Angharad Davies is an artist and architectural researcher, and a member of public works. Her research examines the communities that exist around local, publicly accessible spaces. She believes in architecture as biography, and writing as an architectural process.

In this episode, we hear about her long term work with communities at Rurban in Poplar, London, and the activities and approaches they use to build relationships with local residents.

Owen Kelly talks to Ken Worpole about just some of the adventures of Colin Ward during his adventurous and varied life.

STREAM Meanwhile in an Abandoned Warehouse | EPISODE 79

Owen Kelly | Ken Worpole

His life covered a lot of different territory from architecture to education. He lived “an anarchism rooted in everyday experience, and not necessarily linked to industrial and political struggles. His ideas were heavily influenced by Peter Kropotkin and his concept of mutual aid”.

In his 1973 book Anarchy in Action he wrote “The argument of this book is that an anarchist society, a society which organizes itself without authority, is always in existence, like a seed beneath the snow, buried under the weight of the state and its bureaucracy, capitalism and its waste, privilege and its injustices, nationalism and its suicidal loyalties, religious differences and their superstitious separatism”.

Ken Worpole knew Colin Ward well for many years, and has contributed a chapter to a new book, Mutual Aid, Everyday Anarchism, celebrating his life, thought, and work. In this episode he talks with Owen Kelly about some aspects of these. 

Roman Krznaric: an appreciation of the chuckling anarchist

Wayne Price: What can we learn from Colin Ward?

Mutual Aid, Everyday Anarchism at Five Leaves Press 

The death of Blair Peach, which Ken mentions

François Matarasso is taking a break for medical treatment. We hope he will rejoin us very soon.

On episode 47 of A Culture of Possibility, Arlene Goldbard interviews Clementine Sandison, an artist who works with people in Scotland to build solidarity networks, improve livelihoods and access to training for landworkers, and campaigns on land justice.

Clementine works as co-Director of Alexandra Park Food Forest, a community greenspace in the East end of Glasgow where volunteers produce food, cook and share meals, organize community celebrations, and explore notions of commoning and how to steward public land.

This episode addresses the question: should embedding creative enterprise models be a fundamental approach to sustaining the future of Socially Engaged Art?

Hannah Kemp-Welch & Sophie Hope talk with Kathrin Böhm from Company Drinks, a community space and cultural enterprise based in Barking and Dagenham; and Dan Edelstyn and Hilary Powell from Bank Job and Power Station, based in the London Borough of Walthamstow. All three of them participated in Social Making iteration 5.

Company Drinks works as a long term project in which each step of the production, distribution, and planning operates as a public space. They have produced drinks from handpicked ingredients for ten years now, and use social enterprise models as part of their arts practice.

Power Station grew out of a previous project called Bank Job that took over a high street bank and attempted to create an equitable local economy. Power Station works towards making a street in Waltham Forest into a collective power station, with long term plans to create a borough wide, communally owned solar power company.

Note:

Social Making iteration 5 took place on October 10 and 11, with support from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.

The Museum of Unrest acts as a not-for-profit educational project to support artists designers and communities engaged in art and design linked to social and environmental justice. The project is an online continuation of an organisation that has supported

art and social engagement since 1975 when it opened in west London as Paddington Printshop and subsequently became londonprintstudio. Faced with Covid and rising costs the londonprintstudio facilities closed in 2020 but gave birth to the Museum of Unrest.

The first collection went online in January 2024 and included commissioned articles, interviews and links on the topic of artists’ and activists’ museums. The second collection went online last month. Curated by Clive Russell it asks the question: what might we mean by “good design”?

In this episode Owen Kelly talks to John Phillips and Clive Russell about their work, the museum, and where it might all lead.

Some months have five Fridays, and when this happens add an extra podcast to our normal schedule. In 2021 we played music licensed under creative commons licences; in 2022 we excavated four old radio shows; and in 2023 we looked back at four early classics from Meanwhile in an Abandoned Warehouse.

This year we have found another podcast that we think might interest you: one published under a Creative Commons licence that somehow connects to things here at Miaaw.

This month we go to the heart of enshittification, and listen to episode 438 of Cory Doctorow’s own podcast. He takes Tiktok as an example and lays out his theory of enshittification, using that as an example.

His podcast varies between reading extracts from his novels, reading extracts from his books, and pulling together his thoughts on current cultural and political issues. Many other episodes will prove worth your time, and he has them all stored at archive.org.

As part of the fifth edition of Social Making: “the UK’s only biennial symposium dedicated to socially engaged art practice, co-creation, and place-making” Kim Wide and Anurupa Roy led a workshop exploring the implications of jugaad.

Kim Wide works as the founder and director of Take A Part. Anurupa Roy works as an award-winning puppet designer and director of puppet-based theatre.

The BBC has described jugaad as “an untranslatable word for winging it”. The word exists in Hindu, Urdu and Punjabi and describes using whatever you have to hand to make something you need; a process of frugal improvisation.

In this episode Sophie Hope and Hannah Kemp-Welch talk to them about the workshop; about the nature of jugaad, as a global practice of subversion by radical practice,; the collective politics that fuel jugaad; and what it might actually mean in an English, or European, context.

Note:

Social Making iteration 5 took place at Brix on October 10 and 11, with support from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.

In episode 46 of A Culture of Possibility, while François Matarasso is taking a break for medical treatment, Arlene Goldbard interviews Libby Lenkinski, Founder and President of Albi.org, “a new fund, institute and lab that uses cultural vehicles to establish paradigm-shifting narratives by and about Palestinians and Jews”.

Albi does many things. It supports film and TV projects. It aims to influence the creative industries, expanding the space for critical voices in cultural production to thrive and be true vehicles for change. It also supports a cohort of flagship artists working in diverse fields.

Nisha Duggal is an artist working across various mediums, exploring expressions of freedom in the everyday. She is interested in the transformative qualities of making and doing, engineering situations that uncover deep-seated primitive impulses to connect.

In this episode, she tells us about Held, a multi-platform project in which she guided people to make pairs of simple, clay sculptures formed from the space within the palms of their hands. The crafting enabled her to connect and share conversations about place, land and belonging with participants.

Owen Kelly looks at three things that seem to have occurred over the last few months:

1. The failure of cultural democrats in Britain to present a manifesto, policy proposals, or cultural programme to the incoming Labour government;

2. Our collective failure to write our own narrative, and thus our reliance on perpetually opposing the dominant narrative;

3. Our continuing acceptance of just-in-time “arguing-against”, rather than developing long term strategies based on “arguing-for”.

Owen proposes we look at how the IEA moved privatisation from the shadows to the mainstream and work out how we can play the long game ourselves. He illustrates some of the possibilities with two examples: the ICAF festival and The Museum of Unrest.

He finishes by going wildly off-piste with a brief discussion of the secular benefits of henotheism in an apparent digression that turns out to play a central role in his argument.