Two's Company

This performance paper with Sarah Cole reflected on the potential of participatory art practice as means of provoking curiosity towards exploration of the richness of difference. We looked at the use of pairing strategies between people who would not normally meet and deploying the methodologies of exploration of place, having a cup of tea, and making art together.

Since the XD Pathway's involvement with Ezio Manzini’s UAL-wide research on Cultures of Resilience, we have tested a number of alternative pedagogic practices with current students and alumni.

During 2016 we worked with Anna Hart, (AIR Studios), to pilot a project that paired second year students with members of an Age UK art group, deploying AIR’s methodology of pairing people who might not normally meet and asking them to explore place and practice together. The pairings were asked to test possibilities of exchange and mutual production, allowing their curiosity to inform a new dialogue that crossed boundaries of age, gender and culture (the students were from China, Singapore, Korea, Switzerland, and the UK regions). All the participants were invited to bring their on-going artistic concerns to these dialogic processes, using practice as the place where exchange could happen. The pairs went for walks, visited exhibitions, shared techniques, wrote each other letters, drank tea and commented on the 'unlikeliness' of their budding relationships. All the pairs ended up making collaborative works that culminated in an event Exchanging Time at Conway Hall Library in May 2016.

The presentation went on to describe the extension of these methodologies during academic year 2016-17 with two new artist facilitators, Margot Bannerman and Magda Fabianczyk, students and local people in Kings Cross, at the Kings Cross Construction Skills Centre and the Calthorpe Project, focussing on the processes of linking communities through pre-existing networks. These projects were a test-bed to further explore the ideas and issues that surface from active pairing of people, to determine how our students engage effectively with, learn from and share expertise with their neighbours – how they exchange and deploy the richness of difference, and how these encounters and artworks may stay in the memory despite their transience.

Our presentation demonstrated some of the tensions that emerged between pairs, agonistic moments that led to longer term revelations, collaborative enterprises that could only happen when an unlikely pari bring their approaches and ideas together. A key concern is neighbourliness – how people communicate across boundaries. We sought to reveal rather than extrapolate this in the ways in which the performative paper engages and perhaps tests its audience with performance contributions from students, Christopher Roberts and Matthew Wang, who participated in these projects.