, p. 95.

27. Butler (2000); Solnit, R. (2016). Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities. Chicago: Haymarket Books.

28. Bourriaud, N. (1998). Relational Aesthetics. Dijon: Les Presse Du Reel.

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Coming in from the Outside Radical Institute Eve Olney and Krini Kafiris Kate O’ Shea has often discussed her work in terms of creating spaces with others as alternatives to the social relations of capitalism, places where social imaginaries can emerge which make us believe we can change the world. There are very few spaces available for such collaborations, especially in urban neighbourhoods and cities where neoliberal capitalism has privatised urban public spaces and gentrification has unravelled urban communities. There are many who don’t even see the value in such spaces, as they firmly believe that there can be no viable alternatives to the world as we know it. In keeping with the cultural logics of capitalism, others assume that people might only be interested in such spaces for personal gain and can only collaborate in the short-term, before what is assumed to be a natural human competitiveness and thirst for dominance creates conflict and sends everyone home. Indeed, one of the most successful achievements of the neoliberal project is the fostering of toxic, competitive production spaces where precarious individuals often assume a defensive position towards the naturalised inequities present across mixed groups of people.

Yet so many people came together during Kate’s two-year period as the Just City artist in residence in the physical space of her studio in Rialto, Dublin 8, as well as in the digital, transnational, online spaces collectively established through her work. What happened in these spaces? And how did her residency make us believe that change is possible? It would be accurate to say that Kate’s work involved explicit but also implicit invitations for people to come together and collectively imagine other ways of being, other social relations and other worlds – beyond those shaped by the multiple interlinked oppressions of capitalism. These explorations took place in a myriad of ways, through discussing, reading and learning from each other, creating and making together – through an extraordinary range of projects and events.

With Kate’s facilitation, people connected, collaborated and creatively experimented. In doing so, they nourished and sustained themselves and others during the pandemic and the worsening crises of capitalism.

Throughout the long process of engagement individuals and groups built and experienced solidarity and the rare and often transformative emotions that go along with it. We wonder whether it is these experiences and emotions that best embody the alternatives to capitalism which alternative spaces seek to cultivate. It may be that they form the basis of a new political praxis which is fundamental to more humane, just, democratic and sustainable societies.

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A political voice that Kate often references in her work, Gustavo Esteva Figueroa, argues: An era does not end when a group of revolutionaries challenges it, but when ordinary people, often for sheer survival, adopt a new path, trespassing cultural boundaries and establishing new social facts.1 Kate often presents his argument for ‘radical friendships’ and the hope they inspire as a fundamental requirement of social change, and she used her studio space, during this residency, as a central nexus fastened to a widespread network of groups and individuals pursuing the same socio-political objectives.

Art theorist Grant Kester has noted that the younger generation of artists has begun to rethink the political through a return to exploring basic relationships and critical questions, especially in relation to the dominance of neoliberal capitalism and the absence of the teleologies of revolutionary politics.2 Another important factor which has led to this rethinking may be the understanding that dominant forms of politics have little to offer the world in terms of addressing the crises of capitalism – they may actually be part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Kate’s work delves into these questions and issues head on, particularly through her experimental and highly innovative print practice. Situating her work within the socio-historical movement of print-art, she problematises the political by extending voices and narratives of opposition and resistance beyond the usual paper/poster canvas and by politicising mundane everyday objects through a seemingly incessant attitude of ‘if it has a surface, it can be printed on’. During the residency the studio became an in-situ dialogical field of socio-political discourse that domesticised the political and politicised the domestic. Everyday objects, such as plates, place mats, tablecloths, duvets and pillowcases, appeared in constant animated dialogue with one another. This kind of domestic/political aestheticised landscape then became the ideal catalyst for her visitors to engage with the artist in exploring other social imaginaries. Literally everywhere you looked and everything you used whilst visiting what was, in effect, an immersive environment could serve as a stepping-off point for overt socio-political consideration.

Embedding the aesthetic of protest within such relational objects achieves the dual effect of challenging our comfort in things as they are, as well as 1. Figueroa, G. E. (2018). ‘Friendship, Hope and Surprise’. In Brunetta, V. and

O’ Shea, K., eds., Durty Words: A Space for Dialogue, Solidarity, Resistance and Creation. Limerick: Durty Books, p. 12 2. Kester, G. (2015) ‘Editorial’. Field: A Journal of Socially-Engaged Art Criticism [online], 1, p. 2. Available at: http://field-journal.com/wp-content/ uploads/2015/05/FIELD-01-Kester-Editorial.pdf [accessed 2 October 2022].

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evoking possibilities of resistance from what spatial theorist Jane Rendell argues is ‘the situatedness’ of one’s own subject position within our capitalist world.3 In addition, one of the basic questions continuously returned to in Kate’s work through which the political is reconsidered is how to consciously build solidarity. How do we collectively create the conditions – the spaces, forms of communication, quality of relationships – which spark and support its emergence? What kinds of practices are necessary for solidarity to be realised? And how do we deal with the obstacles to building solidarity, such as the ‘internalised capitalism’ that she mentions again and again?

By ‘internalised capitalism’ Kate refers to those taken-for-granted ideas, values and norms of capitalist cultures which we unknowingly reproduce in embodied, relational ways. We often use them to judge and assess both ourselves and others. By doing so, we unwillingly sabotage the collective work of building solidarity. How do we address this, and how is it specifically addressed within this project?

Kate addresses the reproduction of hierarchical power relations within socially engaged art practice directly in the publication Gravity Express that she cocreates with her mentor Ciaran Smyth.4 Indeed, the newspaper serves as a critical reflective review of her collaborative work, plotted through a steppingstone logic of specific themes that arguably underpin much of her work – radical friendship, falling, failure and [re]wiring. In offering this critical review, she constructs a conceptual field within which her work can be understood and evaluated on its own terms, as articulated by the artist herself.

During the mentoring process Ciaran and Kate considered a wide range of preoccupations which have accompanied her practice over the years. Among those preoccupations S.E.A. - Heart // Break emerged as a key feature. For Kate that title is a means of explaining ‘the heartbreak of falsity in the field of art and activism’, ‘getting betrayed’ within collaborative practice’5 and 3. Rendell, J. (2016). ‘Giving an Account of Oneself: Architecturally’. Journal of Visual Culture, 15(3), p. 338.

4. In late 2021 Kate began a process of critical reflection and review of twelve years of her artistic practice with mentor Dr Ciaran Smyth. Gravity Express #1 is a publication device which they co-constructed with a view to sharing some insights from that mentoring process. Focussing on the ruptures, transitions and re-formulations over the course of that sustained commitment to art and activism, Gravity Express captures some fragments from that work together in the form of a critical archaeology of artistic becomings. Presented in the style of the popular tabloid newspaper, it was first made publicly available as part of an in-conversation event at the Cork Mid-Summer Festival, June 2022.Gravity Express #1 was in part supported by an Arts Council Of Ireland Artist in the Community (AIC) Scheme Bursary Award in Collaborative Arts and Community Development, awarded to Kate O’ Shea. The AIC Scheme is managed by Create, the national development agency for collaborative arts.

6. Smyth, C. and O’ Shea, K. (2022). Gravity Express: S.E.A. Heartbreak, Radical

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‘the messy relational features of socially engaged art practice’.6 She talks about learning from toxic collaborations as well as the kind of durational creativity gained by more nurturing experiences. Kate argues for a better understanding of the pressures and responsibilities and criticisms thrown at the artist who is working instinctually in the field. Within Ciaran and Kate’s dialogue we detect a clear argument for a rethinking of the expectations directed at the artist and what can/should be achieved by them coming in from the outside and engaging with a community. Anyone who has carried out field work is aware that power relations are more complexly played out within such scenarios. They are performed continuously and fluidly with, at times, multiple determining factors that might move beyond conventionally understood cultural/social identity registers. Kate questions how the ‘institutions, organisations and outside voices looking in’ might also acknowledge the impact of ‘the power dynamics that they entail’.7 Kate’s work has reflected growing interest in thinking about these concerns through the issue of care – self-care and care for others. Care is a concept which is often conceptualised through neoliberal discourses and attached to neoliberal projects of value and is thus commonly associated with selfindulgence, selfishness, atomisation and often consumerism. Yet her understanding of care – shaped by the emerging work of Radical Institute as well as historical understandings of care praxis with roots in the work of the Black Panthers and Latinx activists in the US – conceives the notion of self-care and care for the community as always profoundly interwoven. It acknowledges that the multiple, holistic needs of individuals cannot be fully addressed without care for the community and the ecosystem in which individuals live and work. This way of thinking about care is directly at odds with the values and assumptions of capitalist cultures and is therefore deeply political.

The potential exploitative elements in socially engaged art practice that Kate refers to remain an ongoing issue for practitioners when so much of the work exists within the process and can therefore be ‘invisible work’. It is difficult at times to discern who does/did what and the power dynamics at play during the process. The very nature of this kind of work can put it at odds with the evaluation systems within the broader field of art practice in terms of what success of the project might or should look like and who decides this. Ciaran picks up on this during the conversation in Gravity Express when he talks about art practice in relation to a possibility of failure. The pressure on the artist for the project to appear to succeed at all costs, he argues, can be addressed through a more honest and transparent Friendship, Falling, Failure, Wiring and Music. Issue No.1: Limited Edition Newsprint.

Dublin. p. 2. Download: www.create-ireland.ie/publication/gravity-express-1 6. Smyth, C. and O’ Shea, K. (2022). Gravity Express: S.E.A. Heartbreak, Radical Friendship, Falling, Failure, Wiring and Music. Issue No.1: Limited Edition Newsprint. Dublin. p. 3.

7. Smyth, C. and O’ Shea, K. (2022). Gravity Express: S.E.A. Heartbreak, Radical Friendship, Falling, Failure, Wiring and Music. Issue No.1: Limited Edition Newsprint. Dublin. p. 4.

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attitude that ‘has something to do with rescuing the experience of failure via the experiential. In socially engaged art practice, for example, success, what that means, is never guaranteed in any given situation.’8 How might the effects of art practice, such as that pursued by Kate O’ Shea, based on these kinds of collective engagements and explorations be assessed?

One common approach would focus on assessing for ‘impacts’ – where impacts are understood as measurable changes in cognition and behaviour. Whether acknowledged or not, the assumption here is that there is some kind of linear cause and effect between art and its effects. To the extent that this kind of socially engaged art involves collective as well as individual learning, one might also be tempted to engage in a kind of summative assessment, one that involves inquiring into what was actually learned by a community, how much and how well. However, both of these approaches, as well as others shaped by these goals, tend to exclude that which is not visible, cannot be measured or is slowly emerging through circuitous routes and has not yet made itself known.

Arguably such assessments may be effacing some of the most important ‘effects’ of art and in doing so may actually be reshaping how socially engaged art is conceived. On the other hand, there is also a tendency to celebrate a priori, rather than to assess, certain forms of art and art projects for their assumed radical potentials without critical exploration, without considering how they may be refracted and shaped by neoliberal institutional rationalities and exigencies or co-opted by market forces.

How to do a studio 468 residency during a pandemic John Bissett Kate O’ Shea’s residency in studio 468 coincided with the arrival of the Covid-19 virus. Within weeks of her residency beginning the country was in lockdown so there had to be another way to work. She found it in the cracks that arrived with the temporary lifting of lockdowns but initially much more so in online spaces, which few of us had worked in consistently before.

This offered a different way of working, where we encountered each other as talking heads on screens. But this new mode also offered the possibility of links across countries and continents that were generally not thought possible prior to this. So for all of the downsides of the Covid-19 pandemic, we found ourselves communing with people contemporaneously in transEuropean and sometimes global conversations. This change profoundly altered the nature of communication and work, even if we don’t fully understand the implications yet. Perhaps it was the real dawn of the global village. Zoom is common practice now, but then it was a culture change in how we might work in the present and into the future.

As Kate has pointed out, some of the most significant effects of her work are cultivating the right conditions for ongoing collaborative relationships across socially engaged art practice and political activism. As of yet, there is no such category within the governance of art practice that might acknowledge these kinds of achievements that social practice serves so well. Since all forms of assessment contain within them cultural values and priorities, themselves shaped by policies, structures of governance and particular institutions, we would ask: is there enough transparency regarding implicit regimes of value in the assessment of socially engaged art? We propose that one way of doing justice to the power and significance of Kate’s work, as well as to that of socially engaged art more generally, is to consider it through a form of assessment that includes exploring issues of care. This means acknowledging the social and relational work which creates the conditions for solidarity and sustainability in collaborations, as well as the creative nature of this work. It means acknowledging the affective transformations that care practices can lead to, as well as the importance of these to the work of creating alternative social relations and imagining other social realities.

The Just City Collective reading group was one such online process dreamt up by Kate O’ Shea at the beginning of her residency. The group reached into living quarters in various parts of Europe and even down into the southern hemisphere. Helsinki, Berlin, Sydney, Galway, Barcelona, Athens – people could drop in from anywhere and I often wondered how someone so young had built up such extensive international networks. Yet she had. Each week, participants proposed texts, and sections were lifted or the whole text was read with people sharing their thoughts. The group was a place for the diffusion and seeding of ideas and meeting new people and ran for 36 weeks almost without a break. We read many papers and texts. One of them was Henry Lefebvre’s book The Right to the City from which I would borrow the phrase ‘a meticulous hierarchy of place’1 for a forthcoming book of my own, to describe how public housing estates are embedded within the class text that is the city of Dublin. Lefebvre, philosopher and sometime Paris taxi driver, was describing how class is literally built into the landscape of the city and the world. It has become so naturalised that most of the time we cannot see it, but we feel it when we feel out of place. We live here. You live there. The powerful quite often say to others, ‘Know your place and stay in it.’ Reading with a group brings multiple, diverging and often competing

8. Smyth, C. and O’ Shea, K. (2022). Gravity Express: S.E.A. Heartbreak, Radical Friendship,

1. Lefebvre, Henri (1968). The Right to the City. In Kofman, E. and Lebas E. trans.

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Falling, Failure, Wiring and Music. Issue No.1: Limited Edition Newsprint. Dublin. p. 12.

and ed. Writings on Cities. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.

perspectives to bear on the writings of others. Such a multi-perspectival view prods and pushes one to think about many more things than if one were simply reading on one’s own. Through the group I was introduced to writers and thinkers including the post-colonialist African philosopher Achille Mbembe, the South American writer Posadas and the French classphilosopher-historian Jacques Rancière. Some of us from the group would serendipitously meet Mbembe on a Zoom within a few weeks of reading some of his work. The work of Posadas was unusual and strange in that it began with the author’s introduction to trade union organising outside a shoe factory in Rosario in Argentina and finished with him writing utopian science fiction texts from a Marxist perspective on what a new world order might or could look like where people and the work they do are really valued. Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel The Dispossessed, also read by the group, covered similar ground from a literary perspective.

If there was a link between all of the writers it had to do with struggles for freedom and emancipation and the things that stop people from becoming liberated and things that people do under such circumstances. Rancière’s book The Ignorant Schoolmaster tells the story of Joseph Jacotot, onetime soldier and civil servant, who became a school teacher then moved to Belgium and developed a new way of teaching and learning, effectively by suggesting or instructing people to go and learn things for themselves.

Jacotot called the method ‘universal teaching’, and later ‘intellectual emancipation’.2 The thesis of The Ignorant Schoolmaster is that one doesn’t have to know a subject to ‘teach’ it; one merely needs to be conscious of what exists in the field and to point students in the right direction. The most important example of this was a group of Flemish-speaking students who had no French yet within a relatively short period of time were discussing, in and through French, Fénelon’s French translation of the Greek tragedy Télémaque. Although we have no idea how they learned so quickly, they took the instruction to learn to heart and worked on learning the French language in ways they could understand and begin to use for themselves.

There are perhaps many questions with the methodology proposed in The Ignorant Schoolmaster, not least of which is the difference between learning by doing and learning by showing, but like Freirean pedagogy, it provokes one to think about how we might replace or transcend failed and oppressive educational practices. By using such experimental educational approaches perhaps we can transform learning into the enriching process it is supposed to be and not something through which the individual is kept passive, docile and pliant and primarily taught to know and not to challenge one’s place in the social hierarchy. It is up to us to test these experimental approaches and to see if they work or not. The reproduction of class or gender or racial structures through educational and political systems may be difficult to 2. Rancière, Jacques (1991). The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation. Translated by Kristin Ross. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press.

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change but it is neither inevitable nor impossible. In other words, we need to educate ourselves about and for our own struggles.

Through these initial online sessions, myself and Kate O’ Shea began to navigate a community worker/artist working relationship by slowly getting to know each other and what we were both interested in and passionate about. I learned about her background growing up in Kenmare and her journey into art by falling out of architecture and into being an artist, finding something she thought would sustain her emotionally and psychically. She brought remnants of her past works with her to Dublin and prepared for a reopening of the studio. She had an openness to all things politics in the broadest and deepest possible sense, which I would experience when the Zapatistas came to Ireland and she acted as host and organiser. From me and from many others she learned and walked the history of the Dublin 8 area. She was introduced to many different working groups and worked with several of them over her residency.

As vaccines became generally available and the lockdowns slowly lifted, the studio space came back into being over time. It developed something of the feel of an Italian autonomous social centre in that it was warm and there was good coffee and tea, but there was a radical egalitarian politics seeping through the walls. The studio became a cavern full of prints, of posters, of curved steel stencils that printed maps for takeaway art pieces and others that printed images. Posters that arrived pictorialised struggles from all over the world over many decades. From the International Workers of the World to housing struggles everywhere, the scope was vast and these political posters left a visual mark in time as to why the issue was important. Something like political memory. Coming straight in off the street, people encountered all of this stuff and many tried these new tools and loved using them.

New ideas and materials were appearing all the time. There was a roller printer that made a miniature print map of Dublin 8 on A5 cardboard.

The studio became a magnet where people dropped in, made curious by the colour and the chaos and the welcome. There was a constant stream of small and large gatherings, talking and distilling and fermenting and occasional singing. Another artist said to me one day, ‘This is it. This is the way the studio is supposed to work, this connection between the artist and community. She gets it.’ I took that to mean that there was something organic about the connection. Local people, other artists, musicians, writers, workers from local projects – all fed off the energy that was emanating from the studio. Members of the Just City Collective reading group who lived in other countries turned up. Some of these became involved in other projects like ‘The Apology’ – ideas and projects fomented in anti-capitalist form and fashion. Kate O’ Shea plugged her artistry into studio 468, into a range of pieces of work and struggles from urban regeneration

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to housing, to explorations of the phenomenon that is ‘governance’, to community work, to addiction. Phrases from previous art projects like ‘Halfway to falling’ and the phrase ‘Who is it for?’ taken from a book written about the regeneration of St Michael’s Estate became entry phrases for the production of art materials in unexpected forms that were exploring political issues in subtle ways and from obtuse angles. The substance of these issues was made manifest in a variety of forms including ceramics, clothing, posters and, in the case of the Red Wheelbarrow Productions, a Christmas card.

The counter-governance Christmas card has its origins in the work of a collective called the Red Wheelbarrow Productions.3 The name was taken from one of Slavoj Žižek’s jokes about a man leaving a factory every day with a wheelbarrow – when inspected by security officers, they are happy nothing is being concealed in it and tell the man he can go.4 Eventually they discover that he is stealing wheelbarrows. We gave the wheelbarrow a colour and connected it to the issue of governance that seems to a small group of us to be one of the most sophisticated tools used to control, monitor and discipline the field of community and youth work and much else besides. The joke works on many levels, not least of which is the idea that we may not be seeing what we think we are seeing or what appears to be the case may not be the case. As usual with Žižek the joke can be read psychoanalytically.

From the state’s perspective governance is presented as something which is good for community projects and perhaps good for society in general.

Words like accountability and transparency are used as bywords for what is called good practice. The machinery of measurement has developed a range of tools such as ‘logic-models’, ‘inputs–outputs’ and ‘key performance indicators’, all of which was given a new and more intense twist with the austerity that came after the economic crash of 2008–9. One of the strange outcomes of the banking collapse was, therefore, a more authoritarian surveillance state developing sets of tools for groups and classes who had nothing to do with the crash. As someone once said, ‘Don’t let a good crisis go to waste.’ So governance has these two aspects, one of which tells you it is absolutely necessary while the other crushes any signs of dissent or disagreement. The counter-governance Christmas card was a way of 3. Red Wheelbarrow Productions is a creative platform for examining questions of governance, power and social justice in the field of youth work and community development. It was co-founded in 2019 by Jim Lawlor, then Manager of the Rialto Youth Project, John Bissett writer and activist, Tony MacCarthaigh, Management Committee Member of the Rialto Youth Project and Ciaran Smyth, Vagabond Reviews. Current members also include Dannielle Mc Kenna, Project Leader, Rialto Youth Project, Sinead Mc Mahon, Lecturer, Department of Applied Social Studies, Maynooth University and artist Kate O’ Shea.

4. Žižek, Slavoj (2011). ‘Shoplifters of the World Unite’. Libcom.org [online].

Available at:https://libcom.org/article/shoplifters-world-unite-slavoj-zizek [accessed 17 November 2022].

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building on previous work with the intention of posing some questions about what systems we find ourselves caught in and of which we are constantly told, just like the old Guinness ad, that governance is good for you. The work of the Red Wheelbarrow Productions and many other grassroots groups is something which is made in the socio-cultural world to challenge systemic ideas and practices of domination and control. We must understand both levels and how they relate to each other. The Christmas card is something which says, ‘We don’t agree with this thing you call governance. It is not what you say it is and it does something different than you say it does.’ It is an oppositional stance. The work of socially engaged art asks questions about whose interests are being served with the rollout of such practices.

There are significant contradictions within the governance narrative and the card is just one way of asking how such practices have come into existence, what they mean and how we can change them.

The Covid-19 lockdown seems like a distant memory now. We are now confronted with the ‘cost of living crisis’, or as someone else described it, the ‘living under capitalism crisis’. There is much to be done and many to organise. Kate O’ Shea’s residency finished a little while ago and life moves on into new projects and new places and new art. She brings something vital and essential to the struggles of our time that we desperately need. As we say around here, nice one.

La lucha continúa.

The girl from Kenmare Had ideas to spare On plates and coats and walls She put them For the oppressors to gut them.

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The Gift and Responsibility of Collaborative Arts Practice

each person to reflect on their own position and their active role within wider societal challenges. ‘How much is enough?’ is a question that all of us could face in multiple ways and can bring about difficult conversations about contested spaces and resources.

Damien McGlynn

Under Goal 1 of Create’s strategy Connect Create Change: Leading Collaborative Arts in Ireland 2020–2025, we talk about the importance of advocating for the field ‘with partners and funders so that they provide appropriately for the relational (not transactional) and durational (not occasional) nature of much collaborative arts practice’. In the Just City residency and the work of Kate O’ Shea, we see the profound benefits of this relational and durational approach in how an artist was afforded the time and support to navigate exceptionally challenging circumstances, find unity and purpose with a community and deeply engage with pertinent societal challenges at a personal, individual level.

Create, as the national development agency for collaborative arts, has been playing a leading role in socially engaged arts practice in Ireland since 1983.

Our mission is to lead the development of collaborative arts practice by enabling artists and communities to create exceptional art together. Common Ground has been active and ambitious in engaging with the local community in Dublin 8 since 1999. But the ways in which we understand and support this practice is significantly different now to the early days of both organisations and is constantly evolving. The contexts in which artists, communities and arts organisations operate are always changing, and so is our understanding of the purpose, principles and power dynamics involved in this work.

Kate O’ Shea’s work has long had a strong focus on social interaction, and this is evident in the work carried out as part of the Just City Counter Narrative Neighbourhood residency. Yet the artist found herself embarking on this residency during an unprecedented shift in how people interacted with both those close to them and wider society as a whole.

Building connections, and trust, with new people from a distance is a skill that many of us had to learn during this time. But a strange sense of unity was also prevalent, and we can observe something similar in how Kate managed to bring people together to purposefully reflect on what it meant to be part of their local community, their city and their country through the Just City Collective.

The notion of ‘third spaces’, a socio-cultural term to identify communal space, distinct from homes (first spaces) or workplaces (second spaces), is probably more widely understood now, in an era where those spaces are greatly reduced.

The formalisation and commercialisation of space, especially in cities, leads to a slow destruction of places for communities to be – to connect, learn, share and bond, without engaging with often harmful capitalist notions of place.

In this context, and within the restrictions imposed by the pandemic, it is a radical, important and challenging task to carve out the kind of safe and inclusive spaces for collective exploration of the key questions posed by Kate O’ Shea (‘How much is enough?’ and ‘Who is it for?’) and expanded on by the Just City Collective reading group.

Kate’s use of texts and language in her work is both inquisitive and invigorating. The multifaceted questions are posed in such a way as to cause

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At Create, we also talk about leading ‘best and next practice’ – what this means is exploring, testing and sharing ways for artists and communities to work together in systems that are effective, equitable and sustainable.

The methods of achieving this continue to evolve alongside changes in the wider world, and we believe that the learning from the Just City residency, as articulated through the work of Kate O’ Shea and the essays of each of the contributors in this publication, will go some way to helping artists and communities identify and define new ways of developing collaborative relationships that are appropriate to the contexts of a changing world.

Partnership is key to this trajectory and reflects, in Create’s work, the relational and durational work engaged in by collaborative artists. We also regularly commission research into the field, in order to more robustly support artists and communities to create exceptional art together. This commitment to best and next practice comes to fruition in a residency such as Kate’s – a true, rich engagement with community, research, peers and contemporaries in the collaborative and socially engaged art space.

Karen E. Till’s essay in this publication reflects on the idea of our gifts and responsibilities being interlinked, and this is true of artists, arts organisations and communities. Reflecting on the work of Kate O’ Shea during this residency, the act of nurturing bonds of community and solidarity is both a gift and responsibility for us all.

Socially engaged collaborative work is ongoing and changing but will only become more resonant as it addresses major social issues in the here and now, as well as developing issues in the near future. Supporting this work is core to Create’s mission, and we are buoyed up by the exemplary work of Kate O’ Shea during this residency.

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Photo captions and credits

Biographies

Inside front cover Photos of studio 468 by Alec Moore. Includes an image of the exhibition, Once is Too Much, 1998, Irish Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition explored issues relating to violence against women, created by women and friends from the Family Resource Centre, St Michael’s Estate in association with artists Ailbhe Murphy, Rhona Henderson, Rochelle Rubinstein, and filmmaker Joe Lee. 6 Collage including photographs of The Family Resource Centre, Inchicore, studio 468 and a screenshot of Networks of Solidarity.

8 Collage including studio installation by Aideen Farrell and Kate O’ Shea 10 Top to bottom: 1) Screen Print in Goldenbridge Cemetery, 2) HALFWAY TO FALLING exhibition, 3) St. Michael’s Estate, Inchicore.

13 studio 468 and Goldenbridge cemetery photos including screenprinted posters from an archive in process with Josh MacPhee, layered on The Beauty I Can See poem by Nan Joyce.

14 Artworks made with Jo Kennedy from weekly poetry sessions between Jo and Kate.

23 Networks of Solidarity graphics designed by Lucia Pola.

24 Images of work made with mentor Rita Fagan, Family Resource Centre Inchicore and archival image This is Community Development with Rita and Eilish Comerford. Portrait of Rita Fagan as “Rosie the Riveter” by Norman Rockwell.

25 Photo by Aideen Farrell of studio 468 installation by Aideen and Kate.

26 Graphics made during St Michael’s Estate Community Regeneration team meetings.

27 St. Andrews Community Centre, Rialto, Dublin 8, Ireland.

28 Collaboration with Alessandra Azevedo and the words of Maya Angelou Still I Rise.

29 Red Wheelbarrow Productions prints layered over a photo by jedniezgoda.com of HALFWAY TO FALLING, Sample Studios, Lord Mayor’s Pavilion, Cork, Ireland.

30 1) Craig Cox and Siobhán Kavanagh in the making of the collaborative film HALFWAY TO FALLING www.howmuchisenough.online 2) studio 468 gathering with Lillian Kavanagh, Tara O’ Donovan and John Bissett.

39 Anna Martinez with printed glass in studio 468. 2) Notes taken at an online session with writer Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor. 3) Studio gathering with Ailbhe Murphy, Ciaran Smyth and Erin O’ Brien.

40 Photo of John Bissett & Aideen Quirke, Graphics for Drugs Awareness Week, and photo of Lizzy Stringer, Rita Fagan, Noreen Byrne with Palestinian solidarity banner made with Rita.

Inside back cover 1) Photo of Kate by Shane Horan taken in Cork Printmakers. 2) Red Wheelbarrow Productions graphic. 3) Photo by jedniezgoda. com of HALFWAY TO FALLING, Sample Studios, Lord Mayor’s Pavilion, Cork.

KATE O’ SHEA is an artist working across printmaking, large-scale installation, performance, and publishing. Kate is co-founder with Victoria Brunetta of independent publishing house Durty Books. In 2015, she cofounded The People’s Kitchen, drawing threads from NomNom Café, the first social space Kate set up in 2009 in the south-west of Ireland. Kate is a member of The Living Commons Ireland, The Just City Collective, Housing Action Now, CATU, Community Action Tenants Union, Praxis Artists Union, and Red Wheelbarrow Productions.

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COMMON GROUND is a celebrated locally based arts organisation in the heart of a historic and ever-changing area in the south west inner city of Dublin.

It’s been working for nearly 23 years to ensure equal access to and participation in the arts in its immediate community, and in communities nationally. studio 468 is a co-partnership between Common Ground and Rialto Development Association (RDA) since, 2000. The RDA own and manage St Andrew’s Community Centre, Rialto, Dublin 8.

CREATE is the national development agency for collaborative arts in Ireland.

Our work initiates cross-sectoral national and international partnerships which support artists and communities to co-create work of depth, ambition and excellence. Create believes that by working together, artists and communities can purposefully explore how collaborative arts engage in distinct, relevant and powerful ways with the urgent social, cultural and political issues of our times.

HALF LETTER PRESS is a publishing imprint and online store initiated by Temporary Services. Temporary Services is Brett Bloom & Marc Fischer.

We have published booklets as an element of our collaborative work since 1998. We build long-term support and expanded audiences for people that work creatively in experimental ways. We are particularly interested in supporting people and projects that have had difficulty finding financial and promotional assistance through mainstream commercial channels.

JOHN BISSETT is a community worker, activist and writer. He has been a community worker for over 35 years and has organised and participated in significant housing, anti- austerity and public debt campaigns. He is the author of It’s Not Where You Live, It’s How You Live, Class and Gender Struggles in a Dublin Estate (2023) and Regeneration: Public Good or Private Profit (2008). John is a member of Housing Action Now. He took an undergraduate degree in Sociology, English and Philosophy at the National University of Ireland Maynooth and then went on to do his masters and PhD in Sociology at University College Dublin. John currently works as a

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Community Worker for the Canal Communities Regional Addiction Service in Dublin. He has been a member of the St. Michael’s Estate Community Regeneration Team since February 2001.

SIOBHÁN GEOGHEGAN is the Director of Common Ground an arts development organisation based in Inchicore, Dublin, she was employed in 1999 to set it up along with other local activists. Siobhán was born and reared in London. She moved to Ireland in 1980 and was educated at Limerick School of Art & Design, Crawford College of Art, UCD H. Dip Arts Admin. In 2011 she completed an MA in Art in the Contemporary World NCAD. Siobhán has been living in Rialto, Dublin 8 since 2000.

DR KRINI KAFIRIS is an educator and researcher in gender/media related issues, sustainable organising, cultural studies and an activist. She focuses on reflective practices, storytelling and sound, in envisioning and working for post-capitalist futures. She is currently writing a book on radio, sound and space during the Greek crisis for Durty Books (Ireland) which explores how occupied state radio (2013-2015) worked to shape the social imaginary and understandings of the crisis. She has developed and executed trainings and workshops for grassroots groups, artists, media professionals, civil servants and UNDP-ACT staff; participated in autonomous feminist groups; activist radio and the solidarity economy, and taught media/communications at British, Cypriot and Greek universities. She is co-founder of Radical Institute together with Eve Olney, a member of the Living Commons and the Transnational Institute of Social Ecology (TRISE). She holds a DPhil in Media and Cultural Studies from the University of Sussex.

CATHERINE MARSHALL is a curator and art historian. She lectured in art history at Trinity College Dublin, the National College of Art and Design and University College Dublin. As founding head of collections at the Irish Museum of Modern Art she curated exhibitions of outsider art from the Musgrave Kinley Collection, exhibitions of Irish art in China, USA and the UK and throughout Ireland with the IMMA National Programme, and was curator to the Engagement project, which brought together artists from the Kilkenny Collective for Arts Talent, Callan, with artists from widely differing mainstream practices for a series of exhibitions 2013–21.

DR EVE OLNEY is a socially engaged producer/artist, educator and independent practice-based researcher. She is director of creative social living/working/ learning scheme, The Living Commons and co-director of the Radical Institute with Dr Krini Kafiris. She is producer of community arts project The People’s Museum (Irish Arts Council, 2022-23), the multi-programmed arts project Living Commons: Reconfiguring the Social (Irish Arts Council, 2019), coproducer (with artist Kate O’ Shea) the social arts programme SPARE ROOM (Irish Arts Council) and the Irish/Athenian social arts project Inhabiting the Bageion: Architecture as Critique, 2017, (self-funded and CULTURE Ireland) RADICAL INSTITUTE (Dr Krini Kafiris & Dr Eve Olney) is a Cork-based, transnational initiative that explores how the arts and cultural practice can promote and sustain radical social and ecological change to transform our social/political movements and create new worlds. They provide a nurturing environment for participants to unleash their imagination, experiment, learn, collaborate, organise - as well as develop new approaches, practices and tools for ecological, social and community transformations. They offer collective mentoring and training programmes for cultural practitioners, artists, architects, activists and collectives, including those at risk and/ or marginalised, drawing from radical thought and praxis within art, architecture and community building, sustainable organising, as well as from cultural/critical/social ecological theory. Their methods are holistic, ecosystemic, feminist and collaborative.

DR KAREN E. TILL is a cultural geographer, ethnographer and curator who engages in collaborative research about place, memory and creative practice. Working with local experts, she seeks to reconsider, and thereby contribute to, political, feminist and urban theory. Her book in progress, Wounded City, highlights the significance of place-based memory-work and ethical forms of care, at multiple scales, that may contribute to creating more socially just futures. At Maynooth Geography, she chairs the department’s Athena Swan Gender Equity and Diversity Team. She is also a Member of the Royal Irish Academy, directs the Space&Place Research Collaborative (Ireland), and is co-convenor of the Mapping Spectral Traces and Feminist Counter-Topographies international networks of artists, practitioners and scholars.

DAMIEN MCGLYNN, Director of Create, is responsible for core programming and strategic and organisational development and partnerships, nationally and internationally. He has worked in the cultural sector across Ireland, the UK and Europe for 15 years, including as Ireland Director of Creative Lives and as part of the ARTIST ROOMS team at Tate and National Galleries of Scotland, delivering youth engagement projects across the UK as part of a touring collection of work. Damien co-edited Making Common Cause (2018), a collection of essays exploring the potential of cultural communing.

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Acknowledgements Common Ground and Create wish to thank everyone who connected with Kate, online and in studio 468 from 2020 – 2022 during her The Just City Counter Narrative Residency.

Special thanks are extended to: Marc Fischer and Brett Bloom of Half Letter Press, Ailbhe Murphy (Director of Create, 2015 – 2022), John Bissett, Joe Donohue, Rita Fagan, Karen E. Till, Eve Olney and Krini Kafiris of the Radical Institute, Ray Hegarty, St Andrew’s Community Centre, Ger Nolan, Vance Wing-sze Lau, Keelin Murray, Catherine Marshall, Enya Moore and Networks of Solidarity contributors, Josh MacPhee, Dawn Weleski, Siobhán Kavanagh, Áine Crowley, Erin O' Brien, Jo Kennedy, Gemma Dardis, Stuart Bell, John O' Rourke, Aideen Farrell, Eilish Comerford, Karen Aguiar, Alessandra Azevedo, Evelyn Broderick, Seámus Nolan, Craig Cox, Nancy Falvey, Alec Moore, Aideen Quirke, Ciaran Smyth, Sarah Clancy, Anne Mulhall, Fiona Whelan, Dannielle McKenna, Daniel Brennan, Tony Mac Carthaigh, Jim Lawlor, Mary O' Shea, Darina O' Shea, Rob Grant and the ‘Hearlisten’ Community Philosophy Group from St Andrews Community Centre, Sheena Barrett, Family Resource Centre St. Michaels Estate, A4 Sounds Studios, Sample-Studios and Glasnevin Trust.

How Much Is Enough?

Kate O’ Shea & The Just City Residency; Reflections on an embedded practice at the intersection of art and activism Published by Half Letter Press with Common Ground and Create March 2023 Designed by Kate O’ Shea and Half Letter Press Copy editing by Emma Dunne Color digital printing produced in the US. RISO printing on scavenged and donated papers produced in our Chicago studio. Assembled by Union Book Bindery in Chicago, IL. Half Letter Press PO Box 12588 Chicago, IL 60612 USA www.halfletterpress.com publishers@halfletterpress.com

2 Curved Street Temple Bar D02 PC43 Ireland www.create-ireland.ie

47 St Vincent Street West Inchicore Dublin D08 X3N8 Ireland www.commonground.ie

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studio 468 is located in St Andrew’s Community Centre, Rialto, Dublin 8, Ireland. It is co-managed by Common Ground with Rialto Development Association.

Water Offset Note It takes approximately three gallons of water to produce one sheet of paper, which means that many thousands of gallons of water were used to produce the raw material for the full print run of this booklet. To offset this water waste, Half Letter Press will choose an organization to gift a dual flush, low flow toilet. Over time, the water conserved through the use of this toilet while offset this waste. To learn more about these issues please consult our publication Book Waste Book by Temporary Services (2022), available from halfletterpress.com.

How Much Is Enough? Kate O’ Shea & The Just City Residency; Reflections on an embedded practice at the intersection of art and activism received funding from Dublin City Council Arts Office and The Arts Council of Ireland.

This project is supported by the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. www.rauschenbergfoundation.org