Making Common Cause

Making Common Cause Exploring the Potential of Cultural Commoning Curated and Edited by Kevin Murphy Damien McGlynn Denis Stewart

cultural commoning / verb - the process of pooling capabilites and material resources in order to make culture together, wisely and hopefully, for mutual benefit.

Making Common Cause Exploring the Potential of Cultural Commoning

ISBN 978-1-5272-3199-3

Copyright

Voluntary Arts, 2018.

The articles in this publication are published by Voluntary Arts under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.

F ORE WORD

CONTENTS FOREWORD

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PREAMBLE 5 Why Cultural Commoning Matters PERSPECTIVES Cultural Commons and Social Wellbeing Cultural Commoning and Civic Conversation Parks as Commons The People’s Parish - Singing Our Own Song Cultural Commons - Who Pays and Who Benefits?

Culture Banked - Our Digital Commons?

What Does Cultural Democracy Mean?

Mindfulness and the Contemplative Commons

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PRACTICES Howlround - A Case Study in Cultural Commoning 5Rights and the Power of Real-Life Gathering Cardboardia - Forming New Communities No 11 Arts in Birmingham - An Instance of Cultural Commoning Garvagh People’s Forest - A Commoning Practice Hebden Bridge Handmade Parade - Our Big Day A New Role for the Artist Creative Citizens Together - Building Hope in Local Communities

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PROSPECTS Shifting Culture NOTES AUTHORS

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Like many new initiatives, the spark for starting came as a response to something of a crisis. For Our Cultural Commons the challenge we were facing into was fragmentation of local cultural infrastructure in differing ways across the UK and Ireland, one of many consequences, perhaps unintentional, of austerity politics.

The desire in parts of the UK to reduce the size of government, not least local government, meant that many of the support structures - like public spaces for creativity, arts officers and funding - were being lost or restricted. Rather than spending too much time mourning this or campaigning for their reinstatement, Voluntary Arts, along with its partner Arts Development UK, decided to take a different tack. We began to imagine what could be done to support a vibrant cultural life in local places with what was to hand.

And so in 2014, with my predecessor Peter Stark at the helm, Our Cultural Commons was born. As Peter outlined in his initial paper: In the next decades: - most of us will be able to experience the arts and cultures of the world virtually - some of us will travel to experience the arts and cultures regionally, nationally and internationally - but all of us will grow up and grow old experiencing and participating in the arts and culture, locally.

Our cultural life, first and last, is local.

Various questions come to mind: - What can we do, as creative citizens, … to make those life-enhancing culturally common places - those places we aspire to for ourselves, our grandparents, parents, children and grandchildren throughout our and their lives, and which are genuinely exciting, inclusive and inexpensive?

- What opportunities can we secure for all of us to explore and extend whatever gifts and talents in the arts we have been given and cultural interests we have developed as we grow?

- How can we ensure that exceptional creative talent, born into whatever circumstance …

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can flourish to its full potential in the world?

- What places and programmes can we sustain and develop for our communities in all their diversity?

- How can we make our cultural commons places where joy and grief can be shared; where wellbeing, caring, kinship and respect are promoted; where laughter and learning, wonder and curiosity are everyday experiences?

- How can we ensure that our local programmes are designed ‘upwards’ from the assets we already know we have and can deploy rather than beginning with a deficit in what we have lost or never had?

- How can we address two of the largest problems confronting us - the personal, social and economic costs of an ageing population, and the consequence for whole lives of skills deficits and structural unemployment for the young?

The rapid pace of change including many of our local cultural spaces … means that previous models of local cultural planning are no longer effectively providing support.

However, there are new and emerging models, building on local cultural assets and making links with education, healthcare, the voluntary and community sector, and local government. What can be done to understand them better, support them and promote best practice?

Our Cultural Commons began with a series of round-table discussions across these islands. These gatherings provided a space for discussion that could uncover innovative local collaborative practice and build networks of people and organisations exploring new approaches. A result of these discussions was that we developed our collective understanding of the problems facing local places as well as the potential solutions.

world of cultural creativity can learn from others who are applying commoning approaches in worlds as varied as organic food production, land management, software development, energy provision, online services, and local civic governance.

This wider world of the commons is a flourishing world, and something of a renaissance in the making.

This book is a contribution to that renaissance. It is a simple compilation of the weekly Our Cultural Commons series, curated by Voluntary Arts from November 2017 onwards, and authored by cultural thinkers and doers. Our intention is to help make visible the cultural commons in action and to encourage related approaches to sustaining creative cultural activity in local places. There is food for thought here for cultural policy-makers who may not yet be minded to embrace the potential of local participation and everyday creativity, and the importance of enabling citizens to identify concerns and create solutions.

The structure of the book is straightforward with a section dedicated to perspectives on our cultural commons and one to practice-based case stories. These main sections are framed by an introduction to why cultural commoning matters and an end piece that looks towards a potential future. Throughout the book a range of themes is explored, including: • new governance and business models that are more participative and collaborative and centred around common needs and bonds • localities as cultural commons (cities and towns, rural regions, neighbourhoods) • the digital and online cultural commons • creating sustainable asset based financial supports that encourage common wealth • the making of art as a commoning and peer-to-peer practice

What we were unprepared for was that many of the solutions were based on some very traditional ways of working. We knew, from our work supporting voluntary creative groups and networks, that pooling resources was an everyday feature of how people organised things. And the practice of commoning - a pooling of resources in shared local participation - turns out to be part of a trend towards a more sustainable and ethical world, which is being progressed actively across the full spectrum of human endeavour.

I am indebted to our authors who have given of their time, energy and craft. I suspect they too see that this is a time for new thought and new practice. Perhaps, in reading this book, you will find grounds for hope if you need it, the inspiration to begin and encouragement to carry on.

Almost accidentally we found ourselves being part of the global commons movement and in the midst of this cultural shift. Those of us active in the

David Bryan Voluntary Arts Chair

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• how cultural democracy can be enabled through commoning

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Preamble This introductory piece sets the scene for a series of articles by cultural thinkers and doers that follow. The articles are presented in two sets of eight. The first set, gathered under the title Perspectives, are variously ‘thought pieces’ about aspects of our cultural commons and cultural commoning. The second set, under the title Practices, are ‘case stories’ of cultural commoning happening in diverse ways and contexts. Although categorised in this way, both principle and practice are, of course, features of every article.

Why Cultural Commoning Matters Kevin Murphy and Denis Stewart

Cultural commoning is of its time. In a world where it is becoming clear that the everyday creative things we do have value for us, for the social fabric and wellbeing of our communities and for the health of our democracies it offers an alternative approach to sustaining our creative lives. We live in an era when the consequences and effects of dominant economic, social and political paradigms are pressing upon people, damaging democracy and fomenting feelings of frustration, helplessness and despair. It is now when creating together, wisely and hopefully, matters most.

Across the world, the wider commons movement is growing hopeful alternatives to the dispiriting status quo. Peer-to-peer networks of organisation and production are on the increase, multiplying exponentially year by year. Working together, collectives of diversely experienced volunteers and professionals in various sectors are facing into challenges creatively and with concern for the common good. In their ‘small acts of creative transgression’1 these citizen commoners are using open source methods, cooperative learning and collaborative approaches to design and development. New civic and cultural ecosystems are springing up everywhere providing alternatives to economic and social organisation and development. Take Platform Cooperativism2, for example; or the Urban Commons plans in Ghent3, Barcelona4 and Bologna5, to name but a few; or the more ethical blockchain developments in digital currency such as FairCoin6. These movements are well beyond the hopeful aspiration stage.

They are on the ground, happening and here to stay.

The practices, principles and values of the commons and ‘commoning’, are very relevant and directly applicable to the world of creatively cultural activity. Indeed, in a time when perceptions of priority regarding use of the public purse are leading politicians and policy makers to cut back on funding for ‘the arts and culture’, the ways of thinking and acting that are associated with the commons and commoning need to be highlighted and heeded. Cultural commoning happens when people come together through personal choice to initiate and grow creative activity and practices through participative and collaborative approaches. It acknowledges the abundance we have around us and offers a pragmatic and complementary approach to sustaining the means of cultural creation in local places. It sits alongside the public sector and private enterprise with perhaps the most potential being realised when interdependencies are recognised and built upon. And, in enacting alternative ways

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of working, cultural commoning is exerting influence through contributing to processes of transformative innovation, the need for which is becoming ever more evident and urgent.

In the sphere of cultural creativity not least, we have the advantage that the basic resources and building blocks of cultural creativity - the knowledge, the practices, the human impulse to express ourselves creatively - are held in common. These abundant human resources are accessible to everyone. At any given point we can draw from this rich reservoir to imagine and create anew.

Perspectives

More contested are the means by which we turn these building blocks into new expressions, unique to us and by which we nurture, share and celebrate our individual and collective creative acts. The cultural landscape is more fragmented and complicated here. And there are more enclosures.

One next step, as we look to provoke thinking, inspire doing and help to form an enabling environment of policy and practice within which culturally creative commoning in diverse ways and places becomes more of the norm, is to name it and explore it actively as emerging next practice. The series of articles in the following pages aims to do just that.

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Cultural Commons and Social Wellbeing Nat O’Connor

Researchers are making headway in trying to understand and assess what brings people satisfaction in life, based on psychology and better knowledge of the material conditions people need to live a decent life. While this will always be incomplete, we are perhaps on the threshold of having a workable social science of human wellbeing.

And any wellbeing science needs to include the value of aesthetics, creativity and selfrealisation.

A lot of old certainties are fading, such as full-time jobs for life, home ownership, widely shared religious faith, and guaranteed access to a social ‘safety net’ of core public services. People move between localities more often than in the past, and may have various networks through which they derive income for work. Many of us have contact with far more people than previous generations did. But so many of these connections are fleeting, often mediated by social media, rather than long-term relationships.

The three elements that come together to empower cultural commons are: • local infrastructure • creative resources • custodianship.

Local infrastructure can be permanent or temporary. It includes physical space and buildings, but also invisible infrastructure such as insurance cover or local authority permission. Public bodies, voluntary bodies, businesses and even private individuals can provide such infrastructure.

Creative resources are held by individuals and groups, and include both personal resources of imagination, ideas and skills, and physical resources, such as art materials, musical instruments, electronic equipment, or whatever is needed to bring a creative vision into existence.

Custodianship implies that motivated individuals need to co-operate in order that whatever they create does not fade with the dawn and continues to benefit the wider community. Some creativity may be purposefully ephemeral. But nonetheless even bringing something into existence in the first place requires some organisation and forethought.

All of this can undermine our sense of identity and cause angst rather than give a solid foundation to our lives. With the radical shrinking of the foundations of collective identity and a sense of self, many people feel the need to find new forms of kinship to reassert their humanity in an increasingly alienating economy.

Commons are shared resources carefully minded by a community for their mutual benefit. Traditional commons - from the park bench to the public library - have for centuries permitted people to be in contact with one another in a civilised and civilising environment.

To be a force that brings people together in new ways, cultural commons have to harness all of the power of the arts to speak frankly about the deepest concerns of people - mortality, frailty, loss, loneliness, meaninglessness and despair. According to Socrates, an unexamined life is not worth living. Cultural commons at their best should help us examine our lives and to commune with others in the achievement of a mindful and worthwhile human existence. That does not mean that manifestations of cultural commons cannot be fun. On the contrary, merriment, celebration and joyfulness are also an important part of life lived well.

For new cultural commons to make a worthwhile contribution, there needs to be a self-aware network of cultural agitators who understand their role as leaders of collective working towards the emancipation of humanity from the constraints imposed by unregulated capitalism and environmental ruin, not just as providers of entertainment. And such cultural leaders need to be informed about human psychology and the factors that help people lead good lives.

If I were to describe a cultural commons, I would say it allows anyone to claim the public square - at least for a time - in order to put forward their ideas in whatever form their creativity takes, and to invite both friends and strangers to share the experience.

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We know that people require a minimum level of material conditions to attain a decent quality of life - as illustrated, for example, by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s Minimum Income Standard7 for the UK, or by the Minimum Essential Standard of Living8 described by the VPSJ in Ireland. People need the means to have a decent quality of food and drink, clothing, housing and domestic

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fuel, household goods and services, transport, personal goods and services, and opportunity for social and cultural participation.

At the same time, researchers have developed an impressive base of evidence supporting Self Determination Theory9, which argues that people are most motivated by intrinsic things - such as having the capability to do things for themselves, having autonomy to make decisions that matter to their lives, and feeling positively related to other people.

Those championing cultural commons need to be sensitive to the fact that people who do not have enough material resources are less likely to have the capability to engage in cultural activity. Severe deprivation is likely to rob people of even the ability to appreciate passively a cultural experience. Cultural commons need to empower people, in peer networks, to be creative for themselves. Human beings prefer to be active doers rather than passive recipients.

Homo sapiens evolved for over one hundred millenniums in small, close-knit social groups. The transition to postmodern life has been for many too abrupt, too brutal.

It is no wonder that mental illnesses - depression, anxiety and addiction - are the fastest growing health problems of the developed world. Yet a social science of human wellbeing can help us to understand our limits, and to rediscover our strengths.

As the world begins to recognise the yawning chasm between western TV lifestyles and the actual material resources the Earth can provide, there will be greater demand for authentic cultural experiences rather than throwaway consumer products. Cultural commons have the potential to be a sustainable source of sustenance for people’s hearts in an era of constrained global resources. They can go deep and provide spaces and moments within which people can find deeper kinship and solidarity with one another, as part of a global movement for human flourishing.

Cultural Commoning and Civic Conversation Denis Stewart “..in the shorter run, which is the run of everyday life, a civilisation is irrigated and sustained by its common interchange of ordinary intelligence”.

Clive James (2007)10

This article has its origins in my experience of participating in an exploration initiated by Voluntary Arts with others - of ‘our cultural commons’ as a way of thinking about local creative cultural activity and how this can be grown and sustained. The article is in two parts. The first part suggests ways of thinking about ‘culture’, ‘commons’ and, therefore, ‘cultural commons’. The second part shares some perspectives on conversation and its crucial role in a cultural commons.

In recent years there has been growing interest in ‘the commons’, not least as part of people’s search for viable and ethical alternatives to current economic and social paradigms. Much has been, and is being, spoken and written on the subject.

Prominent in this extensive discourse are concepts and practices related to/rooted in people making common cause – people of diverse character and capability who hold in common a set of values, a sense of human kinship, and a commitment to making a difference and shaping a place for the common good.11 One insight which I find especially helpful in thinking about the commons is expressed in David Bollier’s comment that “the commons is an active, living process.

It is less a noun than a verb because it is about the social practices of commoning”.12 There is no commons without commoning.

Turning to cultural commons, it is worth considering for a moment the various meanings of the ‘cultural’ descriptor.

In its broadest sense, culture can be described, for example, as “the total set of beliefs, customs or way of life of particular groups”.13 At the other extreme, the word is used in very narrow ways as if it were the same thing as ‘the arts’. Between these ends of a spectrum of meanings, it is helpful to see ‘culture’ as denoting an aspect of human society that includes ‘the arts’ (visual, musical, performing, etc), but also other manifestations of human creativity, such as intellectual accomplishments –

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In practice, conversation can be a precursor, a sort of parent, of creative cultural commoning. Much of the work that Voluntary Arts Ireland is doing, in partnership with local authorities and others, involves the simple act of inviting people in a locality to come together to share stories and perspectives on creative cultural activity in and around that place.14 Convening conversational gatherings of citizens enables connecting between people and learning from and with others.15 And it can encourage those participating to see that they are already/can become ‘creative citizens’ who can initiate new culturally creative action in the civic space.

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There are several ways in which conversation is a crucial part of cultural commoning. First, conversation - the marvellous process of people talking, listening and learning together - is in itself a culturally creative act. Consider for a moment the root meanings of the English words ‘con-vers-ing’ and ‘con-vers-ation’. Vers means ‘turn’. From vers we also get the word ‘verse’ - a line or row of writing; a furrow. The metaphor is of ploughing, of turning over earth to form a furrow, of turning from one row to another. So, in the course of conversation, the people participating can be said to be ‘ploughing together’, working cooperatively on the same ground. And ploughing is a cultivating action, a deeply transformative culturing process.

There are hints of a heartening vision here, glimpses of grounds for being hopeful in the midst of our contemporary world’s despairing tendencies. As much as ever before, our world needs the nourishing, civilising influence of what Clive James calls, with customary eloquence, the “common interchange of ordinary intelligence”. Cultural commoning and the co-creatively civic conversation at its heart are forms of that common interchange, enabling emergence of the extraordinary from the ordinary and the ethically excellent from the everyday.

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Participating in culture as a process through diverse forms of culturally creative activity is something that many people love to do - and everyone has the inner potential to do - not just privately but in a civic space. When people ‘do culture’ in collaborative association with others, they are engaging in a form of civic participation. They are being creative citizens whose caring about the common good finds expression in their working together creatively to make things happen.

Such cooperatively creative acts - often small, always significant - are what cultural commoning is about. And people engaging in conversation is at the core of this process.

In summary, people being in conversation with each other, learning and creating together, is essential to the purposes and processes of cultural commoning. It helps to prompt participation. It helps people to discover a ‘wise initiative’17 that they can take on and perceive a shared sense of purpose. It helps to cultivate and sustain commitment along the way. And conversing with others co-creatively fosters a sense of practical hope in the face of life’s challenges. As David Fleming put it, “people talk to each other and start to believe they can work things out for themselves”.18

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But culture is not just a collection of customs, conventions, practices and accomplishments. It is, first and foremost, an active process, with which people engage, and which shapes and is shaped by the context in which other practices social, political and economic – take place. It is about people being creators as well as consumers of cultural artefacts and experiences.

Furthermore, participating in conversation with others is an essential and intensely practical part of the collective creativity that happens as a group of creative citizens imagines new possibilities and works towards realising those imaginings. As one thinker has expressed it, “conversation is a cooperative activity, not just a series of beautifully manicured statements”16. Conversation, that goes beyond the cosmetic, changes things. It helps to make a difference.

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in sciences, philosophy, humanities - the processes and products of design - in technology, engineering, architecture - and the practical crafts of making, agriculture, horticulture, and so on.

Parks as Commons Abigail Gilmore

I became interested in thinking about ‘the commons’ in relation to cultural policy through my involvement in the project, Understanding Everyday Participation Articulating Cultural Values19 and, more specifically, in relation to how participants in this research expressed their relationships with parks and open green spaces. The project has been investigating the practices and values of ‘everyday participation’ and the ways in which individuals and communities’ participation helps structure and shape their lives and their relationships to local governance and local place.

Through mixed methods of enquiry, it aims to re-evaluate radically the value of cultural participation from the perspectives of participants rather than the perspectives policy-makers or institutions. The intention is to resist a common ‘deficit model’, and to present the means for more culturally democratic management of and access to resources.

Analysing transcripts from household interviews and drama-based workshops with young people in North Manchester and East Salford, it soon became clear that parks are spaces that express a breadth of different values within the localities they are based. Parks appear to have more salience to people’s everyday lives than the types of assets and amenities we normally associate with cultural participation and value - such as theatres, museums and galleries. The uses to which public parks are put by these participants in our research participants, the values that were attached to their use (and their avoidance), are multi-form and multiple. People use parks with families and friends, in facilitated sports and recreation, for access to nature, to play and to day-dream, spend-time on one’s own, or save time through taking transversal routes to other activities. Parks and green spaces in the city are not just a central part of everyday cultural participation, but also mark time and generate value through their part in people’s memories of childhood days, as well as through the value they connote to their existing neighbourhoods.20

These finding suggested to me Linebaugh’s description of the commons21 as that which is constituted through participation, as the gerund of ‘commoning’ rather than the fixed asset of space. People bring their own values, meanings and resources to their participation in parks, and in doing so generate further value for their neighbourhoods and communities. “The activity of commoning is conducted through labor [sic] with other resources; it does not make a division between ‘labor’ and ‘natural resources’. On the contrary it is labor which creates something as a resource, 14

and it is by the resources that the collectivity of labour comes to pass”.

However, the commons are not neutral spaces or empty vessels waiting to be filled. As places where many different communities share public space, parks act as contact zones22 and can exacerbate both social cohesion and conflict. On the one hand, they provide opportunities for encounters, the formation of social networks, intercultural integration and the articulation of both public and private concerns.

On the other hand, they can also highlight tensions between different social groups and are vulnerable to exploitation from commercial use which may privilege private capital over public value, e.g. when festivals take over parks temporarily but change their use permanently; or when space becomes branded by private interests through sponsorship23. Furthermore, public parks are under threat in the UK, as austerity measures are forcing the local authorities that own and maintain them to look at other income models or face the closure or sale of parkland: over 90% of park-keepers predict budget cuts, and 40% are expecting their parks to significantly decline as a result.24 As common-pool resources, distinct from common-pool property - since they are not statutory services which local authorities are dutybound to keep open and so are not truly owned by the public - they face enclosure.

The public park has its roots partly in the enclosure movement of the 18th and 19th century. Our archival research on the establishment of public parks in Manchester and Salford, the first municipal parks in the country, has revealed that the history of these ‘green lungs’ is intertwined with debates over the moral and physical health of the newly urbanised poor, and that campaigning for accessibility for spaces for ‘public walks’ resulted from the taking over of common land as an economic as well as physical resource.25 Previously the private spaces of the elite, symbolic of their wealth and power,26 parks came to be adopted by local public corporations as central devices within urban cultural strategies. These cultural policies included the encouragement of ‘rational recreation’ and public promenading (promoting the adoption of behaviours displayed by the ‘better classes’), the housing of new art museums and temporary exhibition spaces, and the promotion of live music economies and propagation of cultural tastes through bandstand concerts subsidised by Park Committees. Parks were at least as important as the new museums and library reading rooms of the day, as spaces for regulation and governance of the public body, for introducing proper behaviour and cultural education to the working classes and distracting them from less savoury forms of entertainment, such as music halls. Arguably, parks still maintain this function in urban cultural policy, and they do this particularly well because of their mass appeal and through the spaces they offer for everyday cultural participation.

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So how can these conceptual connections and shared historical origins help us to imagine and create more equitable and culturally democratic policies? From my perspective they remind us that policies for arts and cultural participation should be not just about provision of public cultural spaces or about audience development in the educative sense. These policies should consider how participation in cultural commoning brings the capitals, norms and values of the participants together as common-pool resources. As debates about free museums policies and their visitor demographies suggest, it is not so simple as “build it” or “make it free” and all will come. Commons are made. They can also be enclosed, so that those who do not identify with these attributes or who do not have the same capitals, are left outside or excluded. Commons are also threatened by private interests. Rees Leahy argues, for example, that the cultural policy efficacy of museums is related to tensions between the governance of bodies of work - collections - and the production of social bodies.27 And so generating public good and social improvement through museum participation is always in tension with the protection and curating of works of art.

Parks remind us how the everyday negotiation of shared spaces is important and valuable to both people and places, and that public policies should promote forms of participation valued by all. The next stage in the history of their role in urban cultural policy must see a shift to statutory duty of maintaining access to these common-pool resources and protecting them from private enclosure.

The People’s Parish - Singing Our Own Song David Francis and Mairi McFadyen

TRACS (Traditional Arts and Culture Scotland) is an organisation which brings together the main traditional art forms of music, dance and storytelling, and seeks to position them as a resource for contemporary life and creativity. TRACS is in the early stages of a major project, The People’s Parish, which aims to enable people to shape and share the story of their own community, and to find meaning in it by combining local stories and traditions with local creative voices.

Our starting point is acknowledgement that the world is in a state of profound crisis but that, by digging where we stand - echoing a guiding principle of cultural commoning that our cultural life first and last is local - we have the means to start addressing that crisis.

Our vision is of a revived and enriched civic life, with flourishing communities, characterised by their members’ sense of well-being, good health, civic engagement, radical democracy, social justice (equitable distribution of wealth, power and privilege), and respectful relationships with nature and each other.28 We envisage communities bound together by a sense of place; by a connection with what makes a place different from another – local details, landmarks, geology and geography, resources (the natural dimension); by a connection with the ‘layering’ of a place – of what has happened in the place before the present day and how the resonances of past events persist into the present (the cultural or human dimension). As a recent study put it: “The nature of inequality, distinctive histories and our individual experience intersect in the stories that grow up around places. Those narratives of place in turn shape our responses to individuals in those places”.29 The renewal of the social and civic fabric is both goal and means. And it is urgent.

In order to flourish in the present and in the future, communities also need a relationship with their past, their collective memory. It is our contention that two of the chief ills of our time are alienation and loss of meaning. Culture, nature and society constitute the lifeworld of the individual, which he or she interprets to find meaning.

Meaning - its assignation, communication and interpretation - is the central element of culture, the product of individual minds responding to and navigating reality. A community is any group capable of sharing meanings.

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One way of addressing the problems of alienation and loss of meaning is by identifying, exploring and sharing aspects of cultural memory linked to place.

Within cultural memory we are interested in the possibilities of the ‘folk voice’, the overlooked and vernacular voice, as opposed to official accounts and the perspective of those with political and economic power.

The traditional arts are a collectively created and re-created expression of the people’s encounter with geographical, historical, psychological and social circumstance, including the processes of settlement, relocation and dislocation. And so they offer a unique way of understanding the heritage, character and identity of a place.

By identifying, exploring and sharing the folk aspects of cultural memory, local communities can enlarge their cultural capital and claim cultural equity for it.

Tangible and intangible assets, developed in many cases by unknown hands and minds, and which may have been hitherto undervalued, can be given value and have their value recognised both inside and outside communities.

We propose, therefore, that communities develop resources and tools for exploring the folk voice within the cultural memory (“singing their own songs again”30), using it to share knowledge of the past, and to explore and express its creative possibilities for social, educational and economic benefit, for example, through cultural tourism. The pivotal point of any project is the piece of work which will stand as the community’s expression of how it sees itself and how it wishes to project itself to the world. Like Georges Rivière’s ‘Eco-Museum’ concept, the work generated by the People’s Parish will be “a mirror in which a population could seek to recognise itself and explore its relationship to the physical environment as well as previous generations; also an image offered to visitors to promote a sympathetic understanding of the work, customs and peculiarities of a population”.31

social capital”.32 Why the parish? It is true that the parish is closely associated in people’s minds with the church. And it is also the case that over two hundred years ago, at the close of the eighteenth century, ministers of religion were asked to write the story of their parish for the Statistical Account of Scotland. But the parish is not only an area of ecclesiastical concern but a civic one as well. The parish was the unit of government in Scotland right up until 1930 and the civic parish boundaries are still used by the Census as a way of classifying and comparing information. The origin of the word is Greek – para, ‘beside’ and oikos, ‘the dwelling’ - indicating that area that is within reach and close to home. ‘Parochial’ comes from the same root though it gives ‘close to home’ a negative connotation. ‘Ecology’ and ‘economy’ also come from the same root, concepts of large scope which suggest that the idea of the parish need not be inward-looking and bounded. William Blake invited us to see a world in a grain of sand. And, in that sense, the life of the parish can refract and distil wider concerns.

But at the end of the day, boundaries are just lines on a map and “boundaries are less important than centres”33 where people form associations and social affinities.

The parish boundary and the area it encloses nonetheless provide a useful reference point, and a marker against which to gauge shifts in settlement, the reconfiguration of communities and the orientation and re-orientation of their members.

The intention of the People’s Parish is that, unlike the old Statistical Account, Scotland’s story should be told not by a few professionals or central institutions, but by the people who live and work in each of Scotland’s 871 ancient civic parishes. In short, the People’s Parish aims to produce community generated artwork in any medium and any genre. The result will be not only a local resource but also a multi-faceted and evolving mosaic of humanity and nature in Scotland as a whole in the first quarter of the 21st century.

In light of this we propose local networks of engaged individuals and organisations, supported by skilled field-workers. The field workers can map the local traditional arts ecology, negotiate with, guide and work with local groups and in communities to identify strengths and weaknesses, initiate projects which explore tangible and intangible material, and work creatively with the knowledge developed.

The value of this approach does not need to be demonstrated from scratch. The field of creative community development has attracted much attention in recent times and numerous studies have concluded that “active forms of engagement actively creating, exhibiting and participating - have better outcomes in terms of

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Cultural Commons: Who Pays and Who Benefits?

Niamh Goggin

As a freelance consultant, working on social investment and social enterprise, my interests are focused on the sustainability of the arts sector and the livelihoods of those working and volunteering in the arts. According to Murphy and Stewart,34 “cultural commoning happens when people come together through personal choice to initiate and grow creative activity and practices through participative and collaborative approaches. It acknowledges the abundance we have around us and offers a pragmatic and complementary approach to sustaining the means of cultural creation in local places.” Noting the reference here to abundance, my question relates to the funding of this creative activity and those who engage in it.

In November 2016, Arts & Business NI and Building Change Trust published a report of research, conducted by Margaret Bolton and me, into financing of the arts.35 The overall impression conveyed by our report is of a sector that has been and is continuing to be ‘hollowed out’. A proportion of arts organisations had, with regret, laid off staff and volunteers, while others have sought to increase the involvement of volunteers. Some organisations reported that they have been forced to reduce marketing budgets and were concerned about the likely effects on audiences. Others indicated that they had been forced to reduce the time spent on fund-raising, or that they had reduced spending on building maintenance.

Arts organisations in Northern Ireland recognise that highly creative and skilled staff and volunteers are their most important asset. However, some of the organisations that we spoke to expressed concern about retention of staff due to very low salary levels and pay freezes that have lasted many years. A few organisations referred to being unable, or finding it very difficult, to contribute towards pensions. One mentioned a staff member who is paid for part-time hours but works full-time; another referred to a need to work evenings and weekends to keep the organisation afloat. One organisation commented that the organisation had cut its fees to artists. The impression given is that both staff and artists are subsidising organisations and masking the real cost of arts provision.

that, contrary to public expectation, most UK galleries do not pay exhibiting artists. In the past three years, 71% of artists received no fee for their contributions to publicly-funded exhibitions. And this widespread practice of non-payment is actually stopping artists from accepting offers from galleries, with 63% forced to reject gallery offers because they can’t afford to work for nothing.

The Musicians Union37 reports that earnings for musicians are low. Income levels compare unfavourably to other professionals who have invested similar amounts of time and money into education and training. Of the musicians surveyed, 56% earn less than £20k and 60% report working for free in the past 12 months. Pension provision is poor compared to that made for employees in other sectors, and even by other self-employed workers in the wider labour market. Whereas 22% of employees and 29% of self-employed workers in the wider labour market have no independent pension provision, this rises to 65% for musicians.

A study, conducted by Queen Mary College, University of London38, showed just one in ten authors can afford to earn a living from writing alone - a drop from 40% a decade ago. A typical professional writer, the study found, earned just £11,000 annually - less than the minimum wage. In real terms, the average earnings of authors are down 8% since 2005, according to the report commissioned by the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society. In the year in question (2013), 17% of all writers did not earn any money, despite 98% having had work published during the previous 3 years. Also, women were found to earn on average just 80% of the income of their male counterparts.

So, my core question is: If creative cultural products are to be shared for free, who is going to pay for this and who benefits? Public funding of the arts in NI and Britain has already been cut and is about to be reduced even further. And private sector sponsorship tends to be drawn to the larger and prestigious arts organisations.

That experience is shared throughout the sector. The Guardian36 reported in 2015,

Will cultural commoning result in the arts becoming the preserve of those academics and public-sector workers paid to support volunteers with the free time to contribute and no need to earn further income? Will arts activity be further concentrated in wealthier areas, that have the facilities and resources to host it? I recognise that much of our cultural commons has been laid down over generations. If we want to preserve, maintain and share that heritage, that will cost time, effort, expertise and money to do so. Charitable trusts, community funding, crowd-funding and volunteer contributions can all help. However, my worry is that public funders may see the exploration of the concepts and practices of cultural commoning as an invitation not to pay artists for their creations and creativity.

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In a forthcoming report, A Blueprint for the Future: Supporting arts and cultural organisations in Northern Ireland to become more financially resilient, Margaret Bolton and I map out a programme of support for small and medium-sized arts organisations in Northern Ireland, that builds on capitalisation work by Creative Trust Working Capital for the Arts39 (Toronto, Canada). If participating organisations manage, through their own efforts, to reduce their deficits or increase their surpluses, the programme will match-fund by investing in their financial capital. Financially fragile organisations find it challenging to survive, never mind thrive and innovate. By strengthening their capital base, the programme will help to give our arts sector the breathing space to fly.

‘CultureBanked®’ - Our Digital Commons?

Liam Murphy

In a cultural sector which diverges massively around ownership - or simply ignores it - it is interesting that ‘the commons’ is increasingly in the vanguard of conversation. Before you can share though you have to understand what’s yours and what’s not. My focus in this article is on ‘digital cultural commons’. For simplicity, I’m referring here only to artistic production made, stored, distributed or represented digitally.

The objective of (digital) commoning is that content should be available to all equally - exploitable, but non-exclusive. Starting from a position of giving it all away is not going to lead to a common stock of anything. And neither is centralising ownership. Thinking about cultural products as common resources to build from - extensions of the knowledge-based commons - sends some hard-working artists into a miasmic fit of income loss induced panic. So first a few observations about how much we do and don’t own in terms of intellectual property (IP) and what the opportunities are for our digital commons in particular.

The IP system often claims to respect the ‘rights of authors’ but in fact, little protection or monetisation is possible until the rights we have as authors have been offered up to, usually, a publisher. Twitter, Facebook, Unsplash, etc., like most content management sites, have absolute waivers when it comes to remuneration or control of original work. Basically, they assume all rights and insist that authors relinquish them. Even where Creative Commons licenses are used for sharing (e.g., Flickr), commercial sales are not permitted - though links to websites are. Copyright is arguably a charter for the protection of publishers and owners of rights - rather than for the protection of content creators. But, as creators, we do have power - if we choose to exercise it.

The perception of copyright as a corporate or publishers’ tool for profit also creates a resistance among artists who do not view their original works as appropriate for reproduction, sharing or ‘trade’ worthiness. This reasonable antipathy also bolsters the ‘anti-copyright’ movement, which has found expression in alternative licenses.

Not being ‘defined’ by market value alone is important for the arts. At the same

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time, it’s clear that cultural creativity cannot be separated from the market. At the nub of it, who can afford not to profit? At some level, the arts are always reliant on the market for their existence. And yet they fail collectively to retain much of the value they create, resulting in centralisation - and globalisation - of resources.

The arts have human value, aesthetically, morally and spiritually. They also create monetary value. Re-connecting the two functions is a goal for digital commoning.

‘CultureBanking’ in the UK, is a response to this need for a re-connection of the moral, spiritual and material imperatives for art and culture. It is also a movement to retain IP and re-connect the market with the commons, ‘banking’ our communal digital rights to re-fund cultural activity in localities and grow capital for future cultural investment. There are parallel initiatives bearing the same name around the world, all of which acknowledge that the way we fund local growth in arts and culture is flawed. In the USA Culturebank aims to create “a new paradigm in financing the arts by re-defining returns on investment”. At Culturebank in Sydney40 the model is equally re-distributive but uses crowdfunding methods, more akin to the SOUP model,41 like a modern potlatch42 system. The aim of ‘CultureBanking’ in the UK is to build locally sourced and rooted ‘banks’ of IP in communities which can hold their own in local national and international markets, channelling investment and income back to a real place with real benefits. Currently there are few media or market platforms performing this function. Importantly, it’s not disruptive: By taking control of the assets you create, you’re just saying: “We’re here - these are our terms, take them or leave them”.

Whilst licensing Creative Commons, CopyLeft, General Public Licenses, CopyFarLeft, Human Commons Licenses and user generated ‘culturebanked®’ commercial peer production licenses all represent attempts to revise the licensing of IP assets in order to create some kind of commons of digital ownership, what we need alongside is enabling technology in order to put it to use. The development of smart contracts43 based on distributed digital ledgers such as the Blockchain44 and distributed peer-to-peer initiatives such as Holochain45 are the beginnings of a decentralised approach that can support a more equitable system – offering artists, arts organisations, creative citizens and corporate rights-holders the possibility of ‘holding common ground’.

As Arthur Brock of Holochain puts it: “An equitable economy requires a composable grammar of the commons”. In addition, by developing processes and creating easily adoptable solutions for artists and arts organisations to take a commons-based approach to their IP, we can regenerate commons-based access to markets.

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As we make these changes, there is undoubtedly an ecosystem to protect. The everyday creative things that people do together, the publicly funded arts and the creative industries are what make up the ‘cultural sector’. Upsetting one may upset the whole ecology. But just because we shouldn’t upset something doesn’t mean it is working well. Indeed the ecosystem of cultural creativity is already upset in a few ways. For example, the Creative Industries Federation (CIF) recently quoted a value on the UK cultural sector of £92 Billion (the amount by which Facebook has grown in a year). If we compare this to Arts Council England’s planned annual budget for 2018-22 of £622 million and imagined a tax relationship between the two, it would show that the private arts and cultural sector is re-financing its public-sector counterpart at a rate of little more than half a percent (excluding gifts, trusts and endowments)! This leaves over 18% of that £92 billion to find to match the contribution expected of all of UK companies in tax (19%). Something in the region of £17 billion annually, therefore, is ‘missing’. Arguably, this is the current size of an annually accruing debt of the cultural ‘sector’ to its cultural ‘commons’.

Some handling of IP by the BBC also illustrates the extent to which there is, as yet, any substantial move towards supporting cultural commons for creators. Consider, for example, ‘The Voice’, which has broadly followed precisely the same format as purely commercial channels and sold out it’s right to ITV in 2015. A good indication of a ‘commons-led approach’ is whether or not ‘contestants’ create, own and disseminate their own intellectual property. Universally, in these shows, they do not. The IP remains with the show - not the acts - despite the ‘public broadcasting’ remit. A commons-led challenge to the BBC (and other cultural producers) is to commission programmes which add peer production licences. In this way, the BBC would be helping to create a genuinely diverse cultural economy of new, accessible work, and empowering artists creatively and materially.

Empowering culturally creative people to control their assets and re-financing the infrastructure that helped produce them is the cultural commons which many are looking for. What the commons has too little of are payment gateways to enable this two way relationship between civic roles and voluntary action (production) to happen. By hypothecating the financing of local creative economies using smart contracts and peer-to-peer micropayments to create a digital commons, we can encourage fairer ‘ownership’ and participation in cultural life. And the problems of ‘grass roots’ co-production, local collaboration and inter-sectoral working begin to look more like opportunities too.

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What Does Cultural Democracy Mean?

Robert Livingstone

I believe passionately in the principles of Our Cultural Commons. Many disciplines - archaeology, anthropology, neurology, evolutionary psychology - combine to demonstrate how vital culture has been to our evolution as a species, to our personal sense of identity, and to our ability to act communally for the greater good. But, though culture is something shared by every community on the planet, in the West it is only in the last two centuries that we have seen a true democratisation of culture, making it possible for anyone, regardless of background, to share in experiences that were previously the exclusive provinces of the aristocracy and the church. This is a phenomenon so recent that artforms like opera, poetry, visual arts, even theatre, can still face challenges of being elitist, and therefore irrelevant to the wider population. Unfortunately, such views only lend weight to what I consider to be a sustained and damaging erosion of the concept of cultural democracy, an erosion that is fuelled by some of the same negative forces that are undermining our wider concepts of political democracy.

But what does ‘cultural democracy’ mean?46 For me, it is about being able to watch a new movie release, screened to the highest standards, on one of Orkney’s sparsely populated Outer Isles, in the Screen Machine mobile cinema (which I manage), thanks to support from local community development companies. Or enjoying a pianist of world-class ability playing in a community centre in Nairn, thanks to funding from Enterprise Music Scotland for a local voluntary promoting group. Or it means hearing, one recent New Year’s Day, a unique combination of traditional Gaelic singing and beat-boxing, in St Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh, thanks to the Atlas team, supported by Creative Scotland, and their work with the creative community on Skye.

Those three examples are all illustrations of the fertile interaction between communities and the professional arts which are made possible by public funding.

My life, like the lives of hundreds of thousands of others, has been enriched immeasurably by the cultural activities made possible by direct or indirect government funding. From my primary school days, when my class used to be taken across Glasgow every fortnight to the wonderful palace that is Kelvingrove

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Art Gallery and Museum to be thrilled by films, lectures and the chance to actually try on a suit of armour, through my entire professional life of more than forty years, I have been unendingly grateful for what public funding of the arts has made possible in Scotland. And I have had the pleasure of helping to disseminate the beneficial effects of that funding to many different parts of the country and in particular to rural communities across the Highlands and Islands.

In 2015 I was commissioned by Voluntary Arts Scotland to undertake an audit of community/voluntary arts in Perth and Kinross. What this fascinating exercise led me to understand is just how intricate the cultural ecology is. The publicly-funded and the voluntary, the amateur and the professional - these are not distinct and separate ‘sectors’. They are inextricably linked and interdependent. Weaken any one and the whole ecology is under threat.

Yet that is just what has been happening over the last decade. The steady erosion of public funding for the arts has put the health of our cultural democracy at risk.

Much of this has been so gradual that, like frogs in a pot, we’ve not noticed the temperature until it’s come close to boiling. Consider visual art exhibitions, for a start. Ten years ago, the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh used to mount eight exhibitions a year. Now it’s four. Across the road, in the Council-run City Art Centre, whole floors lie empty for months at a time. Over in Glasgow, the Museum of Modern Art, GOMA, has individual exhibitions - some of very minority interest that are running for a year or more.

There’s a similar picture in the performing arts. What used to be ‘producing’ theatres are often reduced to a heavy reliance on intermittent touring product, and may sit dark for several days at a time. In the late 90s I helped to set up the Promoters Arts Network in the Highlands and Islands, now the Touring Network.

At that time, much of the touring product was exciting and imaginative theatre from companies based in the Highlands, in the rest of Scotland, and in England.

Now local promoters’ programmes are dominated by music, and usually at the less demanding end of the spectrum.

It’s understandable that these diminutions have crept up on us cumulatively. It takes outright closure - as with the Inverleith House Gallery in Edinburgh - to get people exercised and the media interested. But it would be salutary and, I imagine, depressing to take a snapshot of the funded arts sector 20 years ago, and compare it with the current situation, thereby making visible just what has been lost.

I would argue that the situation is most acute and yet also least visible in many

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of Scotland’s larger towns - especially those with areas which score highly on the Index of Multiple Deprivation. In my own field of cinema, I was alarmed to appreciate that, outside the seven cities, the ten most populous towns in Scotland have little or no access to local cinema. At best some half a million people have available to them only an edge-of-town multiplex, with high prices, a limited programme and transport issues. Many don’t even have that.

Yet the irony is that many of these communities do have access to town centre venues, often rather handsome ones, such as Motherwell Concert Hall. But, in the absence of specialist programming staff - such as do exist in, for example, Fife Cultural Trust - these venues play host only to amateur work - an utterly vital role, of course - and a succession of tribute acts, most of them second rate at best.

So, in relation to cultural democracy, there is a very substantial proportion of the population with little or no access to the arts provision for which they pay through their taxes, and to which they are therefore surely entitled.

That issue of venues is at the crux of the matter. Francois Matarasso’s wonderful short book Where We Dream tells the inspiring story of West Bromwich Operatic Society, and what its inclusive activities, over many decades, have meant to one of the most economically depressed areas in the country. But a leitmotif of the story is the recurrent need to change venues over the years as, one by one, theatres, most of them publicly owned, were closed, converted or demolished. That physical infrastructure, and the human resource that should go with it, are surely fundamentally enabling parts of our cultural commons.

It’s easy to get political about this situation, and certainly I believe that it is within the devolved powers of the Scottish Government to do something about this, to make Scotland a beacon of cultural democracy. Here are some suggestions: • Develop indicators of ‘cultural deprivation’ to be included within the Index of Multiple Deprivation.

democracy in action than the hundreds of concerts promoted each year by Live Music Now Scotland, yet it must reapply to Creative Scotland each year, presenting its work each time as a new ‘project’, because of Lottery rules.

• Put local communities as much as artists at the core of Creative Scotland’s mission.

• Build productive partnerships with those national agencies focused on community development and town centre regeneration, and put culture at the heart of their strategies.

There is also, I believe, another fundamental issue at stake. Most local cultural activity is generated within the community, even if that community energy ultimately results in a multi-million pound arts centre, like An Lanntair in Stornoway. But it is a geo-demographic issue - a postcode lottery, if you like - as to which communities have the ability to self-organise in this way. It’s hardly rocket science to appreciate that the more a community is hit by the effects of multiple deprivation the less likely it is to generate spontaneously the voluntary effort to achieve appropriate cultural access. Yet we know from many examples, from Easterhouse to Wester Hailes, that, if you start with culture, much else that is beneficial will follow.

So, if we’re going to be really serious about cultural democracy, we’re going to have to give some communities a helping hand, to develop tools and models that can stimulate and support community-based efforts to develop better cultural access.

And we need to ensure that the physical and human infrastructure is in place to host and to support community-generated cultural activity - and not simply out-housed to unaffordable, inaccessible, privately owned ‘campus’ schools. The alternative is accepting a shameful cultural deficit that is unworthy of any truly progressive nation.

• Formulate a distinctively Scottish model of ‘event cinema’ which would allow the best of Scottish cultural product (especially by the national companies) to be relayed to cinemas and centres across Scotland, at affordable ticket prices.

• Make arts provision a statutory duty of local authorities (before it’s too late. For some LAs it may already be too late).

• Reduce the dependency of Creative Scotland on National Lottery funds to support core cultural activity. There are few better examples of cultural

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Mindfulness and the Contemplative Commons Peter Doran

A feature of the contemporary commoning movement is the welcome shift away from a view of the commons as merely a ‘thing” or ‘resource’ or set of arrangements. We are coming to understand the resurgence of interest in the commons as an invitation to embrace new ways of seeing ourselves and the world and how these ways of seeing co-emerge. Alongside this, the explosion of interest in mindfulness - with its origins in Buddhist meditation teachings and similar practices such as yoga - signals a profound return to the arts of self care and the cultivation of an ethos of mindful attention.

Both these trends, and the associated rise of an ‘attention economy’, can be seen as emerging alternatives to contemporary capitalism and neoliberalism.

We live in an age of disenchantment and ecological destruction that have followed in the wake of our lonely enclosure in cultures of technology, consumerism and hyperindividualism. Our increasing preoccupation with navigating social media, upping our screen time and complaining about the blight of time poverty is fuelled by a form of capitalism, referred to as ‘cognitive capitalism’, which creates value by engaging human neurological systems. Contemporary forms of capitalism now set out to enclose and marketise not only land and our labour but our very imaginations and capacity for carefully attending to that which is life-giving and life-sustaining. Under this form of capitalism we humans are the products – ‘imagineered’ for manufactured dreams with origins in corporate media complexes and public institutions that are dedicated to enhancing our ‘mental capital’.

In contrast, commoning, as a new way of seeing ourselves and our entanglement with the world, is about undoing the disenchantment that has roots in the colonisation of our worldviews by the primacy of economics (or the “miserable science”). It is about re-embedding the stuff of life in new relationships of care and due attention that extend all the way from our own human intentions and values through to a renewed respect for the agency and even the subjectivity of other species. In Buddhist circles this is called a culture of ‘interbeing’ - a cultivated experience of the continuities of our ecological self with the communities of life of other species, with the land, and with the atmosphere.

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Commoning has been described by the wonderful German writer, Andreas Weber,47 as an attempt to redefine our very understanding of the economy, to challenge a dominant understanding that has celebrated rationality over subjectivity, material wealth over human fulfilment, and the abstract notions of growth and endless accumulation of money and things over wellbeing. What we are now seeing opening up is a new arena for the commons - the ‘contemplative commons’. And this is occurring just as, once again, the combined forces of the market and capitalism set out to extend the horizons of enclosure and marketization to the intimate realms of our attention.

Human attention is an exceptionally important cognitive function, and it is one that is now at the heart of a global corporate competition for ‘mind-share’. The eminent psychiatrist and writer, Iain McGilchrist, believes, in line with Buddhist understandings, that the mind and brain can be understood only by seeing them in the broadest possible context – the context of the whole of our physical and spiritual existence and of the wider human culture in which they arise. He has described48 how attention occupies a special status in our lives because it comes into play prior to our functions, relationships and even to our encounters with things. In other words, what we choose to pay attention to has a decisive influence on our very dispositions. It changes the nature of the world we each inhabit.

The great insight behind Buddhist and other practices around mindfulness is that the quality of our attention is not a fixed human deposit. Mindfulness is about cultivating and training that innate human capacity for more focused attention, and reclaiming our ability to observe closely the mind-body. Mindfulness practices encourage the quiet observation of habituated thought patterns and emotions, with a view to interrupting what can be an unhealthy tendency to over-identify with, and stress out about, these transient contents of the mind. In its Buddhist settings, mindfulness is inseparable from the ethical life, because it is the original human technology that cultivates the space where our human condition is laid bare. This is the inner space, where we can reclaim freedom as a kind of virtuosity in the practice of our lives together, and where limits and forms are gateways to an original freedom for improvisation that we associate with a ‘beginner’s mind’. In the words of Thich Nhat Hanh, we can recover the insight that the real miracle is to walk mindfully on the earth and glimpse, once again, that beauty of the first morning of the world.

Somewhat paradoxically but predictably, mindfulness - or perhaps more accurately the popular, secular variety of ‘McMindfulness’49 - is also big business. It is worth in excess of $1.0 billion in the US alone and linked to an expanding range of must

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have products including downloadable apps (~1300 at the last count), books to read or colour in, and online courses. Mindfulness practice and training is now part of a global wellness industry worth trillions of dollars. McMindfulness - mindfulness stripped of ethical and critical consciousness - can appear to offer a tailored and individualised therapeutic response to many of the features of neoliberalism. It can be sold as the perfect antidote when we are overcome by a desire for respite from hyper-consumerism. It can provide us with support in our struggle to comply with pressures to enhance productivity in the workplace. Or it can offer individual training programmes designed to enhance our resilience.

Practices

But as our enclosure in this attention economy accelerates, our vulnerability to addiction, loneliness, depression and alienation increases in a disenchanted world, bereft of complexity, care and meaning, and where nature and other people appear to retreat behind a series of screens. Mindfulness in corporate and institutional settings can be co-opted as a form of self-discipline and adaptation to cognitive disciplinary forces in the service of enhanced productivity. Or the practice can be deployed by institutions to help mitigate consequences at heightened moments of distress, e.g. when staff are being prepared to adapt to news of their imminent redundancy.

This is why Slavoj Žižek once described Buddhism as the perfect supplement for a consumerist society.50 Stripped of its ethical and contextual roots, mindfulness-based practices borrowed from Buddhist and Zen lineages, risk shoring up the very sources of suffering from which the Buddha set out to liberate himself and others.

Mindfulness must be practised with attention to the operation of power and context if it is to generate useful and liberating insights, irreducible to exclusively personal or individual experience. Aligned with, and informed by, acknowledgement of our institutional sources of suffering, mindfulness can be a pathway to critical engagement and transformation and can provide access to the contemplative commons. The risk for mindfulness practices is that they are co-opted and instrumentalized by corporate, educational and other institutional settings. The very domain of interiority, where resistance can begin with insights into the nature of modern power, is in danger of being colonized and enclosed by the imperatives of neoliberal logic.

The recovery of the contemplative commons is central to creating an alternative pathway to a more sustainable life - a life lived both individually and collectively with care and due attention to the mutual entanglements of self, others and nature.

Mindfulness needs to be practised in the context of Buddhist or similar ethical teachings and, in such a context, leads to a liberation that is richer and more interdependent than the lonely, doubting and radically insecure life of solipsism.

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HowlRound - A Case Story in Cultural Commoning Jamie Gahlon “Commoning is at bottom a process by which we enter into a participatory culture and can sketch an idea of how we want to live together as a society”.

David Bollier & Silke Helfrich (2015)

HowlRound is a free and open platform for theatre-makers worldwide dedicated to amplifying progressive, disruptive ideas about the art form and to facilitating artistic, intellectual and personal connection between diverse theatre practitioners.

HowlRound aims not just to change the conversation, but to change theatre practice and its influence on communities around the world.

Zelda Fichandler,53 one of the founders of the American regional theatre movement, wrote in a letter to the Department of the Treasury in support of the taxexempt status for American theatre: “Once we made the choice to produce our plays not to recoup an investment but to recoup some corner of the universe for our understanding and enlargement, we entered the same world as the university, the museum, the church and became, like them, an instrument of civilization”.

Zelda articulated beautifully what those of us working in the arts understand innately - that theatre (and other public spaces of cultural value) cannot and should not be defined by market value alone. Despite being rooted in countercultural ideals, the American not-for-profit theatre risks being co-opted by our hyper-capitalist mores. For us, this is where the true value of cultural commoning comes in. It provides an alternative model and framework for creative action that promotes values necessary for influential and meaningful theatre-making: • generosity and abundance - all are welcome and necessary

In Patterns of Commoning 51 Bollier and Helfrich write: “A commons must arise from the personal engagement of commoners themselves. It is unavoidably the product of unique personalities, geographic locations, cultural contexts, moments in time and political circumstances of that particular commons”. This is certainly true of HowlRound.

• community and collaboration - over isolation and competition

Created in 2011, HowlRound is a non-profit organization based at Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. Our founding came at a time in theatre practice where we saw too many voices left off our stages, not represented inside of our institutions, not recognized for their substantial contribution to our past and present. We set about creating a group of tools that would amplify voices and issues chronically under-represented and unheard in the theatre. Our name, HowlRound, is a technical term for what happens when you place a microphone next to an amplifier. It’s the sound of a feedback loop.

• visibility and accessibility for under-represented theatre communities and practices

We found an organizing principle in the commons as a social structure that invites open participation around shared values. HowlRound is a knowledge commons that encourages freely sharing intellectual and artistic resources and expertise. It is our strong belief that the power of live theatre connects us across difference, puts us in proximity with one another, and strengthens our tether to our commonalities.

Our current tools - a journal, a live-streaming video channel and archive, an opensource World Theatre Map,52 and in-person convenings - facilitate connection and conversation across geography, aesthetic and cultural difference.

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• counter-cultural ideas and leading-edge research that challenges - and seeks to revolutionize - the status quo • diverse aesthetics and the evolution of forms of theatre practice

• global connection - local communities becoming global practice • timely discourse - work that addresses the most pressing issues of our time such as climate change, migration, and racial, gender and class equity.

HowlRound is an invitation to any theatre-maker who wants to participate - anyone can pitch an article for the journal, propose to livestream an event on HowlRound TV, or join and contribute information to the World Theatre Map. The beauty of a cultural commons is that it encourages access and participation. And in so doing it democratizes things like social standing and hierarchies that may normally prevent folks from contributing. Since our founding, we have published over 2,000 articles by 1,000 authors and have roughly 45,000 readers each month. HowlRound TV has amassed over 6,000 archived, on-demand videos, and viewers have logged a total of 7.5 million minutes of viewing time. In its first six weeks of existence 800

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people from forty-eight countries contributed to the World Theatre Map. While these numbers are impressive, the breadth, depth, and diversity of perspectives and people that they represent are far more important. New self-organized collectives, such as the Latinx Theatre Commons,54 have formed in response to and in part because of HowlRound. Cultural commoning has allowed HowlRound to amplify the experiences of marginalized communities and to reveal the richness of our collective theatre-making past and present.

While we steward a primarily online space, we know that our work lives and breathes in real life - in communities of theatre-makers speaking face to face about an article they have read, in ‘watch parties’ for HowlRound TV events, in the implementation of programs modeled after those featured on HowlRound, to name a few. Commons are “social processes that foster and deepen thriving relationships”.55 This is what we’re after, really - to harness the amazing power of the internet and our digital age to create connection amongst theatre-makers so that we can all benefit from each other’s experience, and ultimately create a more socially relevant and just theatre and world.

5Rights and the Power of Real-Life Gathering Beeban Kidron

A few years ago I founded 5Rights - a framework that takes the established rights of children as enshrined in the UN Charter on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC)56 and reimagines them for the digital sphere.

The journey of 5Rights began in 2012, when I made a documentary ‘InRealLife’.

The film explored the lives of teenagers growing up in a 24/7 connected world: the only world they have ever known. The film added to an existing debate about how to help children and young people take advantage of the vast potential of the digital world, whilst avoiding its dangers, and a growing concern that young people simply do not understand the ‘pushes and pulls’ built into emerging digital technologies, nor possess enough skills to make good use of its infinite opportunities.

What emerged was the conviction that it is imperative for: • society to look holistically, not as disconnected extremes, at the opportunities and risks for young people in the digital world..

• the rights that young people enjoy in the physical world to be enacted in their digital world.

• young people to have meaningful voice in how the digital world treats them.

The 5Rights framework was written to offer a single, principled approach that could be used to set a standard by which young people are treated in the digital world. There were contributions from policy experts, academics, teachers, digital engineers, civic society organisations, business leaders and young people themselves. The framework reflects the views and experience of individuals and organisations.

5Rights had been going some time when, in my capacity as Voluntary Arts President, I was invited to attend an Edinburgh round table that was the start of the Our Cultural Commons initiative. We talked a lot about the need for spaces,

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transport, resources, organisation – all perquisites for gathering. Those present (or gathered) clearly felt that gathering had a value way beyond the utilitarian sharing of skills or making things, progressing an idea or an organisation. The subtext of the whole meeting was that getting people together wasn’t the method, it was the point. In a world that daily moves towards the virtual this fierce attachment to gathering as a central component of the Our Cultural Commons ambition really caught my attention.

Like many ideas that are of their time 5Rights had found it reasonably easy to find supporters. But, once the first flurry of media had subsided, and the obvious people had been recruited to the cause, it had stalled. I simply could not respond to the interest - attend the meetings, write the articles, give the speeches (as well as fulfill the needs of my work and family life) - alone.

And so, fresh from my visit to Edinburgh, I decided to invest some time in gathering together some of those who had shown most interest in 5Rights to see what, if anything, might happen.

What emerged was a leadership group - a group with no explicit roles, no home, no organizational structure, no remit beyond that which we collectively agreed at any individual gathering; a group that undertook to amplify the message and implement the principles in real world settings. It had always been important that 5Rights, an ethical framework by which to design, judge and understand the digital interactions of children and young people, should sit in the public arena. But the work of promoting it, which had fallen almost exclusively to me, needed to be shared.

• building an app to help young people manage their internet use • providing evidence to Government about children’s safety and education online • supporting the case for the UNCRC to be extended into the digital environment.

• instigating a report about childhood development in the digital environment • setting up a children’s commission in Scotland that has reported on rights and developed policy for Scottish Government.

• speaking, writing and blogging at many events and in many places – to help build a consensus that ‘children are children until they reach maturity not just until they reach for their smartphone’.

For me, the power of Our Cultural Commons is that commitment to real-life gathering. Neither the form of the leadership group nor its ambitious creativity would have been possible from behind a screen. And, whilst the digital world provides infinite possibilities for creativity and sharing, gathering in real life - whatever the struggle for places, spaces, transport, resources and organisation - is a powerful antidote to the fragmented and commodified experience so often available at the touch of the button. Without it we are alone. And alone we cannot do the creative work or make the social change we want.

I invited 6 people, and 6 people came. We talked about the framework and what might be done with it. We talked about our skills and our contexts and what each person might be able to offer. We ate an excessive amount of crisps and drank warm white wine from plastic cups. We were: a lawyer, a head of mobile products for a major broadcaster, a director of digital design for a major IT company, a regulator, an entrepreneur, a CEO of a Scottish children’s organization, and a member of the House of Lords.

Among the dozens of things done by us with our communities are: • translating Snapchat’s terms and conditions from legalese into understandable English • contributing to the thinking behind age verification

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Cardboardia - Forming New Communities Daria Stenina

Ten years ago Sergey Korsakov and his fiancée Viktoria didn’t want to have an ordinary wedding and decided to build a cardboard wedding palace during the Afisha Picnic Festival in Moscow where couples could make public acts of marriage.

Sergey remembers: “All of the guests liked this ceremony so much that I had the thought of building a second, bigger and longer existing cardboard town with its own traditions, institutes and economy. We materialized this idea in Moscow in January, 2008 to great public and press acclaim”.

Now Sergey holds the post of Tyran of Cardboardia who always is elected on the non-alternative elections and things may have gone to his head. Together with his wife – Prime Viktoria – they rule their own state with unlimited powers and lead their citizens and lieges towards their dream of conquering the whole world – from America to Australia. Their State, Cardboardia, doesn’t have a territory but already has three permanent Embassies - one in Russia, where it all started, one in UK and one in EU (Riga, Latvia), and mobile ones in Poland, Denmark, Taiwan, Greece, Finland, Slovakia and in various towns around Russia. He has also, somewhat uncharacteristically, decided to declare Cardboardia a cultural commons As Tyran says, “Cardboardia is the most friendly and creative country around the Earth with headquarters in Moscow, just seven kilometers away from the Kremlin.

The State of Cardboardia, that has not been recognized yet, is a community of artists, designers, performers and even managers who make amazing things from cardboard and their imaginations”.

Cardboardia, like any other country, has a governmental structure. Tyran and Prime Viktoria are the leaders, who always set new goals and propose new ideas for their citizens called Personages of Cardboardia. In this country you will encounter the Minister of Education, the Minister of Stupid Ideas, the Minister of Circus, and other interesting people who together build a strong community where each person is important no matter their age or status. As well as the permanent participants in the creative process there is always a population of visitors at the events, participants in internships, and anyone who is interested in realizing his or her

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artistic potential. Eeach person can become a citizen, a Personage of Cardboardia.

There are two ways to gain citizenship. The first and principal way is to take part in the internships that are regularly held by Cardboardia due to different events either in Russia or other countries. These ‘laboratories’ give an opportunity to learn about the event sphere and creative business from the inside. It’s a good start for the beginners and young specialists in design, architecture and management because, after the internship under the guidance of experienced curators, they can be offered a workplace. It is also a great opportunity for anyone who loves art, creating and making things by hand.

The second way to gain citizenship of Cardboardia is to be at the right place in the right time. As, for example, in England on the day of the referendum on the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union, when Cardboardia opened its Embassy to give out ‘passports’ - Personages Permits - to those who wanted them. Tyran was happy: “A large queue lined up! Now we are planning a big project in England that includes cooperation with local communities and investors, searching for and making initiatives for the creative economy, and we want to build a real cardboard metropolis.”

Cardboardia appears in real towns and cities during festivals, parades or other events and can work from several days to months. The space created by Personages of Cardboardia is always interactive where people can play different roles and be the part of the creation and development of the suggested story.

Tyran insists it’s not only entertainment but a global international socio-economic experiment: “We are trying to build up a stable and live system without being tied to a particular territory, and we are doing this through the interconnection between the creative people and local cultural communities. The main source of this system is the artistic and creative power and not money, petroleum or political issues”.

He remarks also on the effects on the people who have been involved in Cardboardia’s stories. It’s an experience that helps people to realize their ideas; it gives them new possibilities and motivations. “We have a lot of examples of someone who worked with us on the materialization of Cardboardia. It opened their creative side and they continued to develop their ideas in ‘real’ life. We always stay in touch with such people”.

Cardboardia unites the three simple elements of communication, education and entertainment to make events and festivals together with local communities. Local

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people in coordination with professionals make unique things and spaces for telling different stories and for paying attention to different problems. By making cardboard towns and the other materializations of Cardboardia, people are getting involved in research into new solutions and gaining inspiration and a new vision of the world around them.

In 2016 in Hebden Bridge (UK) Cardboardia joined Handmade Parade57 to work with the local community who earlier in the year had suffered from flooding.

During one month, Cardboardia and local people were making costumes, constructing the characters and thinking out how to tell this story. As a result, they made a mobile city with a huge toilet in the middle accompanied by polluting pipes, chimneys, cars and even a group of bureaucrats to not only show nature’s dirt but all those things that make our lives so messy and unclean. Cardboardia in cooperation with others always looks for stories to tell, traditions to reveal and problems to solve. The main idea is to make life bright and interesting through cooperation, art and creative action.

Cardboardia has already made 11 cardboard towns in Europe and took a part in 17 national feasts. The biggest materialization was in 2013, in the Russian city of Perm, where it was a huge cardboard city with shops, transport, theatres and museums, banks and its own currency, and everything that can be found in concrete or wooden cities. It existed for three weeks and was visited by more than 400 000 people. This year Cardboardia celebrates its 10th birthday and Tyran says that it is only the beginning. He is sure that one day Cardboardia will become the most visible country on the world map.

No 11 Arts in Birmingham - An Instance of Cultural Commoning Tom Jones

Sometimes It seems that theory and practice run parallel with each other - like two sides of a ladder where it’s the steps linking them that enable us to progress.

Written as just such a step, this paper describes an instance of ‘thinking-by-doing’ which is - and not coincidentally - the basic methodological discipline of the arts.

The aim is to show that the way in which local arts practice, which is currently evolving in Birmingham, contributes to shaping and evolving the theory of cultural commons.

In 2010, Birmingham City Council had become aware that its hitherto extensive and successful community arts service was no longer sustainable. In going out to tender with community-based groups, council officers took a first vital step towards democratising arts provision in the city. Accordingly, ten small arts groups of a variety of types were commissioned to manage Local Arts Forums. With a Forum in each of its ten Districts, Birmingham has created a local arts structure embedded in a notably wide range of socio-economic locations. Significantly, Forums were led by artists who were resident in their respective Districts.

Because of this physical and management structure, the Forums were able to generate local arts activities in a notably different way. Systematically employing co-design methodologies, artists functioned as facilitators with the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of creative activities determined by what citizens perceived as appropriate for them. The full impact of this approach soon became evident. Questions arose about the relative importance of process and product, and the consequent issue of how quality could be assessed and by whom. Tensions emerged about the role of the Forums. As commissioner, the local authority saw them instrumentally as a vehicle for delivering the city’s cultural offer in wards and neighbourhoods that it had designated as priority locations. Major arts organizations in the city tended to cast the Forums as localised agents for their outreach and audience development programmes. Ironically in all this, the Forums were weakest where they were

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strongest. Physically localised, spread across the city, and operationally preoccupied, they were disconnected and thus vulnerable to divide and rule tactics.

The earlier promise that Forums would develop a radically citizen-based approach to the arts was beginning to be undermined by institutional interests of the cultural establishment.

The turning point came with two developments. In 2014-16, and alongside councils from Bristol, Bradford and Burnley, Birmingham participated in Connecting Communities through Culture, a project funded by Arts Council England and the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. The Forums were tasked with co-designing arts activities to encourage socio-cultural interaction between otherwise disengaged communities. However, in generating arts activities with citizens simultaneously in widely differing neighbourhoods and communities of interest across the whole of the city, the ten Forum leaders became fully aware of the exciting potential of the Forum structure. They resolved to form an independent company that could speak with one voice for all Forums, raise funds in its own right and champion citizen-led arts. They named the company No11 Arts after the famous Birmingham bus route with the symbolism that it too links outlying microcommunities and, as a circular route, does not radiate from the centre. At more or less the same time, arts organizations in Birmingham - large and small theatres, production companies, galleries, concert halls, etc. - followed a similar path to the Forums and came together to form their umbrella organization, Culture Central. No 11 Arts and Culture Central are currently engaged whole-heartedly in exploring how they can co-operate on equal terms in future. Thus, we now have a strong platform for radically re-thinking the identity, place and functions of the arts in the City of Birmingham.

Whilst continuing to hold the council commission to manage the Local Arts Forums in Birmingham, No 11 Arts now receives funds from other sources. Codesign methodology is a key factor in this respect. Through this process No 11 Arts employs a wide range of art forms to enable citizens to articulate and share not only how they see themselves, other citizens and the worlds around them, but also how their perceptions and those of others might change in future. In this way, No 11 Arts is actively re-shaping where the arts lie in the wider socio-cultural profile of a major European city. Through practice, the case is being made that the arts form common land and an integral feature of the daily lives of all citizens alongside a field owned by professional providers and privileged consumers.

social issues is evidenced by a recent No 11 Arts commission from a consortium of West Midland universities. We were asked to conduct open-ended ‘creative consultation’ with citizens about re-shaping urban services, such as transport, policing, housing etc. Artist-facilitators co-designed activities with contrasting resident groups, enabling them to articulate how they saw themselves in relation to the provision of urban services. The groups chose to engage in yarn-bombing their neighbourhood, composing rap lyrics about the buses and creating a community quilt highlighting what they valued in their environment. Citizen perspectives on urban service providers, revealed through these activities, were notably different from the ways in which providers see citizens.

But how does the practice of No 11 Arts help to evolve the theory of cultural commons? There are indications that a more democratic approach to culture is emerging. Socially loaded hierarchical values are deeply embedded in our ideas about culture. Consider, for example, the values associated with ballet and zumba classes. Through its structure, ways of working and its place in the Birmingham cultural spectrum, No 11 Arts is in a position to set up change-making and place-making dialogues across such divides. Employing co-design methodology enables citizens to benefit from artists’ creative skills and cultural insights, whilst simultaneously developing their creative capacities, without surrendering their own sense of socio-cultural identity.

To conclude, No 11 Arts is engaged in Birmingham-based practice that is helping to shape two processes of cultural commoning. We are fostering a power balance between two forms of authority - rigour that comes from professional capability in the arts, and relevance that comes from citizens’ lived experience. We are also engaged in realising the idea of creative ‘place-making’ by demonstrating that any venue housing an institution dedicated to the arts is no more a centre of culture than any other city location where citizens live, work or gather together.

The capacity of the arts to mesh with other aspects of daily life and with wider

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Garvagh People’s Forest - A Commoning Practice Karin Eyben “I was in the forest today and I came out taller than the trees”

Garvagh (from Irish: Garbhach, meaning “rough place” or Garbhachadh meaning “rough field”) is a village in County Londonderry. It was developed in its current layout by the Canning family in the 17th Century, following the 1640s rebellion with land confiscated by the Crown from the O’Cahans.

Garvagh once lay on the edges of the famous Glenconkeyne Forest which stretched from north-west from Lough Neagh, down the Bann valley, nearly to Coleraine, and across to the Sperrin mountains in the east. In 1607 this area was described by Sir John Davys, the Irish attorney-general, as “well-nigh as large as the New Forest in Hampshire and stored with the best timber in Ireland.”58 It formed in its day one of the biggest, and possibly the densest, oak forest in the country and became notorious for the hide out of the woodkernes - “a race of outlaws driven from their miserable dwellings by the Norman invaders, rarely emerging from their retreats in the impenetrable forests except in pursuit of plunder.”59 They became the most formidable enemies with which the first planters in Ulster had to contend with. By the end of the 17th century the woods of south Derry had become mostly depleted with the woods exploited by the Crown with the timber used for casks, barrels, buildings and ships.

Garvagh Forest today is a ~600 acres mix of broad leaf and conifer forest. This piece of land has evolved through different forms of ownership and management - from its time as land ruled by different chieftains in Gaelic Ireland and managed through the Brehon laws, to the period of private ownership through the Canning family who built the ‘big house’ in the forest, to being owned and managed as a commercial forest by the state from the 1950s.

Understanding this history and the complexity of people’s relationship with the land and the forest is a key underpinning of the Garvagh People’s Forest project.

The story of the project began with the closure of Garvagh High School (also sitting on the former Canning estate) in August 2013. There was significant level of community grief and anger at the time which was gradually shifted to exploring

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the potential of a community asset transfer of the land from the Department of Education to community management. The feasibility of this is still being explored.

However, as part of this process of exploration, a new conversation began - a conversation that noticed the asset of the neighbouring forest and to what extent understanding the value of the forest could contribute to wider community wellbeing. A year was spent testing out different possibilities in the forest - such as creative community events and establishing a collaborative relationship with a number of local primary schools to explore the value of young people learning outside. This work, led by Garvagh Development Trust (GDT), a local development trust, with the support of Corrymeela Community, established enough evidence to allow GDT to apply to the Big Lottery for five years funding to grow the project. We were successful in this bid with this new chapter of the story beginning in August 2017.

Garvagh People’s Forest (GPF) has as its mission to grow value in the forest with and for local people with a simple premise: time outside makes us feel better (if warmly dressed lol) and when we feel better we are in a better place to do interesting things for ourselves and with others. We have five strands to the project: 1. Developing a Forest School - This is being done in collaboration with six local primary schools and three pre-schools with the ambition of increasing the time young people learn and create outside. The work involves growing the skills and confidence of local educators in the processes of connecting young people to the outdoors.

2. An adult education programme - We organise ‘classes in the forest’, where people with skills give time to share and teach those skills with others. An example is a 5 week course, Unplugged in Garvagh Forest, where participants learn basic woodworking skills using reclaimed wood and making useful household items. A Library of Tools & Forest Resources is developing from this strand of the project.

3. Growing community with imagination - This strand focuses on using the forest for community events that invite people to look at the world around them differently in the medium of the forest. For example, in August 2018, we organised a Time Travel Festival, exploring the layered histories of the Garvagh area through an interactive adventure and challenge from Mesolithic Times to the Future through different sites in the forest.

4. Contributing to greater physical and mental well-being - relating our work five

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indicators of well-being: Notice; Learn; Give; Move; Connect.

5. Reflection, Learning, Evaluation, Community and Advocacy.

Garvagh Forest is already well loved by individual walkers, mountain bikers and families. Garvagh People’s Forest is building on these relationships with an invitation to shift from individual connections to exploring the potential of collaboration between individuals and local groups - sharing if not shifting the sense of ownership and responsibility with the Forest Service, local government and the State. Our dream is that, after the project’s five years, there is a communityled integrated plan for Garvagh Forest – a plan informed by knowledge of how the forest works - its biodiversity, social and commercial interests - and, most importantly, how it is understood, shaped and used by local people through activity contributing to the wider common good.

We have crowd-funded for the purchase of nine copies of Lost Words, by Robert McFarlane and Jackie Morris, for Garvagh Forest schools. All over these islands, there are words disappearing from children’s lives. Words like otter, bramble, acorn, dandelion, bluebell are gone from many dictionaries disconnecting young people from the heritage, history and landscape around them. The loss of words is the loss of a relationship and the loss of the art of noticing and learning from our natural world and understanding our place within it. We hope that, in the period ahead, we can shape our programme of work and activities in the Forest to help with recovery of the words that have been lost to the people around it.

So how does Garvagh People’s Forest fit into the ‘cultural commoning’ movement?

The initial decision that began the project was a small act of creative courage as it was driven by intuition as opposed to any evidence. The intuition was that the forest is a key aspect of shared cultural heritage and well-being and that so much more value could grow from people’s relationship with the forest and the local environment if we worked collectively. The forest offers a difference space and tangible focal point for all kinds of commoning work as well as giving value to the work that is happening across Garvagh. We also firmly believe that the sharing of responsibility and ownership of the forest will be better for people, the environment and the place of Garvagh.

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Hebden Bridge Handmade Parade: Our Big Day Andrew Kim Handmade Parade60 is a company of parade artists, puppeteers, stilt walkers, performers and community organisers based around Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire. The company creates high-impact participatory events.

The first Hebden Bridge Handmade Parade happened in 2008. I had moved to England from the USA in 2006 and my wife and I had started a puppet theatre company called Thingumajig Theatre.61 We had found ourselves performing here and there but with no opportunity to perform locally. At the same time, we met lots of artists who were also looking for a way to share their work in their locality. So I proposed a community parade where local artists created parade art with people from their own community. We found some friends who supported us and helped us raise some money. A local commercial landlord let us use a disused office space and we put the word out.

For our first parade, we offered two weeks of free parade costume workshops and had about 300 costumed participants. Last years, for our 9th annual parade, we had about 1000 participants in our parade. Hebden Bridge has a population of about 5500.

From the beginning, I wanted to do something a little different from other small town carnivals. So I borrowed some rules from the Fremont Solstice Parade,62 which I had worked on in Seattle. The approach of Fremont Solstice Parade resonates with how I understand a cultural commons could work in the world of carnival.

Our rules are that no written words or logos are allowed, and no motorised vehicles. Taking cars and decorated flatbed trucks out of the process makes the event human-sized and allows us to slow it down to a child-friendly walking speed.

Making things human-sized also makes it easier for people to make exciting and impressive costumes. By forbidding written words and logos, we take commerce and advertisement away and it becomes more about the celebration of people and their creativity. We also take away the means to divide people according to

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their everyday groupings. In our parade, you are not representing your school or your church or your social club. Instead you represent the parade section you have chosen. You might be in the section with all the other wolves or the flying pigs or the space aliens. This way, different ages and types of people mix in surprising ways and celebrate together.

We begin each year with a Spark Day. This is an open community meeting where anyone can come and offer ideas of what they would like to see in the parade. This might be about a pressing local issue or a big something they’d like to see walking down the streets.

The lead artists will then take the ideas away and settle on a theme. We will then break down the theme into sections and a different artist will design his/her parade section. Each section will have two or three signature pieces, which the lead artist and assistant artists design, and an easily constructed costumed ensemble, which the community participants will make. Our parades usually have three or four sections with a different lead artist heading up each section.

and put together a women’s dance ensemble and a street theatre group so that we can create as many opportunities as possible for people to participate Over the years, we’ve also welcomed many international guest artists from USA, Denmark, Sweden, Ireland and last year a company from Russia called Cardboardia64 who created a whole section of the parade. These partnerships are excellent opportunities to share skills and approaches for working with communities and audiences. They also add fresh energy and open new ways of seeing the event.

The result is a parade which is mix of community participation and individual creativity with strong, artist-led design. In nine years, the Hebden Bridge Handmade Parade has become a core part of our town’s identity. It’s our big day, when we let our creativity flow, dance down streets with our friends and neighbours, and show the world just how funky our town can be.

When parade participants come to their first open workshop, they see all the parade section designs in parade order, like a storyboard. They decide which sections they want to be a part of and which costumes they’d like to make and then go to the table where the artists and volunteers will help them to make their costumes.

This way of structuring and presenting ideas to participants was inspired by my work with the MayDay Parade63 in Minneapolis. It encourages respect for the imagination of the people who are coming to contribute and enables them to find a part in the common cause of the production. Some people will come and make their costumes in just one 2-hour session but most come to three to six different sessions. Sessions are free but we suggest a donation.

The mix of artist-led design, dedicated volunteer help and involvement of citizens is the bedrock of how our parades are put together. The motivations for each person may be different. But both the idea of making a parade with others and the prospect of adding colour and celebration to a particular place is of interest to everyone. Their sense of common cause is the glue that holds people together.

Having this solid foundation also helps us create additional opportunities for people to get involved.

We have workshops in schools, senior centres and community centres to reach out to people who may not necessarily feel comfortable coming to our workshop space.

We also set up workshops for teens and adults in Samba drumming, stilt walking

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A New Role for the Artist John Fox

Population growth, global warming, scarcity, religious and cyber wars, famine, environmental degradation, nuclear proliferation and refugees, signal emergency.

As our financial and religious frameworks are also collapsing, and our media drives anxiety, depression looms. So how do we celebrate what is worthwhile and gives us peace of mind? Traditionally some artists have offered inspiration. In our consumer culture however, many of us, including artists, are hi-jacked by spectacle, novelty and celebrity, and encouraged to create investment product.

In this unsettling time we must look to process to find the ground rules of a culture, which may be less materially based, but where more people will actively participate and rejoice in moments that are wonderful. A culture where more of us grow and cook our own food, build our own houses, name our children, bury our dead, mark anniversaries, create new ceremonies for rites of passage and devise whatever drama, stories, songs, music, pageants and jokes that enable people to live more creatively.

Dominant fashionable so-called art, currently perpetuated by a small number of cultural gate-keepers, their institutions and their manipulative dealing, needs to be re-colonised as a mode of intuitive knowledge with a vernacular root. (vernacular - any value that is homebred, homemade, neither bought nor sold on the market).

A new role for the artist is called for – the artist as catalyst, hands on facilitator and celebrant who recognises the artist in us all. In a society where re-generation is of the soul and not of economics, the innate creativity of people of every age is liberated through participation and collaboration.

In 1968 Welfare State International (WSI) was born in Bradford proposing An Alternative, an Entertainment and a Way of Life. The sixties were Vietnam, apartheid, Paris protests, the Situationists, art school sit-ins. And then, in the 1980s, there was Thatcher’s destruction of mining communities. We wanted to extract art from the ghettos of theatres and galleries and restore it to participating communities. As our new manifesto states, we still do.

WSI continued to 2006. We trucked on, from street theatre with rough Punch and Judy, Mummers Plays and the Arabian Nights to invent influential prototypes of site specific theatre in landscape, fire-shows, installations, lantern parades and new

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ceremonies for secular rites of passage. We became an Arts Council England RFO (Regularly Funded Organisation) with, in 1999, a £2m Arts Lottery refurbishment of our Old National School in Ulverston, so creating Lanternhouse, a hands on producing venue.

The full story is in Engineers of the Imagination and Eyes on Stalks.65 Briefly, after creating world-wide celebratory mayhem with scores of shows from Poland to Vancouver, mainly outside at festivals, we ended our touring phase with Raising the Titanic on Limehouse Dockside for the London International Festival of Theatre (LIFT) in 1983. This was an allegorical three-act pageant, including lantern boats and a public dance, reflecting Thatcher’s Britain mirrored in the arrogance, class structure and disaster of the Titanic.

Barrow in Furness is where BAE build Trident submarines. Through participatory workshops during1983–90 we created the 60 minute film King Real, Adrian Mitchell’s Cinderella version of King Lear located in a nuclear submarine; a Tattoo for the Town Hall’s 100th anniversary with Queen Victoria on an elephant gun carriage; a Tapestry of Shipyard Tales, with sit-coms, musicals, song cycles, Brechtian documentaries; and Lord Dynamite, an opera about Alfred Nobel. In the final Golden Submarine event Lord Shellbent fails to achieve Armageddon because the Trident sheds are moved by women with their nuclear vacuum cleaner.

Nine miles from Barrow is the market town of Ulverston with a population of 12,000. When our family moved there in 1979 there were 44 empty shops. Now, following cultural regeneration, much of it generated by our lantern parades, flag fortnights and a comedy festival, it thrives as “The Festivals Town.”

We started the first lantern parade in September 1983. Now it is an annual event when hundreds process in four rivers of light with their large sculptural candlelit lanterns made at home from willow and tissue paper. The skills are in the hands of the community. The quality totally professional. In an entirely non-commercial celebration of place, family and community, the event has become for some a moment of excess and a secular rite of passage. Now extensively copied world-wide, it was originally inspired by a Buddhist/Shinto procession experienced by WSI in Japan in 1982 - a Japanese blessing, a cross between entertainment and a way of life, between spectacle and a significant rite.

Lanternhouse, our customized sanctuary in Ulverston, gave us the space to research such cross-overs and write manuals on secular rites of passage ceremonies for funerals and baby namings. WSI’s last show, created from stories, photographs,

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songs and poems, gathered over two years, with hundreds of people who live and work around Morecambe Bay, was Longline, the Carnival Opera (2006), an accessible community performance. In her 4 star review in the Guardian Lyn Gardner wrote: “Longline is about what we have all lost and in its quietly moving, highly ritualized second half how we might retrieve it”.

By 2006 Sue Gill and I felt that spectacle had been hijacked by tourism and entertainment industries and the edge for art had moved to ecology, perception and a creative life. So we handed over Lanternhouse and its grant to another company (defunct since 2009) and started Dead Good Guides.

We are now creating Wildernest a half acre strip on the west foreshore of Morecambe Bay. In a liminal zone between land and sea, this devotional secular space is for people to connect with themselves and with the elements. The iconography of image based art works of Icons for an Unknown Faith - poster poems, whirly-gigs and weather vanes - includes mythological, scientific and historical stories. A 100 metre land art installation in longship form provides an open access garden next to Natural England’s proposed coastal path. Wildernest will be a joyous enclave to celebrate the spiritual in the everyday.

Creative Citizens Together - Building Hope in Local Communities Robin Simpson

The world is changing. The certainties we have been used to are shifting and, for many of us, this feels deeply unsettling. The UK referendum on EU membership in June 2016 revealed deep divisions between and within communities across the UK. Writing in The Guardian on 11 November 2017, Jonathan Freedland suggested that the leave vote was: “a cry of pain from industrial towns abandoned and left derelict, with few or bad jobs, stagnant wages and crumbling public services. They felt forgotten by the political establishment in London, and grabbed the first chance they had to make themselves heard.”66 Disillusionment with traditional politics is widespread and growing, particularly locally. There is an increasing feeling of disconnection between large parts of the population and those in power - a vicious circle of disenfranchisement that denies many a voice in decisions that make a real difference to their lives. In addition we are an ageing population, working longer, with less leisure time and less disposable income. And while the range of people in our communities becomes ever more diverse, equality of access and opportunity remains an unattainable dream for many. For community cultural activities the funding landscape looks increasingly bleak. Reduced state funding, the move from grants to contracts and an increasing focus on project funding looks unlikely to be reversed.

This is the new normal. But perhaps it is possible to find some ways of responding constructively to these many challenges in new approaches which draw on old traditions. One encouraging feature of the current landscape across the UK and Ireland is the multiplicity of ways in which voluntary arts activity is flourishing in almost every locality. The innovation, dedication, determination and enthusiasm demonstrated by creative citizens, not least in communities where there is little financial investment, is remarkable. New models based on centuries old traditions of collective endeavour and a commoning approach to culture and democracy are surfacing, often in the most unexpected places. And year by year, through Voluntary Arts’ EPIC Awards, some of the many creative and amazingly resourceful culturally creative initiatives that are happening in localities across these islands, come to light and are the focus for celebration.

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Consider, for example, Rotherham Ethnic Minority Alliance,67 which set out in 2016 to counteract the negative perceptions of the town through an inclusive, creative project entitled Love is Louder.68 This initiative involved working with people from all across the borough, and engaging with over 75 different organisations, to challenge intolerance and division through cultural creativity.

Love is Louder initially used arts as a vehicle for engagement to create influential pieces that could be used as educational tools. The work focused on people with ‘protected characteristics’ including race, religion or belief, disability and sexual orientation. An ‘artbomb’ process saw thousands of handmade textile pieces made by hundreds of people cooperating to form installations in the town centre, bringing together all sorts of groups within the community to create colour and positivity. A crowd of over 90 people were involved in spraying hoardings to create a piece of community art. A Festival of Angels project involved hundreds of people creating interpretations of angels, which were displayed throughout the borough for the winter period as means of creativity, innovation and positivity to the area.

Rotherham Ethnic Minority Alliance told Voluntary Arts: “Rotherham has been hit by negative press and high numbers of far right marches which has seen a large disconnect in communities and high incidents of hate. We wanted to challenge this creatively and develop something that everyone could be involved in and bring some positivity back to the town.”

In Glasgow the volunteer-led RE-Tune Project69 offers people with mental health difficulties the chance to make, and then play, their own stringed instrument. Based in a former boys’ home near Easterhouse in Glasgow, RE-Tune is the brainchild of David McHarg, a social worker for almost 20 years who became disillusioned with the effectiveness of his profession. After re-training in woodwork and ‘luthiery’ (the craft of building and repairing stringed instruments), he set up the RE-Tune Project in 2014 in a bid to help those suffering from mental health difficulties, experiencing isolation and loneliness – and in particular, ex-service personnel suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.

“We use anything and everything to make guitars - broomsticks, cigar boxes, skateboards,” explained David. “We don’t throw anything away.” Over a series of months, participants learn how to renovate disused tools which they then use to repair donated guitars back to their former glory. Those taking part have found that focussing on the discipline of daily tasks has led to a full, busy learning day that stimulates the desire to keep attending, and then seek out further education within the fine woodworking field and move on with their personal development. Various

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local and wider agencies have referred people to the project, including ex-services, NHS mental health and craft institutions.

What these and other examples suggest is that creative cultural activity can help to sustain our hearts and minds and crucially do so in difficult times. Hope, like many of our states of mind, can be lost. Returning to hopefulness is not as simple as picking up a paint brush or singing a song - its far more complex than that. But the journey towards a more hopeful state of mind can be enabled by engaging in the creative things you love to do especially with people you trust and who support you.

Getting involved in a common cause, in which your voice is valued and heard, also helps to foster a sense of hope and is the kind of civic participation that forms the bedrock of a healthy democracy. Here too creative citizens are active together.

In response to city proposals to demolish the Churchill Way Flyover (two elevated roads in Liverpool City Centre) three friends proposed the idea that the flyover could be transformed into a unique urban park and venue and began the Friends of the Flyover project.70 They felt that for less than the estimated £3-4 million costs of demolition the city could have something amazing in return that added a special public space for the city, its residents and visitors. Their proposition to local people was to help them build it, plant it and shape it: “We are very excited to have planning permission for our first phase of occupation on site! Sited beneath the Flyover, Urban Workbench, will give local people the opportunity to get involved in learning skills of making and construction. Central to this will be WikiHouse, a flatpack, digitally-cut house, designed for self-build. This project will give local people the opportunity to build objects for The Flyover, for themselves and for their own neighbourhoods. If you want to know more, you can find us during any Flyover Takeover event, drop us a line or meet us for a coffee!”

In Ireland The Hermit Collective is a poetry, music, art, craft and puppet ensemble which started in protest against the killing off of rural Ireland. Frustrated with a lack of support for artists - both amateur and professional - in their towns, the collective formed with the intention of uniting and energising the local arts scene. Its approach is to bring the arts out to audiences, not just keeping them inside galleries or in rather distant cities. ”The Epic Award has meant so much to us, as verification that what we are doing isn’t pointless or simply amusing ourselves; it tells people that it is important to keep our communities active. That being creative is something that’s valuable. Our group is made up of about 40 people from all sorts of backgrounds, but living in the rural northwest of Ireland where opportunities for

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cultural exchange are scarce, and we bring a feeling of togetherness to our areas.”

By recognising, valuing and understanding the culture people choose to practice themselves, in their own time, at their own expense, we can find new connections between apparently divided communities and offer some much needed hope for a creative, cultural future.

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Prospects

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Over the past few years, Voluntary Arts has been exploring the possibilities inherent in cultural commoning. This voyage of discovery has been thought-provoking and inspiring. As well as learning from the authors in this compilation, there have been opportunities to learn from the wider commons movement across the world. We believe we are now at a point on the learning journey where some potential shifts in creative cultural practice and policy can be posited. Shifts which lean into the challenges we face developing sustainable support systems for creative cultural activity and the even more pressing need for cultural leadership in turbulent and troubling times.

Figure

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LT U R AL U licly Pub ed Art d Fun ientated Or ward to state the

Eve Crearyday Orie tivity ntat e t

the oward d com mon s

Creative Industries Orientated toward the market

In contrast the commons and principles and practices of cultural commoning are creating an alternative narrative - a narrative that revolves around abundance.

People everywhere are participating in the creative cultural activities they love to

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YS T E OS M

At present the process of sustaining the arts in particular and cultural creativity more generally is beset by the push and pull of two seemingly competing forces the market and the state - both, it could be argued, operating within a dominant neoliberal narrative. No doubt in an attempt to make genuine improvements, our creative cultural producers are being asked by the state to help solve increasingly intractable social issues with less and less resources and simultaneously by the market to extract maximum economic profit. This, has led to a culture of scarcity.

Responding to our basic human needs for self-expression and meaning gets lost in the rush to keep the wheels turning.

What if we were to take an ecological approach based on abundance as the starting point from which a transformation of the current paradigm can flow? How would that encourage us to find better ways to sustain our creative cultural life? What would the landscape look like then? The figure below sets out an alternative view.

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The articles published here substantiate the view that culture, in its broadest sense, is a commons, collectively made by the forming, reforming and transforming of the creative expressions we value. The articles also uncover examples of commoning processes being used to sustain distinct creative cultural activities. We can see people pooling knowledge, capabilities and material resources as they come together to make common cause. Despite these examples being diverse in terms of range of activities and geographical location, they clearly run contrary to current mainstream perspectives and practices.

Our current cultural support system, despite our best efforts, has become limited and limiting in several respects. Firstly it refuses to recognise abundance, primarily by ignoring the versions of culture people are making in their everyday lives that often sit outside the narrow definitions of historical art forms. Secondly it runs, for the most part, against the grain of how creative cultural activity is oriented towards an ecological approach with its messy, organic, non-linear way of operating and its high level of interdependency. And thirdly it largely misses the significant contribution of the commons in sustaining cultural life in particular in local places.

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“To believe in abundance is to believe that we have enough” Walter Brueggemann et al (2016) 71

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Kevin Murphy

do as a valuable part of their cultural lives. They participate as individuals and with others, as professional or voluntary creatives and as creative entrepreneurs. Cultural creativity, in all its rich diversity and interconnectedness, can be encountered wherever we look and is endlessly renewable.

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Shifting Culture

What the figure makes clear, first and foremost is that the cultural ecology includes the commons as a third aspect alongside the state and the market. It also says that there are relationships between these aspects and the people and networks active within them. They connect, overlap and depend on each other. The three aspects of the creative cultural ecosystem are distinguishable in broad terms, but they are not separable. They are interacting features within a more cohesive whole and it is in the relationships and commonalities that we are able to see the abundance that’s here. The scarcity of resources that are currently being invested to enable the creative cultural ecosystem is a choice not a condition. But it’s a choice made with a limited view. If we change the view then the choices can be different.

and short-term systems. They also encourage cultural leading by people who are capable of thinking and acting both for individual needs and for the common good; people who are capable of building a bridge between a dominant culture in decline to one that is emerging in response to the transformation needed.

Our Cultural Commons set out to change perceptions and to open out possibilities that are informed by noticing and uncovering the potential that is already there.

We have sought to dig where we stand, turning over the ground to open up new furrows. As a result we are beginning to articulate, with colleagues involved in an open network which has emerged from this work - the Coalition for the Cultural Commons72 - some of the positive shifts of which cultural commoning is suggestive. Shifts that can encourage a different set of choices when it comes to sustaining our shared cultural life more appropriately:

“In the ecological commons a multitude of different individuals and diverse species stand in various relationships to one another - competition and cooperation, partnership and predatory hostility, productivity and destruction. All those relations, however, follow one higher principle: Only behaviour that allows for the productivity of the whole ecosystem over the long term and that does not interrupt its capacities of self-production, will survive and expand. The individual is able to realise itself only if the whole can realise itself. Ecological freedom obeys this basic necessity.”

• From centralised hierarchical governance structures to more distributed ones

Our cultural freedom is relational. It depends upon and draws from lively interconnection with others, meaningful and deep experiences that bind us together as humans. Our ability to exercise this freedom responsibly will depend on how well we relate to others and how well we create and govern together for the common good. What Our Cultural Commons is beginning to reveal is that we have grounds for hope in the present. Our cultural future will always be shared, and therefore we have everything we need today to build it together.

• From rigid, transactional relationships to those that are more collaborative and enabling.

• From fragmented and individualised plans to shared purposes and outcomes.

• From a focus on short-term, project-based activity to developing longer-term cultural ‘assets’.

The future to which this cultural commoning is pointing is a vibrant democracy in which people have the freedom to participate in and shape the cultural life that is best for them and society. This future requires enabling systems that support people in their making of versions of culture. And it also recognises our responsibilities. As Andreas Weber writes:

• From homogenous cultural products to shared cultural processes and experiences as distinctive as the people who make them and the places where they are made.

• From passive acceptance of a damaging status quo - ecological, social, economic - to offering constructive, democratic challenge and speaking truth to power Our Cultural Commons is showing that many creative citizens, organisations, projects and initiatives are already modelling these shifts in diverse contexts. Their actions are potentially transformative and when looked at together are suggestive of a broad movement for change away from our current highly competitive, fragmented

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Notes W H Y C U LT U R A L C O M M O N I N G M AT T E R S

1. Maureen O’Hara & Graham Leicester, Dancing at the Edge – Competence, Culture and Organisation in the 21st Century (2012) 2. See: https://platform.coop/about 3. See: https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/a-commons-transition-plan-for-the-city-ofghent/2017/09/14#section1 4. See: https://barcelonaencomu.cat/ca 5. See: http://www.bollier.org/blog/bologna-laboratory-urban-commoning 6. See: https://fair-coin.org/ C U LT U R A L C O M M O N S A N D S O C I A L W E L L B E I N G

7. See: https://www.jrf.org.uk/report/minimum-income-standard-uk-2016 8. See: https://www.budgeting.ie/ 9. See: http://selfdeterminationtheory.org/ C U LT U R A L C O M M O N I N G A N D C I V I C C O N V E R S AT I O N

10. Clive James, Cultural Amnesia – Notes in the Margin of My Time (2007), p.4 11. As, for example, in the ‘creative place-making’ movement. See: https://www.voluntaryarts.org/creativeplace-making-in-northern-ireland 12. David Bollier, Commoning as a Transformative Social Paradigm (2015). See: https://thenextsystem.org/ commoning-as-a-transformative-social-paradigm 13. Penguin Dictionary of Sociology 14. One example of the effectiveness of facilitated ‘civic conversation’ about cultural creativity is the story of Creative Place-making in Ballyogan. See: https://www.voluntaryarts.org/exit-15-creative-placemakingin-ballyogan 15. ‘Civic conversation’ – people talking, listening and learning together about things that matter to them as citizens - is the term that has come to be applied to such conversational gatherings. The potential of civic conversation for society is considerable. See, for example, this short piece on civic conversation as an aspect of participative democracy: https://imaginebelfast.com/dealing-with-our-dis-ease/ 16. David Fleming, quoted by Jonathan Porritt (2016); see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5MgkZJkVPk 17. Graham Leicester, Practical Hope and Wise Initiative (2012). See: http://www.internationalfuturesforum. com/u/cms/Practical_Hope_and_Wise_Initiative_AMED_Journal.pdf 18. David Fleming, Surviving the Future (2016), p.3 PA R K S A S C O M M O N S

19. See: http://www.everydayparticipation.org/ . Funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council 20. Abigail Gilmore, The Park and the Commons – Vernacular Spaces for Everyday Participation and Cultural Value (2017) 21. Peter Linebaugh, Stop, Thief! : The Commons, Enclosures, And Resistance (2014)

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22. J. Clifford, Museums as Contact Zones, in J. Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (1997); K Askins & R Pain, Contact Zones: Participation, Materiality, and the Messiness of Interaction’ Environment and Planning, in Society and Space (2011) 23. A Smith,‘Borrowing’ Public Space to Stage Major Events: The Greenwich Park Controversy (2014) 24. Heritage Lottery Fund, State of the UK Public Parks II procurement document (2016) 25. A Gilmore & P Doyle, The history of public parks as cultural policies for everyday participation, in L Gibson & E Belfiore (eds), Culture and Power: Histories of participation, values and governance (2018); A Howkins, The Commons, Enclosure and Radical Histories, in D Feldman & L Hyde, Common as Air: Revolution, Art and Ownership (2012)

W H AT D O E S C U LT U R A L D E M O C R ACY M E A N ?

46. Editors’ note: It is interesting to read this article alongside the King’s College London report, Towards cultural democracy: Promoting cultural capabilities for everyone (2017). The King’s report introduces the concept of ‘cultural capability’ as core to cultural democracy. This capability is seen as extending beyond the freedom to experience publicly-funded arts to “the substantive freedom to co-create versions of culture”. See: https://www.voluntaryarts.org/towards-cultural-democracy M I N D F U L N E S S A N D T H E C O N T E M P L AT I V E C O M M O N S

26. T Elsborough, A Walk in the Park (2016)

47. Andreas Weber, The Biology of Wonder – Aliveness, Feeling and the Metamorphosis of Science (2016)

27. H Rees Leahy, Museum Bodies: The Politics and Practices of Visiting and Viewing (2013)

48. See: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/jan/02/1

T H E P E O P L E ’ S PA R I S H – S I N G I N G O U R OW N S O N G

49. See: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/ron-purser/beyond-mcmindfulness_b_3519289. html?guccounter=1

28. Z Ferguson, Kinder Communities: The Power of Everyday Relationships (Carnegie UK Trust, 2016) hypothesises that “everyday relationships and kindness are prerequisites for other types of community activity” and “a broader sense of social capital”.

29. Ibid, p.18 30. The phrase is Steve Byrne’s via Sven Lindqvist: http://digwhereyoustand.blogspot.com/ 31. Georges Henri Rivière, La Muséologie selon Georges Henri Rivière (1989), p.142 32. H Graham, R Mason & A Newman, Literature review: historic environment, sense of place, and social capital (2009) 33. Henry Glassie, Passing the Time in Ballymenone (1982), p.25 C U LT U R A L C O M M O N S : W H O PAY S A N D W H O B E N E F I T S ?

34. Kevin Murphy and Denis Stewart, Why Cultural Commoning Matters (2017): https://www.voluntaryarts.org/why-cultural-commoning-matters

50. See: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/looking-awry H OW L RO U N D - A C A S E S TO R Y I N C U LT U R A L C O M M O N I N G

51. D Bollier & S Helfrich (eds), Patterns of Commoning (2015) 52. See: https://www.worldtheatremap.org/en 53. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zelda_Fichandler 54. See: https://howlround.com/latinx-theatre-commons 55. See: http://www.bollier.org/blog/silke-helfrich-explains-origins-patterns-commoning 5 R I G H T S A N D T H E P OW E R O F R E A L - L I F E G AT H E R I N G

56. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_on_the_Rights_of_the_Child and: https://www.unicef. org/rightsite/files/uncrcchilldfriendlylanguage.pdf

35. Margaret Bolton and Niamh Goggin, Socially Investing in the Arts, (2016): http://www.buildingchangetrust.org/download/files/SociallyInvestingInArtsFinal%281%29.pdf

C A R D B OA R D I A - F O R M I N G N E W C O M M U N I T I E S

36. See: https://www.theguardian.com/culture-professionals-network/2015/jan/12/artists-low-incomeinternational-issues

57. Andrew Kim, Hebden Bridge Handmade Parade – Our Big Day (2018): https://www.voluntaryarts.org/hebden-bridge-handmade-parade

37. See: https://www.musiciansunion.org.uk/Files/Reports/Industry/The-Working-Musician-report 38. See: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/celebritynews/11550871/Just-one-in-ten-authors-can-earn-fulltime-living-from-writing-report-finds.html

G A R VAG H P E O P L E ’ S F O R E S T – C O M M O N I N G P R ACT I C E

39. See: http://www.creativetrust.ca/about/

59. See: http://www.clanmcshane.org/TheMacShanes.PDF

‘ C U LT U R E BA N K E D ® ’ - O U R D I G I TA L C O M M O N S ?

H E B D E N B R I D G E H A N D M A D E PA R A D E : O U R B I G DAY

40. See: https://www.culturebankwollongong.org.au/

60. See: http://handmadeparade.co.uk/

41. See: https://detroitsoup.com/

61. See: http://thingumajig.info/about-us/

42. See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potlatch

62. See: https://fremontartscouncil.org/

43. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_contract

63. See: https://hobt.org/

44. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain

64. Daria Stenina, Cardboardia – Forming New Communities (2017): https://www.voluntaryarts.org/ cardboardia-forming-new-communities

45. See: https://holochain.org/

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58. Irish Woods Since Tudor Times (1971)

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M A N I F E S TO : A N E W RO L E F O R T H E A R T I S T

65. T Coult and B Kershaw (Editors), Engineers of the Imagination – Welfare State Handbook (1983); and John Fox, Eyes on Stalks (2002) C R E AT I V E C I T I Z E N S TO G E T H E R - B U I L D I N G H O P E I N L O C A L C O M M U N I T I E S

66. See: https://www.theguardian.com/global/commentisfree/2017/nov/10/never-stop-brexit-trumpaddress-anger-impeachment-second-referendum 67. See: http://www.rema-online.org.uk/ 68. See: https://www.facebook.com/LoveisLouderRotherham/ 69. See: https://www.facebook.com/theretuneproject/ 70. See: http://friendsoftheflyover.org.uk/ S H I F T I N G C U LT U R E

71. Peter Block, Walter Brueggemann, John McKnight, An Other Kingdom - Departing the Consumer Culture (2016) 72. See: https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Coalition_for_the_Cultural_Commons

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Authors

the Scottish Arts Council. He joined Regional Screen Scotland as part-time CEO in July 2015.

a capitalisation strategy for arts organisations in Northern Ireland.

Tom Jones David Bryan

David Francis

David is the Chair of the Board of Trustees of Voluntary Arts and is Director of Xtend UK Ltd, a management consultancy working in organisational change, leadership development and diversity.

David is a musician and dance caller, with wide experience of traditional music in Scotland. He is part of the management team at TRACS and has been involved in the Traditional Music Forum since it started as an ad hoc advisory group for the old Scottish Arts Council.

Dr Peter Doran Peter is a lecturer in sustainable development and governance at the School of Law, Queens University Belfast. His book, A Political Economy of Attention, Mindfulness and Consumerism: Reclaiming the Mindful Commons, was published by Routledge in June 2017.

Jamie Gahlon Jamie Gahlon is a cultural organiser, producer, and theatre-maker. She is the Senior Creative Producer and a CoFounder of HowlRound, a knowledge commons created by and for the theatre community based at Emerson College in Boston.

Karin Eyben Karin is Development Lead for the Garvagh People’s Forest Project. Prior to that, she was Multidisciplinary Programme Worker with the Corrymeela Community in Northern Ireland.

Dr Abigail Gilmore Abigail is Senior Lecturer in Arts Management and Cultural Policy and Head of the Institute for Cultural Practices at University of Manchester, leading postgraduate programmes in these interdisciplinary subject areas.

John Fox MBE John has a world-wide reputation for creating celebratory participatory art with communities. Artist, printmaker, published poet, film-maker, lecturer, cultural provocateur and occasional musician, he founded Welfare State International (1968-2006) with Sue Gill and others.

Niamh Goggin Niamh has worked in social enterprise and community economic development in the UK, Central America and Europe.

She currently works with Big Local, is Expert Advisor to Barclays Credit Union Support Programme, and is developing

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Kevin Murphy

Following forty-years employment in adult, access, further, higher and post-graduate education in Art and Design, Tom is now on his second, largely voluntary career devising and organising arts activities with citizens in Birmingham.

A musician, cultural leader and creative citizen Kevin has worked on cultural projects for over 30 years. His early professional life was as a musician in London before moving back to Northern Ireland and embarking on a series of leadership roles in arts organisations and networks. He has been the Chief Officer of Voluntary Arts Ireland since 2010.

Baroness Beeban Kidron OBE Beeban is a British filmmaker best known for directing Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004) and the Baftawinning miniseries Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1989), adapted from the Jeannette Winterson novel. In 2006, she founded FILMCLUB with journalist and film critic Lindsay Mackie.

Dr Mairi McFadyen A creative ethnologist, writer, researcher and teacher at the University of Edinburgh, Mairi’s interests centre on the role and value of the traditional arts of music, song and storytelling. She has worked with TRACS in a freelance capacity since 2012.

Andrew Kim As Handmade Parade founder and artistic director, Andrew has created puppet and mask plays, parades and pageants for over 25 years. He is the codirector of Thingumajig Theatre which creates and tours puppet plays and interactive giant puppets.

Liam Murphy Liam Murphy is a Civic Entrepreneur and Writer who has worked as a gardener, picture framer, artist, book seller - and run an art gallery in Great Yarmouth! He’s currently transferring his LTD company into a shared art and framing workshop using common stock and facilities and writing a book about the cultural industries.

Robert Livingstone Robert has been actively engaged across the arts and across Scotland for many years, working for organisations such as BBC Scotland, Dundee Rep, the Third Eye Centre, the Crawford Centre for the Arts, Edinburgh Printmakers, and

Dr Nat O’Connor Nat is currently Political Director for the Labour Party in Ireland. Prior to that,

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he worked with the independent Irish think-tank, Towards a Flourishing Society (TASC), in various roles, followed by several years as a Lecturer in Public Policy and Public Management at Ulster University.

created in cardboard that we were unsure which one she would prefer to be known as. She was last seen working as Project Manager of Cardboardia….. we would love to know more….. answers on a postcard please.

Robin Simpson

Dr Denis Stewart

Robin is Chief Executive of Voluntary Arts. Before joining Voluntary Arts in 2005, he was Deputy Chief Executive of Making Music – the national umbrella body for amateur music making, supporting over 2,000 amateur music groups throughout the UK, including choirs, orchestras, and music promoters.

Denis has been Voluntary Arts Ireland Chair and a Trustee of Voluntary Arts since January 2015. An active member of the International Futures Forum, he is currently in his ‘post-professional’ stage of life, pursuing his interests in ‘life-wide’ learning and connecting with other people.

POS TCRI PT There is always an extraordinary debt of gratitude owed to those who have been prepared to join you on a journey of discovery and in a creative act. The shared commitment to seek the truth of an idea is something very rare. Our Cultural Commons has not only been a significant part of my working life over the past few years, but a passion which went well beyond the work day, shifting and expanding my perspective irrevocably.

So this is somewhat of a quiet personal thanks to all of these brilliant folk who have contributed here, to those in the wider commons movement who have sought to encourage me, my ever supportive family and in particular to my co-conspirators Robin, Damien and Denis. There are no words that can sufficiently describe my admiration and thanks....other than lets continue on this path together.

Kevin Murphy

Daria Stenina The wonderfully elusive Daria, the Scarlet Pimpernel of Cardboardia. She has so many personas

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www.voluntaryarts.org

FUNDER S Voluntary Arts acknowledges funding from Arts Council England, Arts Council of Northern Ireland, Creative Scotland and Arts Council of Wales

Illustrations by Hollie Leddy Flood. Design by Mark Willett.

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