How a twitter thread from Amahra Spence and an interview with Joan Bakewell helped connect Janet’s thoughts about the collective work the F13 network of freelance and independent artists and small arts organisations is doing to devise and produce an event for Coventry’s wider cultural sector, commissioned by Culture Works:

In the context of the work around “Creating the Conditions” with F13, I’ve been thinking a lot about the challenges and power of collective working for the common good. About democracy. About the intricate ways all life is connected, and about the obligations those connections bring: sideways to one another, backwards and forwards – to those who came before, and will come after, us – and out to everything in the living world.

In a newspaper interview this week Joan Bakewell was quoted as saying that, post-war, “There was a feeling that you had to sign up to the future and make it better.” This really resonated. Maybe it’s something that is particularly relevant given Coventry’s history – but it’s also a very personal and urgent thing for me as an artist living and making work in a time of climate breakdown. Signing up to the future and making it better is, as I see it, a determined act of collectivity – and, as with anything you sign up for, there is also an obligation to follow through on your promise: to be accountable.

Amahra Spence, along with the rest of the amazing team at MAIA, is very much signed up to the future – and speaks and writes about this very powerfully. In a thread from last week, she wrote “I did not want to start an organisation. I needed a job. Couldn’t get one. I knew this was a systemic, not an individualised issue. So tried to build a systemic beyond-the-self response that recognised our collective struggle for our sustained capacity….If I were to leave the org today, I would think of all the ways our people advocate for themselves, declare what they need, know what they stand for, how fiercely they support one another, orient towards wants, and what they don’t have to battle through…I’d know I’ve done enough.”

This is, for me, a powerful recognition of the deep human need for collectivity, and the strength and joy found in the collective space; of the obligations and burdens of leadership, and the reasons why those in power might prefer us individualised. Sometimes there are things that everyone can see need doing, but that no-one wants to take on. Things that are too big, scary or unmanageable. Thankless tasks. Things that will test you too much, or try your patience; that you really don’t feel you have the time, energy, strength or resilience for; that take you away from making your art. Things that will mean you will be obliged to put your head above the parapet. Things that may open you up to criticism…

…but I think that, if you believe in the power of collectivity and you are signed up to the future, then maybe sometimes you have no option, but you are obliged to just take a deep breath and roll up your sleeves?

There’s no denying that the experience of City of Culture has been polarising for Coventry. There are some people who feel they are not free to talk about the good things they experienced – and others for whom City of Culture is a wound that refuses to heal. By far the worst outcome is the wedge that this disparity of experience, and our fear of talking about it, has driven through the city and our relationships with one another.

What I learnt from observing the Citizens’ Assembly unfold, was the true human magic of talking about difficult things. Whatever the differences between people, when they came together – future facing, open to listening and learning – it was in their conversations that they found points of consensus to build outwards from, and it was this consensus that built a strong feeling of belonging. The participants’ collective ambition, trust, and their obligation to each other, signed them up to the future.

The journey from division to collectivity rarely seems to happens by itself – I think someone probably always has to steward a process like this. The stewards of the conversation need to be trusted enough that people from all sides of a debate feel they are in safe hands – but this is almost always going to be fragile territory where the sands are likely to shift, suspicion may be rife and trust can be lost swiftly.

This is, essentially, where those of us stewarding the collective planning process for the as-yet-unnamed cultural sector event (responding to “Creating the Conditions” and commissioned by Culture Works*, but independently planned) currently balance. It is a position not without risk. This is a task that may well open us up to criticism from others – from friends and colleagues, from those in the sector who might view the very acceptance of a commission to create this event as some kind of sell out, as well as from larger institutions who might wonder why such an important task is trusted to a collective of freelancers, or who get frustrated by the time it takes.

But we believe in “Creating the Conditions” and the work that has spun out from it, because this is Coventry’s freelance workforce – the independent arts sector – collectively signing up to the future to make it better – accountable to ourselves, our colleagues and to those who will come after us. We’re asking artists, citizens, decision makers and cultural leaders to join us in imagining a better future for our city, and to join forces with us in working to realise it. If the event we plan can bring currently divided people back together to think about moving forwards, to imagining and building a better future for us all, then it’s surely worth the risk of criticism.

---