Training for Exploitation?

Written and collated by the Precarious Workers Brigade (PWB) this workbook is a critical resource pack for educators. As a tool, it emphasizes employability and work-based learning as core aspects of an educator’s ongoing ‘professional practice’.

Training for Exploitation? Politicising Employability and Reclaiming Education | London/LA/Leipzig: Journal of Aesthetics & Protest Press | 2017

For many years the members of the Precarious Workers Brigade have been developing insightful analyses, tools and actions questioning wageless and other exploitative forms of labour in the arts and education sectors. With a shared commitment to developing research and actions, this collaborative political project involves developing tactics, strategies, formats, practices, dispositions, knowledges and tools for making this happen. They seek approaches that are practical, relevant and easily shared and applied.

This publication provides a pedagogical framework that assists students and others in deconstructing dominant narratives around work, employability and careers, and explores alternative ways of engaging with work and the economy. Training for Exploitation? includes tools for critically examining the relationship between education, work and the cultural economy. It provides useful statistics and workshop exercises on topics such as precarity, employment rights, cooperation and solidarity, as well as examples of alternative educational and organising practices. Training for Exploitation? shows how we can both critique and organise against a system that is at the heart of the contemporary crises of work, student debt and precarity.

The PWB is a UK-based group of workers in culture and education whose employment and existence is ‘precarious’ – calling out to those also struggling to make a living in the climate of instability and enforced austerity.

Design: Evening Class

Foreword: Silvia Federici

ISBN 978-0-615-59011-0

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The Millbank Atlas

An exhibition and public events programme co-curated by Marsha Bradfield (Artfield Projects) and Shibboleth Shechter (Chelsea College of Arts, UAL) exploring the lived experience of the Millbank area in London.

Millbank Atlas | Cookhouse Gallery, Chelsea College of Arts | 20 – 28 January 2017

The Millbank Atlas is a collaborative project that brings together researchers, students and local residents to trace the neighbourhood surrounding Chelsea College of Arts. It convenes staff and student researchers based at CCA with local residents and others. Core to the curriculum of Chelsea Local (one of seven studios) on BA Interior and Spatial Design, the Atlas has unfolded as a collection of maps that trace and retrace the surrounding neighbourhoods of the College through diverse 2D and 3D cartographic experiments. Chelsea Local specialises in design for community engagement through participatory practice-based research, exploring social and other forms of resilience for tackling natural and man-made upheavals. The studio considers robust communities to be an essential building block of a resilient society. Chelsea Local holds that Art and Design can and should play a role in shaping these communities, addressing and solving global problems as they are manifested locally.

For this project, students on the BA Interior and Spatial Design used practice-based research to create maps and other cartographic experiments to identify distinguishing characteristics of this part of London. At stake here is a better understanding of Millbank as comprised of reciprocal relations between the College and surrounding businesses, residential blocks, civil society groups, transportation links and other amenities, infrastructure and further aspects of this built and natural environment.

With support from Camberwell, Chelsea, Wimbledon Graduate School

Tea Exchange

Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane, Souped Up Tea Urn and Amp / Teapot (Dartford) 2004. Photo: TATE collections

As part of the inaugural programme of the Tate Exchange, students and staff from the BA Interior and Spatial Design at Chelsea College of Arts (UAL) moved their studio into this new space, which occupies an entire floor of the new Blavatnik building (also known as the Switch House) at Tate Modern, Bankside.

Tea Exchange | Tate Exchange, Tate Modern | 22 February – 3 March 2017

Exploring and expanding upon the name of this new initiative, visitors to the museum were invited to share this studio space, taking part in workshops, talks and presentations as part of a curated programme involving with students, tutors and critics. Over the course of the week, participants designed and constructed eight full-scale cardboard teahouses. Exploring themes of social and ritualised behaviour as well as the architectural and cultural significance of tea, these structured considered tea as produce and commodity. Participants drank tea and exchanged ideas, discussing the historical, cultural, social and political significance of tea.

When the teahouses were almost complete, architect Rain Wu performed tea ceremonies that fuse fuse traditions of East and West, using a tea set designed as part of his 2016 artist residency at the Design Museum (down the river). The programme also included a guest lecture by Masayasu Tamiya, exploring the Japanese Way of Tea. On the final day of the Tate Exchange students were joined by a guest critic, who reviewed the Tea Exchange followed by a performative lecture by ISD tutor Marsha Bradfield – Steeped: A Legacy of Tea on the history, culture and politics of tea.

What Happens To Us

Participants, What Happens to Us. Photo: Ben McDonnell, 2017

Curated by Amy McDonnell and Marsha Bradfield, this exhibition examined democracy as a system of community formation.

What Happens to Us | Wimbledon Space | 15 November – 9 December 2016

Communities don’t just happen, they’re made

The exhibition unfolded in the long shadow of the UK’s referendum about whether to stay in Europe or not, as well as the threatening prospect of Donald Trump leading the so-called free world, which compelled many at that time to ask, should we ‘just say no’ to democracy? What if the philosopher Joseph de Maistre was right: people really do get the governments they deserve?

What Happens to Us takes as its departure the exhibition Democracy by the collective Group Material (1988–9), which was determined by round table discussions on the (still) pressing issues of AIDS, cultural participation, election and education. Today, we might add climate change, mass migration and economic disparity to this list. At What Happens to Us we ate together, made decisions and researched collaboratively, and built the exhibition and its ethos over time, hosting daily workshops, talks and screenings in four, weekly phases – ‘Build’, ‘Elect’, ‘Use’ and ‘Account’ to explore the politics in our communities.

With participation from

Acts of Searching Closely, Francesca Baglietto, Manuel Batsch, Brad Butler, Jaya Clara Brekke, Helen Brewer, Georgia Brown, Elliot Burns, Ève Chabanon, Cinzia Cremona, Carla Cruz, Neil Cummings, Neil Farnan, Michael Freedman, Sharon Gal, Naomi Garriock, Alison Green, Isabelle Gressel, Gabriele Grigorgeva, Mark Herbst, Karem Ibrahim, Helen Kaplinsky, Pippa Koszerek, May Project Gardens, Rosia McGinn, Zoë Mendelson, Radical ReThink, Susan Rocklin, Susanna Round, Scott Schwager, Barbara Steveni, Neil Tait, Jessica Tanghetti, Jennet Thomas, Binita Walia, Wright and Vandame

The full programme and archive of the project can be found at www.whathappenstous.org

#TransActing: A Market of Values

A bustling pop-up market with artists, designers, economists, civil-society groups, academics, ecologists, activists and others who creatively explore existing structures and actively produce new ones.

#TransActing: A Market of Values | Chelsea College of Arts (UAL)  | 11 July 2015

Organised by Critical Practice, #TransActing took place on the historic Rootstein Hopkins Parade Ground, located between Tate Britain and Chelsea College of Arts (UAL). The Market showcased a skillshare, a peoples bureau, organ donation, an economy of promises, commoners, a fablab, a bring your own BBQ, virtuous communities, a speakers’ corner—even a kiosk buying tears. Care, trust, creativity and generosity are forms of exchange that coexist with money but cannot be made equivalent to pounds and pence. It’s wealth beyond capital that was produced at #TransActing.

The Market of Values was hosted in bespoke structures built by Critical Practice, Public Works and others. These stalls were interspersed with other spaces of assembly and exchange: a speakers’ corner, a social cinema, while multiple currencies circulated, not all of them monetary

. Whilst the values of competitive markets dominate contemporary life, including art and its education, other kinds can and do coexist. Some even flourish in alternative communities of evaluation.

#TransActing will nurtured and celebrated these value relations in a spectacular one-day event.

 Critical Practice is Metod Blejec, Marsha Bradfield, Cinzia Cremona, Neil Cummings, Neil Farnan, Angela Hodgson-Teal, Karem Ibrahim, Amy McDonnell, Claire Mokrauer-Madden, Eva Sajovic, Kuba Szreder, Sissu Tarka and many more besides.

This market contributes to a wider project –  Market of Value Research

Further information can be found on the Critical Practice (CCA) research wiki

Funded with assistance from Arts Council England and National Lottery