It’s quite a time to reflect on the brutality of an oppressive and exclusive arts and cultural sector. The tomato soup has barely dried on Van Gogh’s sunflowers and in the aftermath of Just Stop Oil activists glueing themselves to the wall of the National Gallery in the fight against fossil fuels, social media is still debating the personal politics of the artist and the appropriate forms of protest.
At best, this is a sector that operates in an Equality-Diversity-Inclusion paradigm, not even honest about its harm, extraction and complicity, never mind equipped to create structural shifts of power. While simultaneously addressing the positive contributions of the arts, many of our most acclaimed institutions are funded by the same oil companies exacerbating harm, violence and state-sanctioned death.
Throughout history, the art world — whether public sector or private industry — has amassed and sustained significant wealth, land and resources through the colonial acquisition of property, and which continues to distribute resources inequitably. Those who challenge this reality are censored; anti-Blackness and ableism are defaults; and the autocratic hierarchies which govern it are interested in maintaining power, status, and answer only to boards which are made up of the usual suspects: typically white, middle-class, privileged people with “strong networks”. What does it mean to mobilise change, when this is the dominating condition?
The Abolitionist Invitation
What is it to reimagine the cultural sector as an ecology that orients towards life instead of death? At MAIA, we’re inspired by the invitation that abolition presents: to imagine a world free from carceral systems, is to imagine life-affirming ones. As abolitionist scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore says, “abolition is about presence, not absence. It’s about building life-affirming institutions.”
“What is, so to speak, the object of abolition? Not so much the abolition of prisons but the abolition of a society that could have prisons […] therefore not abolition as the elimination of anything, but abolition as the founding of a new society.”
– Stefano Harney and Fred Moten
Grounded in the understanding of abolitionist organising as a creation project, our work is actively imagining and prototyping what the cultural landscape might look like if we were to orient towards a regenerative, liberatory horizon. Instead of sustaining injustice and practices that are rooted in punishment, we’re interrogating how change is ideated and rehearsed, at both the grassroots and broader systems level.
MAIA’s vision is a world towards liberation, in which artists are resourced and mobilised to reimagine its possibilities. Our mission is to grow capacity for collective world-building, where Black imagination and culture are the starting points.
We explore this by prototyping ideas, spaces, relationships and work that situate across three intersecting mission strands:
- Sites of Imagination: we create physical and virtual spaces, centring economic, healing and spatial justice through place-based prototypes. We also share our practice, working with communities across the world to reimagine public, cultural spaces as convening portals to rehearse the worlds we dream of.
- Resourcing the Movement: we support the capacity of artists and the communities they’re embedded in, to shape change. We do this by facilitating decentralised mechanisms to meet the various and expansive needs of people — be that financial, creative, access, spiritual or any other — inspired by the invitation of mutual aid.
- Culture x Liberation: we advocate artists as the designers, practitioners, storytellers and worldbuilders for liberation. Our cultural programmes and residencies draw upon Black scholarship and community practice to explore the role of art(ists) in growing public consciousness, mobilising for change and rehearsing freedom.
Practicing Liberation, Shaping Change
In pragmatic terms, here are some of the ways we’re embedding the abolitionist invitation in our practice.
- [Radical Structuring]
As Grace Lee Boggs said, “you have to transform yourself to transform the world.” If we understand that our large complex systems are made up of many micro relationships and patterns, then we must see ourselves as a fractal of a reality we want to live in. If our wider systems need to transform to make the ‘life-affirming’ possible, then it requires our organisations and our understanding of governance to radically transform.
Over the past two years, we’ve been working with Hanna Thomas Uose of Align, who has been guiding us as we redesign our organisational structure to be in deeper synchronicity with our values, vision, mission and external practice.
Throughout this process, Hanna helped us to develop an organisational structure in the form of a solar system. Instead of a role, like a CEO or Chair in a centralised or hierarchical position, which we know isn’t sustainable in movement work, MAIA’s solar system places our mission and vision at the centre as the Sun. Different roles and relationships have different proximities to the Sun — those who hold MAIA’s mission tighter are more proximate, collaborative teams or assemblages (constellations) form around mission strands (planets) and streams of work (moons). We also acknowledge our mission is interdependent with the missions of those beyond our organisation and understand that we are shaped by, held in balance and in relationship with other solar systems.
The structure is neither hierarchical nor flat, but alive, of organic matter and interdependent with other mission-led organisations orienting towards a shared horizon.
We’ll be writing more on this soon. You can also see Hanna’s reflections here.
- [Life-Affirming Contracts]
Working with Hanna on transforming governance, lots of questions surfaced regarding operations, pay structures, policies and contracts. As an organisation that started from one volunteer, to a salaried team of 8, there have been many steep learning curves. We only became an employer in 2020 and with very few precedents for what ‘good’ looked like in employment practice, we always knew we needed to reimagine working relationships while building the road, when trying to organise for liberation.
To explore this further, MAIA joined a peer-group catalysed by Dark Matter Labs, as part of their #BeyondtheRules work to reimagine employment contracts. In framing contracting as a verb, we saw the full stack of what it takes to ‘relationship’ well.
Our particular interest is in the detail of how we align our legal requirements and due-diligence with life-affirming practice. As a Limited Community Interest Company that abides by English law and reports to the CIC regulator, Companies House and HMRC, we have adopted the many default ways to do due diligence. But these lead to carceral defaults. Language like “probationary period”, “policy”, “review”, “termination” “disciplinary” sit in opposition to life-affirming relationships.
While we started to make iterative changes to our employment benefits to include extensive parental leave, a company access pot, personal wellbeing budgets and paid development days — which was a key part of our fundraising strategy in 2021/22 — we have now begun to also redraft our language and internal practice (policies) to reflect this in employment agreements. We are continuing to interrogate what an abolitionist relationship could look like in a labour exchange.
- [YARD]
YARD is a new typology of space — as a part community hub, part residency space, part work space in a townhouse. Informed by the compounding crises in the age of COVID-10, we intentionally designed YARD’s programme and shared our resources freely to create different types of invitations to be in relationship, and to demarcate a shift away from exclusive and normative arts spaces, into a site of imagination. Part of imagining new spaces involves starting with new precedents. Rather than seeing a white cube gallery as the starting point for designing an arts space, YARD’s journey began with the inquiry: what happens if we start with Grandad’s house? What happens when we start with spaces that make us feel safe, which invite hospitality, wellness, joy, fluidity, and which feel in the same spirit of the places and people we want to honour? And how might these new precedents free up our assumptions, and help us realise more things are possible?
- [Radical Imagination Lab: Life Affirming Infrastructures]
As students of this work, our Radical Imagination Lab is a programme of work rooted in an inquiry that speaks to MAIA’s mission. Our first lab, Life Affirming Infrastructures (May-July 2022), inspired by the words of Ruth Wilson Gilmore, was a season of learning and making for us and our community. Together, we explored abolition as a creation project, particularly in the role of culture as a visionary tool. From workshops on design fiction as a means of holding complexity, to talks on non-hierarchical structures, to a week-long Cypher where we freestyled on everything from Doughnut Economics to more-than-human accountabilities, we were transformed by so many of the ideas and reflections which emerged across the duration. All of this was deepened by the offerings from our artist-in-residence, Rene Francis-McBrearty, who throughout the Lab responded and contributed to the materials and conversations through their own creative practice, leading to the formation of their land justice project, Star Flower Club.
- [YARD Arts School]
YARD Arts School is a radical arts school built around Black thought and creative practice, Over two weeks, this became an open invitation for artists-in-residence and our community to use culture as a means of exploring MAIA’s inquiries. In doing so, we use the school as an invitation to deconstruct some of the systems and structures which decimate our relationships, environments and ways of being.
The provocation of our first school, ‘Imagine a World Without Prisons’ became a way to explore all facets of the criminal justice system, the insidious ways that policing shows up in our communities, the social prisons and expectations in which we’re confined, and the instinct for punishment which we inflict on strangers, loved ones, and ourselves.
By building a learning space which encouraged intuitive making, which placed ‘play’ at the heart of its curriculum, and created capacity for people who wouldn’t call themselves artists to see how materials and creativity might give form to some of their most complex feelings, Arts School became a reimagining of pedagogy. This reimagining was deeply inspired by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, who writes in Undrowned:
‘We are struggling because, over and over again, we feel like we are not good enough family members, but what if we just need to go back to school? Meaning, what if there is no such thing as “good enough” in structures too small for the necessary adaptations of life? What if all those ways we feel like failures in our families are not failures at all, but a pre-school lesson that could teach us to restructure our care?’
Challenges of Seeding New Paradigms
Change does not manifest immediately. In fact, as a team of artists and cultural workers, we understand our work as rehearsing change. We are not working from a place of answers; we’re wayfinding, testing out new ways of working, making and being in relationship with each other. On top of this, the conditions we work in are always shifting and are always precarious. Our communities are experiencing constant and ever-worsening forms of crisis. We are trying to build new systems and structures, whilst navigating the problems of the ones we currently exist in. The challenges of doing all this, inside of tension and uncertainty, while trying to deepen the work and strategise, is inescapable.
Since our origins, we do this work while under-resourced, and with no financial runway. In order to get resources at scale to cover adequate salaries and rising operating costs, we work in partnerships with clashing timelines. Or we have to appeal to funders who often do not understand or recognise our work as something rooted in emergence and tending to conditions, rather than work which has predictable outputs and outcomes. We then have to piecemeal opportunities and finances in order to create good jobs, beyond-bare-minimum benefits and care budgets for people marginalised by systems within and beyond the cultural sector.
MAIA has grown from a single volunteer to a team of eight on payroll, in a short space of time. 2020 was the first time anyone became salaried, after receiving a capacity-building grant. Learning to grow well, learning to manage and be responsible for a group of people, is a complex, difficult and often contradictory process. All of the team come to this work as people who have been harmed, hurt, undervalued and/or erased by other places of work and relationships. These wounds show up in complicated ways. But they also remind us of the urgency of healing justice inside our movements. We can’t build anew without tending to the harm our communities have faced; it will always surface.
We acknowledge this critical need for capacity and healing justice while working in impossible conditions. We are trying to operate beyond normative practice and defaults. There are no precedents for this in our sector; we are bravely stepping into new territories all of the time, and this always comes with risk and learning, which requires patience, reciprocity and mutuality by those we’re in relationship with. Often, this isn’t conducive to people tending to their own urgencies.
Even with Disability Justice as a central framework, we can’t meet everyone’s needs all of the time. While operating in a working paradigm, we are learning to respond to fluidity and to changes of needs, with no adequate resource to actually be able deliver the level of care, options and flexibility we’re dreaming of. But this is an iterative process.
Mission-led organisations who lead boldly with their principles and values are often expected to have immediate solutions for their community’s interconnected struggles, situated beyond any one organisation’s remit. Thus, these organisations are held under relentless levels of scrutiny, expectation, accusations and demand. The impacts of austerity politics and economic crisis means that some needs which should be tended to by community, family, peers, the State, etc, aren’t, due to lack of resource and the decimation of welfare and community infrastructure. In their absence, one organisation can’t do or be everything to everyone, but may be expected to fill various gaps for many people at any one time. It is a challenge to manage this, set clear expectations and hold boundaries when you’re often the only entity or place a member of your community has to go. We often become a placeholder for the frustrations and disappointment of people failed or compromised by capitalism.
Even with new organisational structures, even with setting up accountability lines, even with growing slow collaborations, even with piecing together just about enough resource to make something transformative happen, these things take time to put into practice. This means that risk, responsibility and care often isn’t evenly distributed across the team, which can slow work, evade rigour, result in burn out, and lead to mission-drift.
“If collective access is revolutionary love without charity, how do we learn to love each other? How do we learn to do this love work of collective care that lifts us instead of abandons us, that grapples with all the deep ways in which care is complicated?”
- Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
On The Horizon
As a continual enquiry of a life-affirming cultural sector, our next phase of work helps us to deepen our collective worldbuilding practice:
- [Disability Justice Labs]
Disability Justice Labs are peer spaces, in partnership with Hazel Sealeaf, exploring how Disability Justice informs imagination to liberation practice, particularly in how it pertains to space, relationships and resourcing. We begin this process by inviting some peers to go on a journey with us. In 2023, we’ll be going on deeper dives into spatial, relational and resource design for collective liberation, through a lens shaped by Sins Invalid’s ’10 Principles of Disability Justice’.
- [Accounting in the Black Imagination]
Interrogating the foundations law is built upon and detangling the stories we tell around finance, ‘Accounting in the Black Imagination’ is a residency for invited artists-in-residence, using Indigenous wisdom, craft and Black imagination as the lens to explore new possibilities for accounting, data analysis and organisational storytelling. This residency was shaped following a worldshifting conversation with artist Jack Ky Tan.
- [Governance and Structuring]
We’re moving into the next stage of detailed design around embedding solar system governance into practice. The key focuses are: mission stewarding, accountability and relationshipping in decentralised leadership. We’ll share more about this, as we continue to explore bio-reconciliation, informed by biomimicry, in organisational structures.
We’re very conscious, embracing and intentional about our work being experimental, iterative and emergent. We consider MAIA a learning organisation, where we come together with our ecosystem as both students and practitioners, imagining, rehearsing and iterating possibilities for change. If you’re interested in exploring how our experiments align with your organisation or practice, we’d love you to join us or get in touch.
