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Shock City: Resilience and the Anthropocene

Shock City was a series of events, including an exhibition, practice exchanges, a ‘day of doing’ (with walks and a workshops), and an international conference on Resilience and the Anthropocene.

Shock City | Chelsea College of Arts (UAL) | 28 – 29 October 2015

Events launched the Year of Resilience (YoR) – a programme run by CCW Graduate School during the academic year 2015–2016 – a the wide-ranging discursive educational programme that aimed to present new cultural discourses on ‘resilience’.

Resilience can be understood as the capacity of a bounded network – a person, bacterial culture, a forest, a city or an economy – to deal with change and continue to develop. It is a response to shocks and disruption, like an infection, financial crisis or climate change that spurs creative practice and encourages renewal. Resilience is a means of taking action and creating sustainable ways to co-exist within our biosphere.

Framed by later events, such an unravelling Brexit, a Trump-dominated so-called ‘free world’ and with hurricanes and natural disasters displaying climate change’s impact, this 2015 call for resilient practices is more prescient than ever. Archived here (via the UAL website) is a community of artistic practitioners producing an emergent understanding for the potential of resilience in an attempt to accumulate a shared ethos that we hope will continue on into new, unexpected and divergent practices.

Shock City Programme

The conference included presentations by invited speakers and practitioners from CCC Head in Geneva (an educational programme that develops new vocabularies for articulating the political and social implications of a changing world). Following the themes of YoR – ‘Empathy and Proximity’, ‘Making and Repairing’ and ‘Community and Resilience’ – the conference included practitioners working in the CCW Graduate School as well as others, from those working in architectural performance in Warsaw to the impact of culture on policy-making in Geneva. Together, participants and speakers created a multifaceted community response to the broader changes shaking the foundations of cultural production, including art and design education at that time.

Conference papers

Opening remarks – Marsha Bradfield, Chelsea College of Arts and Design (UAL) / Artfield Projects

Introduction – Malcolm Quinn, Associate Dean of Research and Director of Camberwell, Chelsea, Wimbledon Graduate School

PANEL 1 – EMPATHY AND PROXIMITY

Proximity to Workers in the Network – Charlotte Webb (chair)

More than One Way to Get Somewhere – Edwina Fitzpatrick and Geraint Evans

Towards the Proximity of Collective Action – David Cross

Artistic Research Impacting Policy – Hannah Entwistle

PANEL 2: MAKING AND REPAIRING

Haptic Tiles and the City – Aaron McPeake (chair)

Inheriting an Existing Circumstance – Ken Wilder

Pointing the Finger: Architecture of Abandonment – Natalia Romik

Who Looks After the Boat? – Robin Jenkins

PANEL 3: COMMUNITY AND PLACES

Finding a Model for a Resilient Society – Ezio Manzini (chair)

#TransActing: A Market of Values – Marsha Bradfield

From the Classroom into the Community – Patricia Ellis and Andrew Graves-Johnson

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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

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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