During a recent Urban Heat lab in Maribor, eastern Slovenia, we spent an afternoon with Tandem Kitsch and our project partners discussing survival strategies. What are the concrete strategies we use to resist the dominant ideologies and systems we work within? Heres what the group came up with:
- Have a regular (but precarious) job and fund arts activities from your savings
- Manage your time carefully
- Be specific/precise about what you do and what you dont do
- Favour marginalised places and practices and open places to art
- Have only one child
- Create your own business?and spend the profit on a new system
- Reject engagements which are not paid enough or valued enough
- Recontextualise and focus on the moments at hand; how is this moment reinforcing dominant ideologies of scarcity, exclusivity, temporality, privilege?
- Give everybody authorisation by endorsing everybody! Call everything art, call everybody an artist! Thereby resisting exclusivity, scarcity and gate keepers.
- Practice fighting / disagreeing
- Stop working and live your life. Frame that as work.
- Make shit.?Distract yourself.?Stop the flow. Dont create new things. Make always the same work. Forget everything you know. But dont forget about fun.
- Be careful not to reproduce exploitation in your own creative environment. Rethink and reframe the ways of production.
- Make budgets public
- Have power relations?in mind
- As a producer, act as a buffer between the system and artist in order to protect artist time
- As educator, create an oasis in the educational system to open space for the debate and to involve new ideas
- Endless reflection and critical thinking
- Join the union + care for one another + give things for free + occupy time rather than space + find new ways of use other people’s resources + share resources
- In education, using non hierarchical?systems, decline publication pressure, volunteering
- Curate with extreme inclusiveness (include even the things you dont like)
- Remind yourself that you are a good person
- Invent new systems that serve you and your values
What are yours?
