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Producing Future Homes and Communities

A partnership between Chelsea Local and Artfield Projects, this five-day project took place at Tate Exchange, Tate Modern (London, UK).  Staff, students and alumni from University of the Arts London (UAL) collaboratively delivered an experimental programme exploring future homes, communities and ‘production’.

Producing Future Homes and Communities: Utopias, Dystopias, Heterotopias and Other Spaces | Tate Exchange | 6 – 10 February 2018

With funding from the University of the Arts London Teaching and Learning Fund

Co-curated by Interior and Spatial Design Programme tutors Marsha Bradfield (Artfield Projects) and Shibboleth Shechter (Tate Associate) the programme stemmed from the conviction that shared sustainability depends on cultural and other forms of heterogeneity. Communities are not something we can take for granted. They must be produced and reproduced in response to diverse conditions and considerations.

Producing Future Homes and Communities convened a community-of-communities that considered the significance of museums and other cultural institutions while grappling with the materiality of community and how it is shaped through structures, systems, networks and other relations. Through a series of public workshops it considered the future to better understand the present: smart cities, climate change, generative and other materials for urban expansion and renewal, as well as so much more.

At the centre of Producing Future Homes and Communities was a large-scale collaborative experimental build using recycled materials from Tate Modern and beyond. With input from tutors from across UAL including Emma Hunter, Sadhna Jain,  Peter Maloney, Matt Schwab, Takako Hasegawa and Wilfried Rimensberger – a community activist and Director of Millbank Creative Works the programme reflected on the changing importance of the home to consider the broader contextual relationship of ‘the domestic’ to the world – the relationships between public and the private spaces. These projects and collaborations culminated in a large scale Community Market, where students transacted alternative futures through a non-commercial community market showcasing creative practices from disparate points of view that variously propose utopic, dystopic and a medley of other scenarios.

Producing Future Homes and Communities also advances projects realised by Critical Practice and the Camberwell, Chelsea, Wimbledon Graduate School through practice-based research into value systems beyond the monoculture of money.

Programme – Producing Future Homes and Communities

Tate Exchange, 5th Floor, Blavatnik Building, Tate Modern

Workshops

Future Archiving – led by Marsha Bradfield and Shibboleth Shechter

Souvenirs: memories of the past, objects for the future –  led by students from MA Graphic Design Communication (Chelsea College of Arts)

Space Detectors – led by Takako Hasegawa

Constructing Architectures and Infrastructures for Community Engagement

Constructing the House of Daydreams – led by students from Interior and Spatial Design (Chelsea College of Arts)

A Community Market

Featuring the following stalls: #Barter: Narrative Exchanging Station | Affordance | Artshoes – Walk Your Way | Community Days of Future Past | The Continuum: An Architecture for a Conceivable Future | Drawing Life-Map of Future | Future Archive: Legacies | A Game of Impression And Imagination | Gel Dancing with Open Systems | Gestural Dictionary for A New Community | Give, Take, Make | Is Digital a Killer Virus for Community | NSC – New Sky City | Reinterpreting the Aqal| Those Bloody Stairs | Space Detectors Workshop: Remnants | Outcomes from Souvenirs: Memories of the Past, Objects for the Future

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#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