Sep 09 at 18.00
Exit to Community: Exploring a future through collective practice
Event Participants
Alexander Cromer (Host), Santini Basra, Andthen (Panel Guest), Fran Edgerley, Assemble (Panel Guest), Jeni, Black Obsidian Sound System (B.O.S.S.)Join our host Alexander Cromer and panel guests from Assemble, Andthen and Black Obsidian Sound System for the Industry and VIP Preview event for the launch of Postgraduate Showcase 2021. The global Covid-19 pandemic brought into sharp focus the overt and discreet ways in which political, social, economical and environmental forces shape our ability to socialise, organise and work with each other. Through restriction, we have been reminded of our interdependence and interconnectivity.
Yet prior to the pandemic and often in response to these same forces, a resurgence in collective based practices was already beginning to emerge across creative disciplines.
Through this panel we are looking to explore the qualities and potential in collective practice. We want to ask in what ways collective practice enables us to organise and respond to the current moment we all find ourselves in and what these practices and modes of organising can offer emergent practitioners.
Stay tuned, the event closes with a stunning performance from Alexander Cromer reading his work, ‘Dem Lost Ones’.
Alexander Cromer (1984, USA) obtained his BA at Point Park University (USA) and studied with the University of the Underground at Sandberg Instituut (NL), where he earned an MA in Fine Arts and Design.
Cromer uses a combination of text, sonic acts, and performance to explore new forms of storytelling. His work is concerned with the creation of speculative pasts, presents, and futures as a means of investigating ontological and epistemological facets of Blackness. By doing so, he aims to establish new relationships between environmental and human organisms to produce energies that disrupt and transform oppressive/colonial systems.
Andthen are a team of designers that research. In particular, we research the future to help our clients understand what it could look like, and what people want it to look like. Most of the time, we help our clients during the early stages of building something new to align around a common vision of what it is that they are trying to build, and how to get there.
Santini leads the team at Andthen — he gets irrationally excited about creating opportunities to make people think long term, and engage critically with the future(s) that they might inhabit. Currently, he’s interested in exploring an emerging approach called participatory futures, which aims to better involve large communities of people in conversations about the futures they want to see.
Assemble is a multi-disciplinary collective working across built environment disciplines, including architecture, research, design and public art.
Founded in 2010 to undertake a single self-built project, Assemble has since delivered a diverse and award-winning body of work, whilst retaining a democratic and co-operative working method that enables built, social and research-based work at a variety of scales, both making things and making things happen. Members have a broad range of skills and experience covering design, construction, furniture making, fabrication, brief development, urban and public realm design, organisational development, making, audio production, events programming and production, performance, carpentry, ceramics, product development, set design and theatre-making. As a practice, we have tried to champion projects which now have an independent life of their own, and which continue to be agents of change around which communities can strengthen, and grow networks of meaningful mutual support.
Black Obsidian Sound System was established in the summer of 2018 with the intention of bringing together a community of queer, trans and non binary black and people of colour involved in art, sound and radical activism. Following in the legacies of sound system culture we wanted to learn, build and sustain a resource for our collective struggles. The system, based in London, is available to use or rent by community groups and others with the purpose of amplifying and connecting us.