I presented this at Historical Materialism Toronto on Sunday, May 13 at York University, Toronto. I was part of a panel entitled Spaces and Forms of Resistance, with distinct but complementary (and very good!) presentations by Clare O’Connor and Elise Danielle Thorburn. Comments on this paper, as well as criticism and so on, are welcome. Some rights reserved: cc by-nc-sa 2012 Kris Erickson. The abstract is immediately below, with the full text after the jump.

Creating Resistance: Exploring the Spaces of Community Artists’ Work

This paper will consider how contemporary uses of camera-based technologies in instances of Community Cultural Development (CCD) effectively function as counterhegemonic cultural strategies. In New Creative Community (2006), Arlene Goldbard positions CCD practices as cultural in the broadest sense: that is, as concerned, on the one hand, with nourishing the diversity of cultural life and preserving the variety of its forms of production; yet interested, on the other hand, in dismantling artificial boundaries erected within mainstream culture between and amongst the spheres of art, economics, and politics. In this paper, I will draw on my dissertation field research and interview data from contemporary Southern Ontario CCD practices and practitioners. Through a discourse analysis of these sources and their products, I will explore how camera technologies coupled with CCD practices constitute a transformative mode of cultural production. I will argue further that such a creative, emancipatory politics suggests important techniques for opening up the possibilities of who can participate in public discourse and democratic action by shifting the grounds upon which such discourse occurs, and by expanding the repertoire available for cultural action. I will draw on the interdisciplinary thought of Goldbard, Steve Edwards, Diana Taylor, Jacques Rancière and others to critically interrogate the possibilities, as well as the limits, of such camera-based communicative strategies and the varieties of community and culture they claim to foster.

My research looks at the practice of community arts in Toronto, also known as community cultural development, in order to understand the ways it impacts these communities in a context of postmodern globalization and neoliberal economic and cultural austerity. I don’t have enough time to attempt an exhaustive definition of community arts – it is an expansive umbrella for a whole host of lo- and high-tech cultural production practices. I’ll borrow Arlene Goldbard’s summary from her book, New Creative Communities (2006): “‘Community cultural development’ describes the work of artist-organizers and other community members collaborating to express identity, concerns and aspirations through the arts and communications media. It is a process that simultaneously builds individual mastery and collective cultural capacity while contributing to positive social change.” The key terms employed by Goldbard – “community,” “culture,” “art,” “artist-organizer” – while I don’t dispute them, are complex, and need far more elaboration than I can provide here.

In any case, I’m interested in community arts and particularly those practices that employ cameras. When utilized in these contexts, I believe photorealistic imagery, and the kinds of cultural and ethical issues that emerge when people make camera-based pictures, affect how the community “identity, concerns and aspirations” that Goldbard talks about get envisioned and imagined. I hope to say a few tentative words near the end of my presentation about the aestheticization of everyday life that camera-based practices in community arts afford their practitioners.

However, to begin, I’ll describe a few of the experiences I’ve had, and attempt to address why I believe they encourage a host of creative and aesthetic practices which attempt to resist, with varying degrees of success, the lean social context of the prevailing neoliberal order. I originally proposed to engage with some of the theory that I see informing the practices occurring in these sites. Given the time I have and the still early stage I am at in analyzing my fieldwork, I thought it better to invert this aim, and instead focus on an account of the practices themselves.

In the Fall of last year and the Winter of this, I worked with MABELLEarts, an organization initiated by and still affiliated with the Toronto community theatre company Jumblies. MABELLEarts is located in Mabelle Park, a high density Toronto Community Housing complex in Central Etobicoke populated disproportionately by low-income, immigrant, elderly and visible minority individuals and families relative to the immediately surrounding, more affluent neighbourhoods. I helped residents make pinhole cameras as part of a weekly two-hour drop-in session, in support of a project artist who was leading the sessions. Over about four weeks we had roughly 20 cameras started. Very low tech, they were made out of cardboard, tape, and aluminum pop cans. By January, we had about eight of the 20 completed, with many of the cameras left incomplete because participants chose to engage in some other on-going activity; in the multi-purpose space where we worked, people were encouraged to join in music and singing sessions, embroidery, or a kind of pastel drawing activity. Each evening, a few people cooked a communal meal in an adjacent kitchen, converted at the special request of MABELLEarts and active tenants to TCHC to support the drop-in work, and more besides. This “ladies cooking circle,” as it’s called, would prepare a simple meal each night to be shared by all of the workshop participants, the MABELLEarts facilitators, and even some non-participating residents looking for company – whomever happened to be in the room. All were welcome. So that’s the context: it was a very open-ended and emergent space in which art, music, cooking, storytelling and conversation would happen with residents, resident-artists, and guests of the MABELLEarts organization.

Near the end of December, one elderly women lit up when she put the last pieces of tape on her cardboard pinhole camera – “I made a camera!” she exclaimed, her enthusiasm resembling the exuberance of the youngest of the drop-in residents, which were children aged about six. She never took a picture with it – the making was enough for her, it seemed.

I recall a conversation with another woman who modelled patiently for a still life, holding her hand steady amongst some textiles and objects arranged according to her own design on a tabletop. A long exposure was demanded by these cameras through a combination of dim light and their tiny, pinhole apertures. During the exposure, with nothing much to do besides waiting and people watching, she spoke candidly, telling fragments of stories that amounted to a troubled life. I was astonished by the willingness to share and the rawness of the details – she really held little back, even though I made no explicit prompts apart from a few mute nods. I was humbled by her trust. She spoke despite this being the first time I had met her, and indeed the only time I’ve ever seen her. I believe something about the fabric of the space, the ways it had been shaped over years of engagement with her and the community in general, facilitated such trust.

Another night, one young girl, a regular, posed for a portrait. High energy though she typically was, she willed herself to stillness for the few minutes it took to make the exposure – with a pinhole camera, remember – resting her head on the back of her chair, and calling upon an internal focus I previously would have not thought possible from her.

In short, the drop-in space, frenetic though it often became, was nevertheless a thoughtfully constructed event, the result of several years of MABELLEarts being in the community, along with a highly reflexive awareness of the changing needs, interests, and energies of the residents that developed as a result. It resembled an eddy in a stream: a time and place to dwell together in a community otherwise marked by a kind of migratory impermanence and cultural heterogeneity that seemed more often to divide residents rather than give them a reason to come together. As MABELLEarts Artistic Director, Leah Houston, represents it, “What we do is make art with people who live here in order to transform [these] public spaces while learning how to inhabit those spaces in new ways.”

This past March break, I helped facilitate a digital story workshop with youth residents of Swansea Mews, just west of High Park. “Swansea,” or “The Mews” (never both, according to the residents), is another TCH complex, though comprised of lower density townhomes rather than multi-storey high rises like many TCH complexes. Nevertheless, Swansea is home to a disproportionate number of immigrant, low-income and visible minority individuals and families when compared with the surrounding neighbourhoods of Windemere, Queensway, High Park or Bloor West Village.

Digital story, in a nutshell, is a process through which participants create a personal, though not necessarily private, story in a digital video format. It’s in a documentary rather than in a fictional mode, though because it’s narrated from a first-person perspective, it often incorporates fictional elements.

This particular session was part of an Ontario Arts Council pilot grant that put North York Community House, or NYCH, a multi-service settlement agency, together with Four Villages Community Health Centre. Unlike MABELLEarts, which is principally an arts organization, NYCH is principally a social service agency, as is Four Villages. Their roots in their constituent communities and the resulting relationships they have with people are thus different, though the OAC grant represents an attempt by NYCH to broaden and deepen those roots through different forms of engagement beyond mere service provision, such as arts-based engagement.

In any case, we ran the workshop from Tuesday through Thursday of that week. This particular digital story method – I have been graciously reminded that there are others – this one begins with a story circle in which participants, one by one, begin to tell a story they have in mind. They were asked to come prepared, perhaps even with something written, but at least with an image or a moment in mind. They were asked to narrate this moment of significance to the others, whether in whole or in part, and were prepared for the possibility that the story might change, subtly or drastically, as they developed it. The story circle also demand that participants listen, and learn to listen, to the stories that their peers also have to tell.

Despite the workshop happening during their March break – their week off from school, and during a spell of unseasonably warm weather that threatened the sedentary editing work – the youth were eager participants. Indeed, of the nine that started, only one didn’t complete. I was a little discouraged at first by how often so many of them asked “I can do that?” or “I can say that?” with respect to including certain images or saying certain things as part of their story-making process. It seemed a kind of self-censorship, presumably acquired through all kinds of encounters with authority and dominant culture. However, they were eager to push many of these boundaries when their stories demanded it, and test the limits of what they are supposed to say and show. I was quite impressed by the acuity with which they spoke about the example stories that were screened to give them a taste of what digital stories looked like. They recognized, and spoke quite precisely, about what they saw and why an author included certain images and sounds to evoke fear, anger, anxiety, or whatever. It indicated to me the sophisticated knowledge they already possessed and that, judging by the number of ambivalent comments made about their schools and local authority figures, they had not been typically given credit for, nor asked to voice.

During the second day it became pedagogically important to the facilitators to divide the group so that some would stay to audio record their stories while others would roam the neighbourhood with digital cameras and video recorders to gather images and sounds to layer in beside their audio tracks. Despite the acuity they earlier showed in analyzing the digital stories of others, both groups had a tough time making their own pictures in this kind of materials-gathering stage. While there were clear exceptions to this trend, many showed reluctance to even handle the cameras until after the editing work was well underway. Even then, there was a great deal of prompting to encourage how they might illustrate their work without being overly didactic about it.

For example, one boy wanted to recreate a fight he had with another. The conflict was central to his story. Rather than try to track down his adversary, an impractical solution since he probably wouldn’t want to participate in any case, we managed to make a series of detail shots that evoked moments of the argument without dwelling on the specifics of the fight – the point was in the working through, not the conflict itself. While all were quick to pick up the narrative value of such symbolic communicating, it became evident that few had any on-going chance to engage in such fundamental communicative modes. The workshop created a significant, if temporary, space for practical and communicative possibilities not typically open to such participants.

Finally, I will quickly describe the large-scale photographic portraits that were hung or wheat-pasted along the stretch of Queen Street that’s within Toronto’s Parkdale. Inspired by the work of French street artist JR, these images were full colour photos of participants from the community arts organization Making Room, taken as they meditated – meditation being a crucial part of that practice. In describing this series, entitled “Portraits of Silence,” Making Room’s Artistic Director, Michael Burtt, suggested the images both resembled and yet failed to fulfill the rhetorical tone of advertising imagery. Local residents recognized their peers, and had conversations with folks they may not have otherwise ever engaged in. Non-residents and those travelling through the community struck up conversations – with Michael, with Making Room participants, and with others – about the point of the images (“What are they selling?”), particularly as the images started to deteriorate through weather and vandalism. The effect, in short, was that the everydayness of people’s experience of Parkdale was transformed, in some cases significantly, in others only slightly. Much like at MABELLEarts or in Swansea, the space of the community was changed as a result, in large part due to the collaborative nature of the art, and the unfamiliar claims it made of public space.

I have tried to suggest that the kinds of spaces that get created through community arts practices are distinct from the habitual spaces people occupy as members of a community. However, I don’t want to seem simply celebratory, or claim that these spaces are, by default, resistant to broader neoliberal practices. Indeed, I think here that a weak version of community arts might be differentiated from a strong version: the former being identified, for example, by tenuous ties to existing community, more temporally limited engagements, or an arbitrary focusing of “audiences” for projects. Youth-oriented mural projects, or photovoice projects with, say, single mothers as participants are two common examples I would cite as the weak version of community arts. While space may indeed be created in such community arts projects, I have serious concerns about how temporary it may in fact be and how little agency might be acquired, both by artists and participants, in terms of the resistance to neoliberalism I discussed earlier. The practices that I have detailed veer much more toward the strong version, I feel. They presume and commit to an already existing cultural infrastructure of sorts, integrating into and supporting an existing web of relations, and they demand far greater engagement and responsibility from participants over a more indefinite span of time. It is in such a context that resistance becomes at least conceivable, if not put into practice through non-commercial, non-commodifiable art and cultural production practices.

I have also tried to suggest that photorealistic images and, perhaps more importantly participant-centered camera-based practices in community arts uniquely contribute to how these spaces become manifest as resistive practices. In part this is because of the ubiquity and accessibility of camera technology; however, more importantly are the ways images and their authorship seem conducive to the collaborative practices of community arts – practices that value learning through experience, and that take the material conditions of local, everyday life as significant. At their best, camera-based community arts images seem constructed in ways that are not readily commodifiable, since the significance performed and encoded is not easily communicable beyond geographically and culturally delimited audiences. Thus, despite standard claims to photorealism’s objectivity or “universality,” community arts implementations introduce a crucially affective and performative dimension which demands a more active and interactive decoding. This is because camera-based practices are utilized at least as much in cultural production processes as they are in the results of those practices. Reassigning priority from product to process, image to image-making is not without its contradictions of course, but the shift helps support community arts practices to develop resistance to and rejection of the kinds of social and cultural separations that seem to so profoundly demarcate the terrain of our everyday lived experiences at present.