Nurturing Ecologies: Peer-to-peer Knowledge Exchange through Collective Practice

a publication by RESOLVE Collective

Burnt out in 2021, we decided to sharpen the tools of our practice and turn them inward, toward building long-term, radical infrastructure for the communities we support. This work involved organisational and strategic shifts that took us to new realms of possibility, entangled between dreams and aspirations. It forged new pathways that looked past the immediacy of our traditional projects to the sustenance of worldbuilding.

Nurturing Ecologies is one of those pathways and the residency we held in Sheffield in 2023 represents a mobilisation of that dreamspace. It was a programme of peer-to-peer learning and knowledge exchange that gathered Black, POC and marginalised group-led creative practices and tested, drafted, and rehearsed our regenerative futures. This document recounts the week of activity: it reflects on the knowledge exchanged, shares the tools we used, and explores the infrastructure required to nurture our ecologies of practice.

How Did We Get 0.

Here?

An Introduction to Nurturing Ecologies p.6

To Turn Our Tools Inwards

p.12

How Did We Get Here?

p.18

Programme for the Week

How Did We Get Here? p.22

1. Translocal Sheffield

'What if Our Green City Was a Black Utopia?’

by Evie Muir

p.24

Walking Sheffield’s Black Radical History with Mark Hutchinson

p.26

Queer Black Arts & Practice in the North with Pacheanne Anderson

p.28

'Recipes for Healing’ Natural Remedies Walkshop with Peaks of Colour & Shaheen Kasmani

p.30

SADACCA Shorts with White Teeth

How Did We Get Here? p. p.34

2. How We Document

Documentation Gang with Jashan, Nate, Nathaniel, Halima, Grace and RESOLVE

p.42

Show + Tell with Nate Agbetu

p.44

Archiving Under a Surveillance State with Ella Barrett

p.46

Image Sequencing with Nathanial Télémaque

How Did We Get Here? 3. Sustenance through Joy p.50

After-Hours

p.52

'Boyz n the Hood’ Screening with Amahra Spence

p.53

'Sacred Breath’ Guided Meditation with Amber Caldwell

p.53

'Attack the Block’ Screening & Discussion with POoR Collective

p.54

Open Deck with Ashley Holmes

p.55

'The Inheritance’ Screening & Revolutionary Reading Group with Rosa-Johan Uddoh & Louis Brown

How Did We Get Here? 4. Black Infrastructions p.58

_DRAFT DAY_p1_v1 with RESOLVE Collective

p.62

Collective Build with RESOLVE Collective

p.66

Next Steps

d We Get Here?

5. The Collective

p.74

Contributions

p.76

[B]acknowledgements

p.78

Curated Images

Ecologies of Practice In the recordings for the Sheffield Black Radical Walk, the late historian and schoolteacher Mark Hutchinson recalls the life of community leader and British Black Panthers member Olive Morris and her relationship with the city. Hutchinson, who left his indelible mark on Sheffield celebrating the historic importance of Black life in the city, tells us in his characteristically soft but instructive tone that Morris saw Sheffield as a place of temporary relief. It was where her then partner, activist Michael McColgan, lived and lectured. Despite the critical anti-racist and anti-fascist work ongoing in Sheffield at the time, of which she was not involved but proximate to through McColgan, the city gave her distance from her radical work in Brixton in London and Moss Side in Manchester.

"Sheffield",” remarks Hutchinson, "afforded her the time and space to rest, reflect, and then recharge her batteries to continue the work…".

Without history's invaluable aidememoires it is easy to condemn ourselves to social justice and community-building as necessarily self-destructive endeavours.

Morris’ sojourns in Sheffield in the 70’s, and Hutchinson’s elucidations of them, remind those of us in adjacent fields today that 'place’ is not only a setting for our labour. Respite has always been a resource and breathing space an infrastructure. Particularly for socially-engaged creative practitioners across the UK today, whose work often strikes a precarious balance between advocacy, organising, and artistic expression, 6

relationships to place and within places are inextricable from practice.

We are unambiguously reliant on what activist and philosopher Grace Lee Boggs described as “the "invisible fabric of our connectedness".

This connectedness exists no more so than between practitioners, where our practices are informally nurtured, supported, and facilitated by the localised practices of others, whether in shared spaces of production, larger social milieus, or professional networks across a city and region.

Creative practitioner connection is the bedrock for what we at RESOLVE Collective describe as an 'ecology of practice’: a place-based network of community focused practitioners, organisations, resources, and spaces. Not always synonymous with collaboration or even cooperation, these ecologies are fundamentally aligned by their interdependence. It is this essential reliance that creates space and grows sporous possibility from the cracks of formal professional spheres.

An attunement to places and their ecologies in our practice with RESOLVE Collective drove us to turn our design tools inwards and create moments of introspection in our project work. Whether in the spaces we create or the programmes we facilitate, these moments mobilise creative practitioners at a level of intensity that earnestly departs from the confines of professional congress; the ephemerality of talks, the rigidity of symposiums, or the responsibility of collaboration. They recognise that a place and its ecologies of practice can also mean for others what Sheffield meant for Olive Morris in its capacity not just to hold our productivity but our intimate reflexivity and joyous assembly.

For practices like ours, whose financial model is predicated on delivery, it is in these moments that we are able to cherish what binds us to others rather than celebrate and value each other’s outputs alone. By bringing together creative thinkers, practical dreamers, space makers and system designers and situating their practices within the socio-political landscapes of various locales we are able to constantly define what an ecology of practice can be and nurture collective development through processes of knowledge exchange.

This is the draftwork not of collaboration but coconspiracy: early meditations of a trans-local approach to building planetary, liberatory frameworks.

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A Residency in Sheffield This approach became Nurturing Ecologies, a worldview and rationale that centres the carework and infrastructure required for supporting placebased ecologies of practice. This thinking is part of a fluid cannon of thought, championed by numerous contemporaries in the field, that is concerned with reimaginings and rehearsals of alternative futures rooted in the knowledges, experiences, and needs of groups who are, often violently, marginalised by the current global arrangements of power.

Nurturing Ecologies is an attempt at a continuous redrawing of our foundations. It is, to cite Healing Justice London founder Farzana Khan, 'Black insurgent pencil-work’ in the sense that it is the act of drafting and rehearsing a dis-ordering of dominant power structures. As such, part of the first actions of Nurturing Ecologies has been the development and delivery of a week-long residency in Sheffield, funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, that brought together Black, POC and marginalised group-led organisations who champion radical approaches to community world-building through creative practice.

The city of Sheffield was integral to the residency. Far from the backdrop of our activities, Sheffield was a constituent part of the programme and, not unlike its relevance for Olive Morris, we positioned the residency in solidarity with and proximity to the city’s legacies of activism, its current socio-political landscape, and its local organisational networks.

Despite the aim of our time there not being to engage in direct action, we felt that the core principles of a support structure for community-focused participants, especially with a significant number of participants working in Sheffield, could not overlook the immediate support needs of the place in which it is situated. In this respect, it differed drastically from a research trip or other forms of collective situated practice that express ethical alignment yet maintain critical distance. Our time there sought to learn from, celebrate, and catalyse the 'local’. Numerous sessions took Sheffield as their conceptual point of departure, such as Mark Hutchinson’s Sheffield Black Radical Walk and Ella Barrett’s Archiving Under A Surveillance State, and others used the residency to test ideas that would soon find a citywide resonance, such as White Teeth’s SADACCA Shorts exhibition which opened in October 2023.

Though we hosted the residency and were responsible for the safeguarding, transportation, accommodation, and payment of participants and partnering organisations, the programme itself was delivered by its participants in adherence to a peer-to-peer pedagogical approach. This took the form of workshops, groundings, panel discussions, walks, film screenings, idea prototyping, listening sessions, meditations, and exhibitions.

Themes and topics ranged from inherited remedial knowledge, in a sharing session hosted by curator/producer Shaheen Kasmani and Peaks of Colour founder Evie Muir, to queer Black arts practices in the North of England, in a panel discussion held by curator and gallerist Pacheanne Anderson

in conversation with Jesualdo A. Lopes of Leeds/Lisbon-based outfit The Blacker The Berry, Sheffield-based visual anthropologist Wemmy Ogunyankin, and Sheffield-based DJ and Calabash founder, DJ MYNA. Each session showcased the expertise of practitioners whilst prioritising experimentation and radical imagining; it was an opportunity to test new ideas, socialise provocations, and develop existing bodies of work.

Activities were held in spaces of critical social importance across the city: SADACCA, the Sheffield And District African Caribbean Community Association on the Wicker; Mondo Radio, a community radio station and DIY event space in Smithfield; Gut Level, a queer-led DIY event space on Eyre Street; Abbeydale Picturehouse, a Grade II listed 1920’s cinema on Abbeydale Road now stewarded by the grassroots Sheffield arts charity CADS; and Bloc Projects, a contemporary arts organisation in the city centre. Importantly, just as the city nurtured our practices, it also nourished our bodies with Ethiopian and Eritrean feasts at Frehiwet Habesha, Napolitan revelry at North Town Deli & Kitchen, and Caribbeaninfused Yorkshire pies by Rob Cotterell’s Trelawny Hotpots. All of these spaces situated us, with partner organisations grounding our thought in the context of the city’s socio-political landscape and with the convivial venues keeping us viscerally in its everyday experiences, quite literally at gut level.

Our communing spaces became provision grounds, distinct from spaces of artistic production or even personal creative consumption; they were where conversations leaked, where comradery was consolidated, and, to evoke the verse of poet and Caribbean Artist Movement co-founder Edward Kamau Brathwaite, sacred plots where we would plot.

In order to capture these situated knowledge exchanges, the documentation of the residency was governed by its peer-to-peer approach. Following this doctrine, a group of frankly inspirational participants, Nathaniel Télémaque, Nate Agbetu, Halima Ali, Jashan Walton, and Grace Lee took on the moniker, 'Documentation Gang’, and took on the task of recording the week’s activities. Their aim was to take ownership over the narrative, allowing the collective creativity and expression of the participants to shape how the residency’s impact will be evaluated. The static or moving image as the sole artefact of impact evaluation is challenged in their approach, which also includes the use of interview recording, scrapbookmaking, collective lexicon creation (often signalled by a participant crying out the phrase "combinayshun!"), and live illustration. Their archive creation work is exemplified throughout this document.

On How We Gather The end of the residency marked the beginning of a period of evaluation and appraisal. During the week in Sheffield, together we created times and spaces for participants to sit with the inherent connectedness of their extant practice ecologies, affording to idle connection the ceremony of professional development. In the coming weeks and months, the onus will now be on how we gather and configure these experiences in ways that are both true to power and that speak truth to power; making the argument to funding bodies, to supporting organisations, and to other ecologies as to why this communing cannot be left to become an aberration.

The following pages are the preface of that process. In them you will find the collective joy of a room full of zealots gleefully indulging in both Amahra Spence’s screening of Boyz N The Hood and Rosa-Johan Uddoh and Louis Brown’s screening of Ephraim Asili’s The Inheritance on the same day. You will read and almost hear Deborah Yewande Bankole’s roofraising oratory, Akeelah Bertram’s breathtaking resilience, and the spell of Ashley Holmes’ musical arrangements. You will feel the deep breaths of bodies in the sweltering heat of the poolside, guided through meditation

by Amber Caldwell. And you will uncover a voice that speaks of this to others as Andre Anderson crafts radical thought out of the hollows of ordinary conversation.

This text is dedicated to Mark Hutchinson, October 1960 - September 2023.

Lead orchestrators, Seth ScafeSmith and Jana Dardouk, share the background narrative of Nurturing Ecologies, covering key moments in the lead up to the residency, from its conception to the team’s first moments on the ground.

JD: To RESOLVE, Sheffield is more than just a familiar setting from past projects. It holds family history for you and Akil, it was a second home for me whilst studying there, it is the conceptual birthplace for Nurturing Ecologies and where we met for the first time.

All these interconnections create a strong foundation for future endeavours and revisiting Sheffield naturally reinforces that, but why was it crucial that Sheffield was the host city for the pilot programme of this framework?

SSS: The personal relationship we hold with Sheffield is a beautiful coincidence that strengthens our bond with the city but the reason we held Nurturing Ecologies there was more intentional.

In 2019, we were invited for our first residency and exhibition at S1 Artspace in Park Hill Estate, Sheffield - an opportunity that came through curator Kerry Campbell and the team at Bloc Projects.

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Our project,‘The Garage, was instrumental to the development of our practice. It allowed us to test methodologies in an unfamiliar context, centre material narratives, ecologies of practice, and creative infrastructure, and refine RESOLVE Collective into a form recognisable today. Through the tireless work of curator Laura Clarke (now Head of Programme at Site Gallery), studio manager Katie Matthews (cofounder of Sheffield-based queerled DIY collective, Gut Level), and the rest of the amazing team at S1, we entered into a dialogue with Sheffield and its communities, historic and contemporary, and built a programme embroiled in the resultant joy and contestation.

A thread of the Nurturing Ecologies residency was to ask "what infrastructures are necessary to continue to support an ecology of practitioners who champion radical approaches to community world building?" So, to us, it made sense to test that idea in a city that played such a significant role in our organisational journey and practice methodology.

JD: A lot has happened since then, multiple projects across scales and continents, but our aim to work with and for communities remains consistent. Whether working with local groups or maintaining relationships with the collaborators in our ecology , there’s always an alignment with our core value of platforming local knowledge.

However, there has been a significant change in the size and structure of our organisation to deliver against these aspirations.

How did we make this shift?

SSS: This question about structure is an important one, particularly within conversations around 'rehearsal’ in our field (shout outs to community-led health organisation, Healing Justice London, blazing a powerful trail with Rehearsing Freedoms Festival 2023).

We’re often too quick to spotlight the final performance without accounting for the years of rehearsal necessary to get to this point, and thus the structures needed to get us to the stage.

One afternoon in 2021, during our residency with our kin MAIA, an artist-led social justice organisation, at their YARD Art House in Birmingham, we sat round the kitchen table with CIVIC Square director and co-founder Immy Kaur and she walked us through possibilities for building and delivering long-term strategies that support our communities and our planet. Rather than Newton’s apple, this conversation was more like the colourful arrows on the track of a Mario Kart circuit, accelerating the concept of RESOLVE Studios, the charitable arm of our organisation that we have now set up.

Photo by Becky Payne Photo by Vishnu Jayarajan

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As our strategy developed, we lent on our propensity to deliver projects in order to test wider ideas and scoped a series of pilot projects that would mobilise our strategic areas. During this phase, funders 30 Percy, Paul Hamlyn Foundation and The National Lottery committed resources to support our continued development.

Along the journey, the Nurturing Ecologies residency became the pilot project. In spite of this most recent and incredibly significant milestone, we’re still rehearsing.

The structures in place aren’t permanent, nor is the shape of the ecology. To build infrastructure, this time in the lab is crucial.

I’m conscious I’ve completely sailed past Nurturing Ecologies as a concept. Do you want to talk to that and how you’ve come to understand its relationship with our work and its future capacities?

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JD: Over time, my understanding of this term continues to be 'chopped and screwed’ as it moves from a concept to a project title and now to a framework. It’s rooted in an awareness of the network of spaces, communities, organisations and practitioners that we work within - the ecology - and the need to strengthen existing bonds, whilst also making space for new ones, in order to perpetuate our collective radical imagining.

The residency was an opportunity to create a particular modality of nurturing, one that propagated direct methods of knowledge exchange, but the goal is to work like this on an infrastructural and systemic level. What we have been practising and will continue to rehearse is a collective approach to world-building that can only be realised through collaboration.

Of course, that is a life commitment, not something that can be accomplished overnight or even in a week, but we did get a taste for how we might start to actualise our intentions through the residency.

How do you feel the framework came through in the programme and why was a residency an important pilot format?

SSS: When we refer to 'nurturing’ here we’re particularly interested in interconnectedness and, like you said, we wanted to facilitate direct ways in which knowledge could be exchanged to build a platform for collective and individual development. By emphasising this as a peer-to-peer activity we are building ways of valuing our respective practices: to both the participants across the projects and the wider folks impacted by our work.

In many ways this is an essential component of RESOLVE Collective and speaks to the way we’ve worked since conception, but the exact structure of the week started to take shape as we reflected on a previous project with University College London’s Development Planning Unit, SADACCA and Gut Level in 2022.

Recognising the value in learning from one another, we began to critique the role institutions (or larger organisational bodies) play in choreographing such opportunities.

Removing this opens up an essential space not only to imagine possibilities and test ideas but, crucially, to reframe the time and resources necessary to do so. So, whilst the programme we built reflects the foundational principles of RESOLVE it also presents a more recent desire to centre our collective practice and complementary knowledges in a framework for peer-to-peer learning.

The residency-cum-retreat format was an excuse to bring people together to share, test and build something collectively.

However, tracing the fault lines of format involved some heavy lifting; shifting between event organiser, project manager, curator, and everything in between. As someone who moved between all of the above, how did the form of the 'residency’ take shape? What were key steps taken to organise on this premise and what contributed to its success?

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JD: Step one was listing the organisations, practitioners, and friends who were to become an ecological microcosm for the week - I would say this was the key to its success. We wanted to share this space with world-building giants, platforming those whose work continues to influence our own like MAIA, Civic Square, Freedom & Balance, Healing Justice London, Peaks of Colour, and SKIN DEEP, to name a few. It’s hard to put into words how beautifully balanced this group of people were, it felt like we were all innately connected even those meeting physically for the first time - because of our shared values and crossovers in practice. Emphasising that this would be a safe and stimulating environment for discovery, experimentation, and testing in a way that isn’t usually afforded to these practitioners, we invited participants to contribute an activity to the programme which they would ultimately deliver. From this we uncovered threads and curated new alliances that would then determine the structure and tone of the week.

Underlying this, however, was a level of curation that meant we all ate well, danced a lot and rested plenty. With RESOLVE’s first hand 16

experience of Sheffield including its culinary scene, nightlife, and suburban softness, we were able to map moments of grounding and processing according to our movements around the city. As stimulating as the sessions were, it was these moments of restoration in between that allowed for bonding and a strengthening of our connections on a much deeper level - another key to the residency’s success.

A determining factor was also how we distributed the funding provided by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) for this project. Beyond funding, how do you think they, as an organisation, contributed to the success of the residency?

SSS: It is important to stress the significance of funding this type of work and speak to the collaboration with JRF. The proposal we presented to them in October 2022 was intentionally speculative as we sought to test our aspirations toward creating infrastructural change for local communities and ecologies of practice across the country.

New systems are not built overnight, nor are they off-the-shelf ideas ready to implement: they require work and re-work, continuous drafting. To build them we need labs; not projects, not outcomes.

Laboratories where we can assess the conditions that led us here and plan our route out. Through this work JRF funded the lab and that directly contributed to its success.

To continue the lab metaphor, you were one of the first to put on a lab coat and test with us. As someone coming in fresh to the work, how did you find the transition and what ingredients do you think are needed for it to come together?

JD: RESOLVE’s work always resonated with me in a way that goes beyond my skill set or qualification, so Nurturing Ecologies as a concept made sense instinctively. In practice though, this was uncharted territory for all of us - a moment of transition and growth for both myself and the organisation - but what made it work was our trust in each other. We made sure to be as transparent as we could from the beginning, and I asked a lot of questions along the way, but it eventually came together in a way that felt like a dress rehearsal.

This all came to light from the moment we touched down in Sheffield. The joy and jokes from conversations during the first meals at Cafe #9 and Frehiwat Habesha rippled through the week quite literally. While we were chatting, someone mentioned Drake - as we do - and a cultural phenomenon that was the "combination" meme.

It came up so many times in those initial exchanges that saying "combination" en masse became our way of encapsulating profound quotes uttered through the week.

"combination" in a sentence, he has to follow it with 'no Drake’... we won’t be able to hear that word the same way again. I think it’s a good representation of what we’re trying to do with Nurturing Ecologies; what we’re rehearsing.

No one could've predicted the impact of a single word - how one improvised moment became a pivotal point in the script - which reminds me of the quote

by Grace Lee Boggs that helped us introduce the idea in its early days: "We never know how our small activities will affect others through the invisible fabric of our connectedness. In this exquisitely connected world, it's never a question of 'critical mass'. It's always about critical connections."

To this day, everytime Akil says 17

Sunday 13th

Monday 14th

9:00

Tuesday 15th

Wednesday 1

Shopping with Rob

BIG Breakf @ Kollecti 9am - 10a

10:00 Introductions & Sheffield Tour 9am - 1pm

11:00

12:00

Travel / Arrivals

DRAFT DAY #1 with RESOLVE Collective 10am - 1pm

13:00

14:00

Lunch 1pm - 3pm

BIG Lunch @ Birdhouse 1pm - 3pm

Show + Tell with Nate Agbetu 3pm - 6pm

Queer Black Arts Practice in the North: In Conversation with Pacheanne Anderson @ Gut Level 3pm - 6pm

15:00

16:00

Check-in from 3pm

17:00

18:00

19:00

Onwards

Recipes f Healing Natural Reme Walkshop with Peaks of Co & Shaheen Ka 10am - 3p

Home Made P with Rob Cotter Welcome Dinner @ Fresh Habesha

Dinner @ North Town

Dinner @ Gut Level

16th

Thursday 17th

Friday 18th

fast ive am

Guided Meditation with Amber Caldwell

Shopping with Rob

for edies p

olour asmani pm

Screening: The Inheritance 10am - 11:30am Revolutionary Reading Group with Rosa-Johan Uddoh 11:30am - 1pm

DRAFT DAY #2 with Healing Justice London & SKIN DEEP 10am - 1pm

Saturday 19th

Collective Build 10am - 12pm

Rob’s Saturday Soup 12pm - 2pm

Lunch 1pm - 2pm

Sunday 20th

Travel / Departures

BIG Lunch @ APH Image Sequencing with Nathaniel Telemaque 2:30pm - 4pm Archiving under a Surveillance State with Ella Barrett 4pm - 5:30pm

SADACCA Shorts with Ella Barrett & Jashan Walton + Open Deck with Ashley Holmes 3pm - 6pm

Collective Build & Final Showcase 2pm - 4pm

Screening & Discussion with POoR Collective 4pm - 6pm

Pies

rell

'Boyz n the Hood’ Screening with Amahra Spence (+ Pizza) 6pm - 8pm

Food & Music @ Mondo

Leaving Dinner @ DIYAFA

Home

Shubbery!

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1.Translocal 1.situating the Sheffiel tran

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nslocal ld A 'local’ community is typically defined by its proximity to specific 'locales’: buildings, neighbourhoods, transport infrastructure, landmarks, landscapes, and political or municipal territories. Despite this,‘'locality’ is rarely a matter of proximity alone. Throughout history, relationships between 'locals’ and their locales have been shaped by global movements of people, goods, and ideas, whilst today, globalisation increasingly reproduces conspicuous forms and collective behaviours across the world’s locales. Returning the favour, the 'local’ also continuously shapes global imaginaries having played a critical role in the production of languages, cultural forms, more-than-human ecologies, and even physical appearance that has only been catalysed by the digital age. In the midst of the anthropocene, the local is demonstrably global.

'Translocality’ then describes a lens that looks at the local as a globally networked space. As such, a translocal practice is one that strengthens solidarity, shares resources, and builds social infrastructure across local areas and communities through locallyfocused creative practice. The work is reciprocal: site-specific nuance is celebrated and cross-cutting learning is shared. The thinking is ecological; understanding the entanglement of practices, resources, and spaces as environments from which to forge principles and shape shared definitions of value.

The Nurturing Ecologies residency is an attempt to consolidate a translocal approach, situating knowledge from marginalised practitioner experiences in locales across Greater London, Brighton and the South Coast, Birmingham and the Midlands, Leeds, Sheffield, and Yorkshire, within the city of Sheffield itself. We aimed to do this primarily through the elements of the programme that created moments for the assembled ecology to learn from, celebrate, and catalyse the 'local’ with their knowledge and experience. Simultaneously, these programmatic parts aimed to platform Sheffield and Yorkshire-based practitioners whose work navigates local-specificities whilst interrogating the globally-relevant social and political themes. This section of the document looks in detail at these moments in the programme.

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by Evie Muir In August 2023, we had the deep honour of taking part in the RESOLVE Collective’s Nurturing Ecologies residency - a jam packed week of peer-to-peer learning in a knowledge exchange programme for Black, POC and marginalised organisers and artists.

Hosted by RESOLVE and delivered in our very own Sheffield, the project prioritised the existing knowledge and expertise of practitioners, to enable collective development and lay the foundations for future collaborations through both tangible and intangible infrastructures.

Over the course of the week we became immersed in film screenings, workshops, panel discussions, exhibitions and so much more, including a walkshop co-facilitated by ourselves, draft days with Healing Justice London, Image Sequencing workshops with Nathaniel Tèlèmaque, screenings of SADACCA’s archival footage with Ella Barrett and an Open Deck session with Ashley Holmes!

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It was a soulful week filled with mind, body and heart expansive connection, that inspired creativity, imagination and hope.

And, here at Peaks of Colour, we’ve been entirely distracted by thoughts of it ever since.

One question that continues to dominate our musings is: What if the Peak District/ Sheffield was a 'Black* Utopia?’

Hear me out. From The Fly Tower, to Gut Level, Mondo Radio to SADACCA, and the vast array of eateries we nourished ourselves in, the residential utilised some of the best of Sheffield’s cultural spaces (many of those quite literally on the doorstep for us locals). I didn’t realise how transformative this would be.

To be able to leave the house, walk down the road and experience that sense of family and freedom without having to travel to London for an event, or to, the farthest corners of Scotland for a retreat.

Throughout the week 'space’ and place’ became regular topics of

discussion and exploration, and I found that I came away feeling unapologetically proud of the people and places that are the sites of revolutionary practice in Sheffield. It was a welcomed reminder.

No matter how proudly northern we know ourselves to be, so often we can be distracted by what we lack [cough ~ funding, resources, land, time ~ cough], particularly within a narrative that tells us that change can only happen in London’s metropolis. To be underestimated and undervalued can be a contagious feeling, and that bitterness is one I’m conscious to unlearn. This week offered a renewed confidence that just maybe, we already have everything we need right here, in and amongst our seven hills.

It made a Black utopia seem not like some distant pipe dream, but a reality we were all living and breathing in the now. Tangible.

Possible. Not least because of Sheffield’s proximity to the nature of the Peaks. In our

Utopia we were engulfed in the intimacies of one another. Sucked into an orbit of care, we emerged calm, loved, resourced, inspired, hopeful, motivated, moved, together. It felt good. Or, as Farzana Khan of Healing Justice London rightly summarised on our final night together, 'breathed into.’

For Peaks of Colour, the week has left us with that feeling of anxious, excitable anticipation.

Like we’ve just opened a door to something that feels too irresistible to close. For now, our contemplations will continue, but we know that this is the start of a thrilling journey to answer the question of: What if our

Green City was a Black Utopia?

We’re endlessly grateful to the RESOLVE boys and babes for the opportunity to sink deeper into community with the organisers, creatives and movement makers that we consider family. Watch this space...

*We use Black here in the context of political Blackness, which encompasses all those racialised under white supremacy.

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Walking Sheffield’s Black Radical History with Mark Hutchinson For the first activity of Nurturing Ecologies, we gathered to tour Sheffield’s city centre through the lens of historical Black radical figures who had lived, worked, visited, or sojourned there. The Sheffield Black Radical Walk was the brainchild of the late, great historian and schoolteacher, Mark Hutchinson, and following it was an act that grounded us in the city. Guided by Hutchinson’s voice recordings - each track a re-memberment of Sheffield’s Black radical past - helped frame the group’s relationship with contemporary environments in the city and draw parallels between all of our own socio-historical contexts. It was a beautiful, rare didactic moment in the residency, presenting a pedagogy that we would interrogate, remix, and deconstruct over the week.

The tour sites included: Lady’s Bridge, for the site of a 1993 conference for Black Year 10 and 11 students held by Black teachers from SUMES (Sheffield Unified Multicultural Education Service); Alexandra House, for actor Samuel Morgan Smith’s performances in the 1860’s; the meeting point, opposite West Bar Police Station, of antiracist & anti-fascist groups in the 1980’s such as the Sheffield Asian Youth Movement; the Friends Meeting House on 3 Watson’s Walk, Hartshead for writer and abolitionist Olaudah Equiano’s speech against the evils of slavery in 1790 and abolitionist and campaigner Fredrick Douglas’ speech, 'A Simple Tale of Slavery’, in 1847; the Montgomery Statue, near where historic newsagents A.J Baines would sell picture postcards of footballers in the 1890’s that included Sheffield Wednesday’s Arthur Wharton, the UK’s first Black professional footballer; and the plaza outside Sheffield Cathedral, where at the end of June 1970, British Black Panthers members including Olive Morris, Farrukh Dhondy, Linton Kwesi Johnson, and Darcus Howe held a cultural arts performance that concluded their four day stay in Sheffield. These, and many more, formed the group’s initial points of interaction with the city and its memories.

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1.SADACCA

2.Lady’s Bridge

3.Exchange St 7. Montgomery Statue 8. Sheffield Cathedral

4.Angel St 5.Watson’s Walk 6.Friends Meeting House

11. Crucible Theatre

9. John Lewis 10. Surrey St

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Queer Black Arts Practice in the North with Pacheanne Anderson The practices and practitioners of Nurturing Ecologies evidence the many ways in which marginalisation is experienced but also navigated, celebrated, fought against, and reimagined across this country. In Sheffield, there are constellations of Queer practitioners in the cultural sector that we have grown to know well, collaborate, and conspire with, such as Gut Level, Andro & Eve, and FLAW Collective, and then many others doing integral work for the flourishing and safety of their communities.

Intersections of race within these constellations provide a critical and generative but also disruptive lens through which to sharpen our tools in this community-building work.

It was with this in mind that Brighton based artist and curator, Pachanne Anderson, gathered Jesualdo A. Lopes of Leeds/Lisbon-based outfit The Blacker The Berry, Sheffieldbased visual anthropologist Wemmy Ogunyankin, and Sheffieldbased DJ and Calabash founder, DJ MYNA for a group discussion at Gut Level’s then temporary space on Eyre Street. Together, they spoke on the experience of Queer Black arts practices in the North; operating in and supporting communities from an acutely sparse but hugely important intersection.

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Recipes for Healing - Natural Remedies Walkshop with Peaks of Colour & Shaheen Kasmani

As descendants of colonised peoples, our connection to land has been continually erased over generations by the violence of nation state formation, the un-commoning of once collectively stewarded terrain and spiritual estrangement from our environments. In such conditions, we hold onto connections deemed more fickle: fables from lands before us or allegiances with lands we don’t belong to.

To discard these would be to self-inflict a mirroring of what philosopher Miranda Fricker describes as "epistemic injustice", or to deny the colonised power as 'the knower’.

Our inherited stories and our creolised allegiances, at their most capricious, unclear, and incoherent, are our acts of resistance and generational resilience. These 'back home’ recipes, passed down remedies, family tales, and hybrid identities are continually evolving tools to navigate land through its contents; they arm those who recognise its power.

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Recipes for Healing was a special moment of countering epistemic injustices and re-tooling to navigate land knowledges during the Nurturing Ecologies residency. Planted during a series of preliminary Zoom schemes between them, Peaks of Colour founder, Evie Muir, and curator, educator, and producer Shaheen Kasmani then grew a workshop that gathered people’s inherited recipes and traced the intersections of healing and heritage. In Shaheen’s words: "the warm milk and haldi, the nettle tea, the bone broth, the tastes and sensations we may have taken for granted but whose value and capacity for physical, emotional, and mental wellbeing we now recognise."

The workshop was woven into a ramble through one of the Peak District National Park’s most popular trails. Alongside fellow Peaks of Colour practitioner Hafsah FitzGibbon, Evie led the group on a journey that trawled the geological landscape that birthed our host city, Sheffield. By the banks of a brook, nestled in a landscape dyed purple by the heather surrounding us, we recounted our recipes for healing. It reminded us of the ancestral depth to our fickle connections with the lands across the earth, affirmed by the naivety of burgeoning bonds to the land beneath our feet.

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SADACCA Shorts with White Teeth

"Historical narratives are premised on previous understandings, which are themselves premised on the distribution of archival power" - Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History Far from mere evidence bases, archives are entrenched in hegemonic power structures. It is the metadata of the archive that often harbours these relations: what is retained or discarded, how communities are represented, and who this information is collated by and made available to. Conventionally, the archive, to evoke historian Achille Mbembe, is not data itself but a “status” constituted by a discriminatory - albeit heterogeneous - institutional gaze that both privileges and inters that which is deemed archivable.

Today, indebted to generations of decolonial thinkers, activists, radical practitioners, and the renewed gravity of indigenous and syncretic knowledge systems on the Western canon, archival practice has adopted modes that also disrupt this institutional gaze. Articulating this in a keynote for the Living Archive conference in 1997, organised by the African and Asian Visual Artists’ Archive (AAVAA), cultural theorist Stuart Hall wrote that a ‘living archive’ of the diaspora must “insist on a certain heterodoxy. Replete with this deviance, the interpersonal and creative methods used today by many marginalised groups and practitioners to archive their own histories challenge the dominance of linear and oppressive archival practices. Collectively, they move toward diverse approaches of community archivism that continuously revisit, reclaim, and rewrite our historical narratives.

Exemplifying this, on the fifth day of the Nurturing Ecologies residency, White Teeth, an audio-visual art practice by Ella Barrett and Jashan Walton, screened a draft version of SADACCA Shorts. It was a multi-screen installation of intergenerational short films that unpacked and documented the history, heritage, and journey of African Caribbean communities in Sheffield through interviews in collaboration with the Bantu Archive Programme that is housed at SADACCA. Ella and Jashan took the group on a voyage of oral histories centred around time, space, and memory but also welcomed constructive critique on the endeavour, epitomising the ‘laboratory’ approach the residency centred. Together, in response to SADACCA Shorts, we considered the ways in which community archivism in Sheffield might narrate previously silenced pasts.

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2.How We Document

As Black practitioners whose labour is so often framed within the scope of white institutions, the power to tell our story becomes a precious and carefully scripted task that redacts the violence we navigate whilst perfecting our crafts. Far too often, how we are documented readily replaces how we document. For Nurturing Ecologies, we saw documentation as an expression of liberation, an act that treated our images and our stories with the care they require and curated our narrative with labour and love.

This section is a dedication to documenting documentation. It gives insight into the motivations of the group members who took on the challenge of self-documentation in the residency in ways that interrogated what it means for marginalised, community-building practices to portray one another in active exchange. It also provides an overview of the peer-to-peer workshops in the residency programme where 'document’, as both a verb and a noun, was the object of our deviant desires.

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Ironically, documentation is critical to our schemes and conspiracies.

Whether we’re sharing process on social media, photographing stages of a commission, or reminiscing for publications, a RESOLVE project is incomplete without record of the journey. Nurturing Ecologies was no exception. But it required an approach that aligned with the residency’s core values of experimentation and peer-to-peer exchange. So, guided by these tenets and utilising the talents and perspectives within the ecology, a self-elected subset of the group began constructing the residency’s collective image. They soon became known as Documentation Gang.

Each member of Documentation Gang had a unique lens through which they captured the narrative of the week and an approach that both appropriated and challenged conventional method. This included: scrapbook-making from physical ephemera gathered over the week by photographer and educator, Nathaniel Télémaque; 8mm videography of the residency’s 'in-between’ by filmmaker and photographer, White Teeth’s Jashan Walton; interviews with zinemaker and creative practitioner, Halima Ali; live illustrations of residency workshops by multidisciplinary artist, Grace Lee; and digital resource development using Notion, organised by cultural curator, Nate Agbetu.

Documentation Gang was an assertion to, as anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler writes in Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance, "turn back to documentation itself, to the 'teaching’ task that the Latin root 'docere’ implies". Chronicling from within the story meant the co-production of documents as pedagogy for reading one’s own runes. By gathering raw footage, candid images, unfiltered quotes, and vivid illustrations of one another, we were learning to alchemise action into prophecy; reciting the challenge to 'business as usual’ - it sounds like rapture - and imaging regenerative futures from our present kinships.

As facilitators we had a valuable observational position similar to that of a photographer: bearing witness to the intimate moments that form the bigger picture of our ecological practice. We were also often the photographers and took pictures of the events of the week ourselves, capturing the rehearsal of freedoms, and acting simultaneously.

RESOLVE Collective Facilitators Photography 36

Jashan Walton Filmmaker Videography

"Working in film, there’s a lot of emphasis on technical ability which can make creating work quite menial and rigid.

It was great to be in an environment with the NE doc gang that was more about the process of making something and what comes of that rather than the 'content’ we produced.

There’s a lot to be said for having fun."

Nate Agbetu Cultural Curator Notion

A visionary in the realm of collective knowledge exchange, Nate was the architect of the digital resource on Notion that collated material from the residency such as the programme of activities, personal bios, and an archive of profound quotes uttered by participants. We are now growing this into a tool that is shared with others in the wider ecology and beyond.

"It was great to collaboratively work with other documenters, because documentation is usually a solo role for me. However, in working together we were able to share cameras, knowledge, and different approaches to documentation with each other. It was different to how I usually practise as I usually do collaborate with other people, however, I rarely get a chance to collaborate with other documenters. All in all, it was highly generative as it made me think about how we could effectively combine our skills."

Nathaniel Télémaque Photographer Scrapbook

"Documenting part of the Nurturing Ecologies experience was such a rewarding thing. Whilst being immersed in the conversations, it allowed me to step away, reflect, and capture the people and the places in the moment.

My practice often revolves around immortalising beautiful moments through photography and zinemaking and this experience felt like a meaningful extension of that, whilst having a documentation team who I could grow with and learn from."

Halima Ali Zine Maker Interviews

Grace Lee Visual Artist Live Drawing

"The residency gave me space and time as an artist to fill my cup with the beautiful events and people and be inspired by the knowledge sharing within a community of creatives. I was made to feel comfortable in creating a foundation of quicker live sketches to capture likenesses, think about my experiences further, and delve into the documentation more deeply afterwards."

Show + Tell with Nate Agbetu An invitation to share our intentions, explore our values, and unfurl the collective practice of the ecology.

This exchange gave participants an opportunity to reveal the layers of their being and cement their aspirations for what lies ahead, one piece of media at a time. It formed the basis for a transformational experience within a group of people from varying backgrounds in pursuit of a common goal.

Workshop Ingredients: Materials: • Note taking materials/software • Selection of media, e.g. image, audio, video etc.

• A friend or group to share with Instructions: 1. Prepare a group introduction for yourself without using your name, age, occupation, nationality, ethnicity or location

Prompts: What do you care about?

What do you love?

What are your truest values?

2. One piece of media that relates to your practice, showcasing some of your craft or your output, and note why you chose this piece 3. One piece of media that relates to your intention for the future of Nurturing Ecologies. Note down what you would like to see from future iterations of the project 4. Spend some time sharing your thoughts with your friend/the group

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Archiving Under a Surveillance State with Ella Barrett Photographic portraiture often gives us Photographic portraiture often gives complex yet intimate impressions of theus complex and yet the intimate impressions of the observer observed, the document observer and the observed, the document and its documentation.

The peculiar and its documentation. peculiar portraiture of the modernThe passport photo portraiture of the modern passport can be read as the austere scenography of photosurveillance; can be read as the austere state emotionless subjects scenography of state surveillance; arranged so as not to be acknowledged but emotionlessafloat subjects so as identified, in aarranged sea of white. notthis to be acknowledged But familiar ritual but can identified, also stage afloat in a sea of white.

But this collective imagination. Archivist and familiar ritual can also stage curator at the Bantu Archive Programme, collective White Teeth’simagination.

Ella BarrettArchivist examined and curator at workshop, the Bantu Archiving Archive Programme this in her Under a , White Teeth’s Ella Barrett examined Surveillance State . Participants had their this in her workshop, Archiving Under photos taken on the roof of SADACCA, while a Surveillance State .

Participants below discussion raged about community had their surveillance, photos taken on archiving, andthe theroof ways in of SADACCA, while below discussion which we are documented and observed. raged about community archiving, surveillance, and the ways in which we are documented and observed.

Workshop Ingredients: Materials: • White Backdrop/Background • Film (Kodachrome 150 film/Kodak Ektachrome E100) • Film/Digital Camera • Photographer Instructions: 1. Set up your backdrop in a space with good lighting. This could be inside or outside 2. Align centrally with the background, keeping a generous white frame around the head and shoulders 3. Unlike a standard passport photo, express yourself as you wish to be captured in this moment 4.Take the photo

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Image Sequencing with Nathaniel Telemaque Image Sequencing is an interdisciplinary practice prominent in varying modes of storytelling, yet is rarely explored in visual arts literature.

This workshop encouraged a conscious and collaborative process of constructing narratives through visual representation using collaging and scrapbooking techniques.

Workshop Ingredients: Materials: • Polaroid Camera • Polaroid 600 or SX70 Film • A3 Hardback Sketchbook • Selection of Printed Images and Visual Material • Reference Photo Books • Glue/Tape • Pens/Pencils Instructions: 1. Gather your images and/or visual material 2. Construct a narrative using the images/material you have chosen

Prompts: Can you see a common thread between them that forms a narrative?

What story do they tell?

3. Arrange them in a sequence to reflect this narrative in your sketchbook using collaging techniques

Prompts: How do they sit on the page/next to each other?

Do any quotes or words come to mind that you could also write down?

4. Stick the sequence into the sketchbook

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3.Sustenance through

h Joy

Though emancipation is the premise of much of the cultural work of those within Nurturing Ecologies, we rarely appraise the leisure that sustains this labour. Despite wading through institutional violence, navigating systemic injustice, and managing the sensitivities of lived experience, the sustenance of our collective work is joy. When we dance, watch films, sing, and laugh together, we are watering our bodies and our practices; revealing rest and labour not as dichotomous acts but reciprocal components in sustainable, liberatory action. And though it can be tempting to disregard the heights of our revelry - where we find ourselves lost in h’enjoyment - it is important to remind ourselves that "joy doesn’t have to be contingent upon anything but existence", as journalist and author Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff writes in Black Joy. Our existence as Black, POC, and marginalised creative practitioners in Britain was fought for by generations of activists, thinkers, rebels, and revolutionaries, so it is from this particular genealogy of existence that we have centred joy, unfettered, in Nurturing Ecologies.

This section contains an overview of the activities in residency that were programmed with joyous intention; where we gathered as an audience, selectas, meditators, partygoers, and discussants. There is also special photographic arrangement in this section called After-Hours, which visualises some of these activities and other convivial moments. Enjoy!

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Boyz n the Hood with Amahra Spence Synopsis: Ricky, Doughboy and Tre navigate life as young Black men in South Central LA. Review: This collective viewing became a moment to decompress and pay homage to the early influences of our practices. We travelled to Compton to revisit the seismic cultural impact of the film’s narrative and visual language.

Sacred Breath with Amber Caldwell Synopsis: Group mediation to ground participants, connecting them to one another and their surroundings.

Review: We sat rooted together in our place of rest, following the hums of a sound piece by Amahra Spence whilst sharing a moment of stillness. This session was necessary in preparing our bodies and minds for another day of discovery.

"I am connected to all things"

Attack the Block with POoR Collective Synopsis: POoR Collective’s film exploring how council estates are moulded into platforms for cultural exchange through music video production.

Review: A reflection on how music videos and other cultural activities unlock spaces in the city that would otherwise be used for functional purposes. In particular, how council estates are moulded into backdrops and platforms for cultural exchange through music video production.

Here we explored our own familiarities with the iconic architecture of our cityscapes.

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The Inheritance with Rosa Johan Uddoh & Louis Brown Synopsis: Director, Ephraim Asili’s first feature film, The Inheritance is a fictional account of internal social dynamics in social movements. It weaves together the histories of MOVE, a Black liberation group founded in Philadelphia in 1972, The Black Arts Movement, an AfricanAmerican-led art movement in the 1960’s and 1970’s, and the filmmaker’s own formative experience in a Black Marxists collective.

Open Deck with Ashley Holmes Synopsis: An ongoing project and series of gatherings giving space to collectively listen, discuss, and explore relationships to music and sound recordings.

Review: Disseminating sound through group-listening creates a conversational space for sharing memories and stories carried in our personal connections to music. This uncovers cultural traditions spanning across locales and time frames, introduces new interpretations of foundational songs, and threads together a sonic narrative that is unique to the ecology.

Review: The film resonated intimately, sometimes almost uncomfortably, with audience members familiar with the interpersonal perils of social organising. Though set in a specific time and space, beautifully aestheticised to evoke the iconography of young Black revolutionaries in U.S. cities during the febrile 70’s, the mundane arguments, the relationship rifts, and the ideological bickering that the film portrayed so incisively could have been taken from our own stories in practice.

"WE ARE A SHOELESS HOUSE!!"

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4.Black Infrastructi

ions The question of infrastructure is an all-encompassing one in the realm of Black radical practice. We understand that word, infrastructure, as describing systems that mobilise or provide access to resource across populations. Infrastructure often concerns the distribution of both material and immaterial resources: distributing electricity across a grid involves the movement and transformation of large quantities of natural resources, accessing knowledge through public libraries requires a proliferation of locally accessible buildings. As such, the question of infrastructure - "where resource is directed, how, and to whom?" - is an inevitable preoccupation of Black radical practice precisely because it coheres the tangible and intangible distributions of resource that effectively and historically produce marginalised identity.

The "where", "who", and "how" of the infrastructural question are what we call "infrastructions" and they determine an infrastructure’s often complicated nature. "Infrastructions" can describe the weaponisation of state infrastructure evident, for example, in how carceral education systems in the United Kingdom produce "school to prison pipelines" that disproportionately affect urban, working class, Black populations. But they can also describe the effects of infrastructure that is shaped for and by the needs of marginalised people. This sentiment is exemplified by the contemporary neighbourhood experiments of groups such as Civic Square, Dark Matter Labs, and MAIA in Birmingham that draw from histories of social infrastructure created for and by Black, POC, and marginalised populations across the UK. "Infrastruction" shapes both how we imagine collectively and how we are collectively imagined in society; it is the lens through which we understand infrastructure as hegemonic or liberatory.

Our mission at RESOLVE is not just to follow "infrastructions" that are shaped by Black radical imagination, building equitable infrastructure that resources ecologies of marginalised practice and inspires translocal social change. It is also to practise infrastructurally, understanding our practice apparatus as itself a means of radical redistribution. In order to achieve this, we recognised the need to change the course of our practice’s journey and its mode of transport.

Nurturing Ecologies presented a catalytic experiment in speculating and positioning that change, asking what our collective practices might look like as blueprints for just worldbuilding. In this section, we share notes on activities in the residency that tested these infrastructural aspirations in community with one another. We also explain what the tangible next steps of Nurturing Ecologies are and what resources we will need to deliver them.

_DRAFT DAY_p1_v1 with RESOLVE Collective

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_DRAFT DAY is an exercise that examines one critical question: what are the necessary spaces, programmes, and resources to facilitate radical infrastructural work?

After consulting Farzana Khan of Healing Justice London, the idea developed into a co-run session over two mornings during the residency, with the aim of drafting a strategy that will set out how this ecology can be supported in the future.

Using a shared 'draughts board’, participants mapped the journey of their practices, speaking to the spaces, resources, organisations/people, and strategies that have shaped their story.

This draws from the work of Maurice Mitchell, the national director of the Working Families Party, who, in his article Building Resilient Organisations, highlights a number of systemic challenges faced in building resilient social justice organisations and identifies key strategic areas for sustainable solutions.

" - that the people who do this work reach for pencils because it's always the first draft."

This exercise builds towards a prospective 'Part 2’, in which we will draw from our journeys to collectively imagine what is possible for facilitating radical infrastructural work. In the meantime, 'Part 1’ allows us to contribute to the foundations of a futurefacing strategy that determines conditions for sustainability and tools for organisational resilience.

Workshop Structure: The workshop is formatted for participants to explore the different journeys that have led their practices to this present point.

1. Think of your journey as organisations/individuals:

Prompts: • Use these guides when asking yourself what or who facilitated your practice journey: » Strategies » Spaces/places » Resources, » and Organisations/People • How can you think about these as ‘generational’, including the strategies, spaces/places, resources, and organisations/people that preceded them? » E.g. 1: We see the “Olympic Legacy” as closely tied to what we call the “Second Generation” Meanwhile Space practices in London » E.g.2: We understand our own practice as made possible by the legacies of social movements from ‘81 Uprisings in the UK such as the Brixton Black Women’s Reading Group and OWAAD. 2. Map this journey by illustrating, notating, or symbolising the strategies, spaces/places, resources, and organisations/people that have produced or shaped your practice. You can start from as far back as you feel is relevant (e.g. the stories of your ancestors).

Use the grid as a support structure to grow the map of the journey like a climbing vine - don’t get boxed in!

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"We're always drafting.

Always in rehearsal."

Photo by Ahmad El Mad

- Farzana Khan, inspired by Amahra Spence, 'Life-Affirming Infrastructures’ 61

Collective Build with RESOLVE Collective At RESOLVE Collective, 'design’ does not describe products. For us, 'design’ is a channel through which we embrace collective practice and test ideas for resilient social infrastructure.

This manifests in many of our projects, such as You Get A Car [Everyone Gets A Car] where we worked with local groups across Liverpool to prototype a community-driven material redistribution system for cultural institutions in Liverpool. Thinking about design and design processes in this way continually forces us to reevaluate our relationship with sites of engagement and the tools that we obtain from having been situated in locales across the UK and the world; from Sheffield to Douala, Malmö to Ramallah.

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The Ecology

The Process

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The Space

Nurturing Ecologies culminated with what we called a collective build for SADACCA’s Bantu Archive Programme, previously named the Basil Griffiths Library, which was housed in a dilapidated part of the building on Wicker.

The programme, run by White Teeth’s Ella Barret, is a room consisting of a plethora of books and publications alongside a growing online audio-visual archive of Sheffield’s Windrush generation. It is testament to both Ella and the community’s dedication to documenting local histories.

However, the room itself was in desperate need of TLC; testament to this, some months later the roof caved in after days of heavy rain.

The collective build mobilised the labour of the Nurturing Ecologies group using leftover materials from within SADACCA to provide a heuristic renovation for the Bantu Archive Programme. The group-led renovation of the archive attempted to challenge wider structural barriers to improving existing assets, which include cost inefficiency, knowledge gaps, and time poverty. It was asset improvement but also an experiment for a people-centred approach to seeding the feasibility of circularity in our everyday practices.

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1. embedding radical practice 2. peer-to-peer learning 3. nurturing future growth

The residency week represented the first activation of Nurturing Ecologies as a strategic area for our practice and our community. It created an opportunity to convene through a programme of peer-to-peer learning that championed radical practice and drafted collective strategies for future, sustainable growth. The intention was and continues to be that the programme lives far beyond the week in Sheffield and, as the name suggests, this requires continuous tending in order to adequately nurture an ecology of Black, POC and marginal group-led creative practitioners on their individual and collective journeys toward a radical future.

The next steps are convoluted as they are entangled within broader questions of funding, organisational growth and sustainability, and radical infrastructure that envelope our work and the work of our peers.

The continuation of this work does not simply mean reviewing and recycling the same format to heighten its success, but a desire to propagate the ideas from the programme in Sheffield through formats that continue the collective experiment. An essential next step is to continue to support the potential collaborations forged during the week, facilitate the expansion of the work exchanged, and further the content created.

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This section concludes with traces of that propagation that navigate different scales, stakeholders and formats, detailing opportunities for new collaborations and further funding. Whilst this process is tentacular, its funding begins with three 'seeds’.

Photo by Jana Dardouk

Photo by Becky Payne

Photo by Jana Dardouk

national

international

across locations

publication co-produced

group exhibition

artwo

interviews new collaboration & partners

commissioned work to continue to share residency outputs

testing new formats

syllabus/ pedagogical product

building on existing learning

toolkit for future residencies

foundation for future collab platform to share skills & resources

host previous residency format

n

ork

Seed 1: Content Development We need to be able to fund and facilitate: • Future residencies: adopting a range of formats and locations • Knowledge and learnings sharing: with the participants and the continually growing ecology through commissioned work e.g. exhibitions, publications • Resources and opportunity platforming: to continue to support the growing ecology of practitioners and blueprint future collaborations

public forums

communication & dissemination cross locations

broaden ecology

platform radical practice

strategies for supportive infrastructure

lecture series

talks

test bed for continuation of ideas micro-projects

extend scope of nurturing ecologies programme existing collaborations align with existing programmes

further nurturing ecologies collaborations

The power of what we achieved can be deeply felt in the spirit of the collective. A key principle of Nurturing Ecologies is to tend to the connections across the fields and disciplines we traverse in order to determine a pathway toward sustainable development. We need to continue to nurture the collective spirit that strengthens our ecology, ensuring our growth is intertwined, and that the landscape of sustainable development recognises the importance of peer-to-peer learning.

Seed 2: Collective Action We need to be able to facilitate and fund: • Talks, lectures, public moments and other opportunities: to communicate and disseminate the knowledge exchanged through Nurturing Ecologies • Continuous open 'drafting’ of strategies: to support radical, marginalised practice and map out future-facing alternative infrastructure • A programme of micro-projects that further initial collaborations: building on the learnings from the residency to extend the scope of the ecology.

black-led creative practice

teaching resources

RESOLVE operating 'infrastructurally’ leadership & skills development

long-term educational programme

long-term core funding interdisciplinary practice

material store dissipative infrastructure

local centre

host ecology

circularity & community design

vacant asset

The final and most pressing part to unfold from the residency regards infrastructure. The questions raised during the week-long programme reflect those prevalent in allied circles across the country and the world: • How can we imagine and build a future that prioritises care and planetary wellbeing and is constructed from the radical imaginations of marginalised people?

• What are the spaces, structures, and programmes that help us to shape new futures?

Our aspiration with Nurturing Ecologies is consistently an infrastructural one that exists in two realms: • How our practice can become infrastructural within a framework of cultural ecological thinking • How can the outputs of our practice become truly dissipative within the environments and landscapes we interrogate.

Seed 3: Alternative Infrastructure We need to be able to facilitate and fund: • Capital projects: to claim existing, vacant assets and situate the value/aspirations of Nurturing Ecologies within a local centre to collaborate with place-based, community-focused practice • An educational programme: that harnesses genuine interdisciplinary creative practice and presents a pedagogical framework through a radical Black lens • Long-term organisational funding: to continue RESOLVE Collective’s work

The Nurturing Ecologies residency was only made possible with the participation and contributions of the following organisations and individuals, who are key nodes in the fabric of our 'ecologies of practice’:

GROUPS

INDIVIDUALS

MAIA Amahra Spence Amber Caldwell

Nathaniel Télémaque (Pesovisuals) Nate Agbetu (FREEFORM) Andre Anderson (Freedom & Balance) Connor Rankin (ACV) Deborah Yewande Bankole Pacheanne Anderson Rosa-Johan Uddoh Louis Brown Halima Ali Ashley Holmes Shaheen Kasmani Grace Lee Akeelah Bertram Jesualdo Lopes (The Blacker the Berry) DJ MYNA Wemmy Ogunyankin Rob Cotterell Mark Hutchinson

Civic Square Immy Kaur Daniel Blyden Kavita Purohit Charlotte Bailey Khadijah Carberry POoR Shawn Adams Larry Botchway Matt Harvey Healing Justice London Farzana Khan Rebekah Delsol Sarah Al-Sarraj SKIN DEEP Anu Henriques Georgie Johnson Hannah Azuonye White Teeth Ella Barrett Jashan Walton Peaks of Colour Evie Muir Hafsah FitzGibbon RESOLVE Collective Seth Scafe-Smith Akil Scafe-Smith Melissa Haniff Jana Dardouk Nina Jang Lauren-Lois Duah

PHOTOGRAPHY Jashan Walton Nathaniel Télémaque Halima Ali Akil Scafe-Smith Jana Dardouk

SUPPORT SADACCA Gut Level CADS Mondo Radio Bloc Projects Sheffield Mercure Kenwood Hall & Spa North Town

THANK YOU!

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peer-to-peer knowledge exchange through collective practice Sheffield, 2023