Audre Lorde said “there is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.” Our times are far more complex, messy and non-linear than our understanding, current commitments or posture is prepared to tend to.
It should not be lost on us that our world is crumbling. Human-induced warming is escalating us all towards irreversibility. We’re up 1.1°C on pre-industrial era temperature, which spells catastrophic for our planetary and ecological health. Biblical floods and destructive storms are rampant globally, along with chronic heatwaves and multiple pandemics amidst cascading crises. All the while, energy companies are reporting astronomical profit figures at the same time prices are soaring, while inflation forces everything to go up except wages. Civilians are punching climate activists blocking them from getting to work. Twitter is now ‘X’. Aliens are being acknowledged in Congress. Marine mammals are organising a revolution from their now boiling springs. Without a doubt, the walls are tumbling down.
As Bayo Akomolafe teaches us, “the times are urgent — let us slow down.” This slowing down invites, not a slowing of pace in and of itself, but a grappling with depth. Let us deepen our perspectives, our horizons, our analysis, our capacity to be honest. Let us acknowledge that ‘business as usual’ is literally killing us.
What is the role of culture here, amidst such troubling, apocalyptic times? Sure, entertainment is nice and there are individualised wellbeing benefits to engaging with the arts. But in a world that continues to spill, does this not become redundant? Our situating of art and culture could — and must — be so much more expansive than our current framings. Even in the present, we are stifled by how we think about impact and metrics, measuring what makes little sense in an already decaying world. We need more than plasters over septic wounds.
We find ourselves in a context that recognises investment in culture is important for the vitality of places. But what do we mean by ‘place’ in diasporic times; when war, climate collapse, landlordism, mass development and economic crises are enforcing movement, growing a type of artificial, nonconsensual impermanence? The edges are blurring. What if we understood that our places are never fixed, finished or finite? Neither are we. How might we then engage with culture, as though change is the only constant, as Octavia Butler reminds us.
What does it mean to mobilise change when the dominant condition of our field is rooted in the hoarding of power, wealth, land and resources? Or when erasure, classism, racism, ableism and other tactics of ‘otherness’ are the default?
What if we engaged culture as strategy in cultivating a more liberatory paradigm? What if we reimagined the cultural sector as a cultural ecology that orients towards presence, where infrastructures, resources and relationships are layered, dynamic and regenerative?
What would we build?
Maybe we’d reimagine spaces as loving sites of imagination, designed to be regenerative across scales, because we build what we believe. These sites of imagination could be ongoing spaces with play, rest, sharing, connection, pause, collective dreaming, gardening, making, healing, repair and worlding designed into the very fabric. Maybe these cultural infrastructures would be committed and adequately resourced at the earliest stages of development, instead of retrofit ‘solutions’ to ‘placemaking’. Maybe these infrastructures wouldn’t apply short-term ‘solutionism’ approaches to the climate crisis while constantly falling behind in their own environmental responsibilities. Maybe even before beginning to build something, we would understand there is no way of building a regenerative anything, without placing our more-than-human accountabilities at the centre of our spatial enquiries.
And when we say we are accountable to more than the ‘human’, we’d recognise our plant, animal and other nonhuman kin as relatives, rather than commodities, liabilities or nuisances. When we say we are accountable to more than the ‘human’, we’d see how the subjectivity of the term creates supremacies and how few have been afforded the privileges of such a categorisation. Meanwhile, people who are disabled, queer, Black, racialised, poor, asylum-seeking, gender non-conforming, elderly, for example, are actively erased, made disposable, harmed, violated or denied access to even the most basic affordances preserved for the ‘human’. When we say we are accountable to more than the ‘human’, we’d acknowledge the lineages and ancestors cultivating possibilities in impossible times before us, as well as the future ancestors to come. When we say we are accountable to more than the ‘human’, we’d acknowledge the new postures, practices and commitments required for our ecological and environmental responsibility. Perhaps we’d even acknowledge the atrocities enacted in the name of ‘human’-centred design, and sharply pivot to a more-than-human cosmology. We imagine in this paradigm, we might have an altered consideration of what matters.
What would we build?
Maybe we’d redistribute or recirculate our resources to meet the expansive needs of people, in which no one is made disposable. Perhaps we’d acknowledge the material, access, health, artistic and spiritual needs within this expansiveness. We’d see our budgets as an offering of our moral codes, and perhaps we’d reimagine the spaces we exercise our values here too.
To reorient towards this type of reciprocal generosity, perhaps we’d spend time getting intimate with our fears, the anxieties and the scarcity that sits at the base of our impulses to hoard wealth. Perhaps we might even need to create our own language to express the tangibles and intangibles of our work, because the binary 0 and 1 system of fiscal accounting, for example, tells one narrow and easily skewed picture where fiction masquerades as fact. And yet in this type of due dilgience paradigm, we might struggle to talk about other types of impact, so we risk erasing altogether the other, richer narratives of ‘ins, outs and loops’. When we desperately need deeper accountabilities and accountable practices in these times, perhaps we’d reframe what we consider due diligence to be.
What would we build?
Maybe we’d look at our investment in art and culture as rehearsal for who we want to be, beyond the individualised pursuit. Could we see that our programmes, artistic enquiries, venues, activities, partnerships, decision-making and ways of being are not just self-determined as important but rehearsal rooms for liberation, space to work through in all its messy, at-times-painful, heart-wrenching, necessary complexity.
Here, we expand what it means to even be an artist, giving form to new possibilities and narratives of ourselves, in turn liberating culture from its own colonial-imprinted shackles. Here, we might grow our collective imagination and understand creativity as a way to prototype the world that we are dreaming of. For that to be an authentic inquiry, we’d try to create the capacity for magic in the every day, rather than a fleeting, momentary occurrence.
What would we build?
This is not a speculative exercise.
Sometimes the magnitude of what we are yearning for feels too great for us to even begin. We feel like this type of reorientation is so impossible, so grand that we stagnate. But this is not a speculative exercise. We don’t have to get lost in the feeling of starting from scratch. Because we aren’t.
10 years ago, MAIA began as project to unpack how we could create these loving spaces and infrastructures between us as a network of artists, creatives and culture-makers who felt disinvested in or othered by the current system. MAIA began from a frustration that the people with the ideas, passion, commitment, love and ideas for their places are usually the ones most disconnected from resources to make change happen there, but wanting to employ a type of poetic pragmatism against the tide of systematic barriers.
Together, engaging in a systemic analysis of our current paradigm and its harmful, extractive, inequitable defaults, we began co-investing in building alternative possibilities using culture as strategy. We took these guiding ‘what if’ questions and set out to explore what we could build instead. The people of the city got behind us. Over time, those who knew that ‘business as usual’ was killing us — the artists, organisations and fellow poetic pragmatists from across the country — and eventually across the world — joined our mission.
Working to build real-time systems demonstrators of these possibilities, our practice is explored through three mission strands: ‘Sites of Imagination’, ‘Culture x Liberation’ and ‘Resourcing the Movement’, while the organisation itself becomes a testbed for organisational forms, tactics and structures needed to support this liberatory paradigm.
In 2020, when we set out tor raise £2,000 to distribute to artists we knew were slipping through the gaps of infrastructural provision in COVID-19, the people got behind us. We crowdfunded and redistributed £10,000 within 3 weeks. By the end of 2021, we had invested over £250,000 to culture makers by way of hardship grants, funds, commissions, access resources, wellbeing support, and (relatively) secure employment.
In the same year, when we got the keys to YARD, to reimagine a 4 bedroom townhouse into our first Site of Imagination, in the spirit of Grandad’s house, the city got behind us.
Now for context, Grandad’s house is the most convivial, joyful, loving space you could imagine. A house full of laughter, music, food, conversation, soul, Grandad’s house was the neighbourhood’s cultural infrastructure never included in city mapping projects. A pristine front room, covered in a growing collection of plastic-wrapped furniture, ornaments and photos of everybody’s children. An animated living room: debates and dominoes at the dining table too big for the size of the room, a phone call from Sister Francis whose safe return home invites rejoicing from Nana, toddlers dancing in front of the television, Aunties singing their hearts out, the scent of soul food filling the air. Teenagers lining the stairway creating their own sanctuaries. Grandad was the first and greatest storyteller, generations of children joyfully gathering at his feet as he shape-shifted, retold fables and induced wonder. Why would we not build from this spirit?
When we set out to develop an artist-led hotel called ABUELOS, that held the spirit of Grandad’s house and would steer the cultural sector’s extensive accommodation budgets away from private hotel chains and extractive landlords back into Birmingham, the city got behind us. The generosity of the city’s cultural leaders — who shared their budgets, offered their support, gave their time, connected us to resource and advocated for MAIA — seeded a whole new set of possibilities. When cities around the world invited us to come and share our practice, to support place-based iterations
It started with Grandad’s house and the beauty of the every day. That is to say, we need new visions and precedents for what we build and how we lead.
Relational ecology as strategy
This is not a speculative exercise. These loving structures exist all around us. There’s Soul City Arts, consistently showing up in disinvested in Birmingham communities, bringing people together in interfaith, intercultural convening at beautiful scales. There’s BOM, who are actively raising investment and reviving one of the city’s most loved and historic music venues to develop the Digital Centre for Inclusion, while constantly opening doors for other leaders to access opportunity because their director Karen Newman understands that the story of BOM is interdependent with the rest of the cultural ecology. There’s Grand Union who are working to ensure artists — who the cultural sector’s value is built upon but are disproportinionatley invested in — have permanent spaces to grow their practice, make work and access opportunities. There’s Civic Square, who are engaging in everyday acts of creativity as strategy for ecological, social and climate transition at the scale of a neighbourhood. There are already a wealth of collectives, independent artists and many others who operate beyond the constraints of ‘organisation’ who are doing this work. And this is just to get started.
So what will we build? We have already started. We know this work is messy, complex and constantly jars against the normative environs we’ve all been raised in. This is why de-centring ourselves is so critical. In isolation, resorting to defaults in which accountability orients around supremacy is convenient. Collectively, new openings emerge, deeper accountabilities grow.
We consider ourselves within a wide-ranging, interdependent ecology, extending beyond the arts because we know that a single issue approach to change-based work isn’t an appropriate tactic. Our ecology is made up of an entangled network of organisations and practitioners exploring wealth distribution, transformative governance, healing justice, land stewardship, intergenerational learning, community-led development and much more, all of whom hold the compounding, complex crises of our times central while facing a shared horizon. The question is what forms of resistance are we encountering along the way and how can our wider field’s collective leverage be utilised to support the more regenerative, just paradigms we’re calling for? Here’s to facing the task with unparalleled bravery, because this is not a speculative exercise. May we slow down. May we commit to depth.
