With for About 2018: Making a Meal of It

For this special edition of our With For About conference series, we hosted the fifth Staging Post of the Collaborative Arts Partnership Programme (CAPP), an ambitious transnational cultural programme focusing on the dynamic area of collaborative arts across Europe.

With For About aims to create a space to discuss and reflect on the fierce and urgent questions facing collaborative and social art today. Making A Meal Of It is the third iteration of our conference series. With For About 2018 took place on Tuesday 17th April at St Helens Town Hall and on t Wednesday 18th April at Tate Liverpool.

We invited participants (who would normally be understood as conference delegates) to collectively create, serve, and eat a meal. We wanted to use this collective task as the basis of a shared discussion that addresses the issues we are concerned with: of documentation, knowledge sharing, building a lexicon, building an archive, supporting artists and workers. We want to collectively publish a document within the timeframe of the gathering.

Our collective task was:

To produce a dinner course, present it in a meaningful way; document the process and the event; contribute to discussion; submit a page for publication.

A support structure will be in place to help you realise the contribution you want to make. No pre-conference preparation is necessary. All your experience is useful.

Why are we doing this?

We want participants at this gathering to have a collective experience in space and time. We want to embody the values we expound. We want to reflect on a common task.

We wish to symbolically and actively ‘enact’ the principles we seek to discuss, to work together bringing different experiences and perspectives together through artistic endeavour.

Participants will explore the principles of collaboration through doing, and over the course of a day forge relationships, making a meal and creating meaning in the process. We will reflect on the experience we have embarked on together as a way to explore some of the urgent questions we encounter in our work. We will share the knowledge we uncover with the wider sector.

A number of conference bursaries (up to £100 per individual) were available for artists and independent producers and curators to contribute towards travel, accommodation, subsistence, childcare and/or access costs. Priority was given to those who would otherwise be unable to attend.

Afternoon Activities at Tate Liverpool

Following the conference, With For About attendees were invited to join us for an afternoon of activities at Tate Liverpool:

A Conversation on Place-Making, as part of Engaging Places: Collaborative Praxis in Art and Architecture at Tate Exchange, presented six leading Irish practitioners in the area of collaborative art and architecture. The practitioners were; artist Michelle Browne, curators Rosie Lynch and Eilís Lavelle from Callan Workhouse Union, artist / architect Blaithin Quinn, and architects Emmett Scanlon and Laurence Lord from Out.Post.Office. Their practices examine how socially engaged art and architectural practices critically engage in questions of spatial justice and influence how we create a sense of place and community in the built environment.

This Tate Exchange conversation on the theme of ‘place-making’ was part of a programme of activities including open studio sessions, discussions and workshops, as a way of initiating further creative works.

An opportunity meet Brazilian Collective Opavivara! and discuss their practice as they begin to install their show Utupya (April 27 – June 24) in the fourth floor gallery at Tate Liverpool.

Engaging Places: Collaborative Praxis in Art and Architecture is supported by Culture Ireland’s GB18: Promoting Irish Arts in Britain programme.