Partial Self-Portrait of Critical Practice

This text takes the form of a timeline. Introduced by Marsha Bradfield, it tracks the research and production of Critical Practice (London, UK). Like pencil lines marking growth spurts on the kitchen door frame, the visual and verbal entries mark events that have constituted and transformed the cultural-based research cluster. This account reflects on the uneven flow of members, decision making and practice-based activities that have constellated and reconstellated Critical Practice. As a partial self-portrait, this text is only one possible narrative of how value, values, valorisation and evaluation became leitmotifs over the cluster’s formative phase of development. From this perspective, this timeline follows the long season of value-related research (2010 - 2015) that led the cluster to the project that was TransActing (2013 - 2015). A list of the people who at one time or another have been members of Critical Practice caps off the self-portrait to acknowledge the cluster’s membership over its first decade of activity (2005 - 2015).