Research Question: How can the archive support the research and testing of alternative forms of cultural value that are not measured by the neoliberal value discourse, such as commoning, care and unlearning practices, and the social wealth they generate?
My research into the archive at Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons responds to the above research question that, in turn, was inspired by RT12: Grass Roots Practices: Documentation and the Archive will analyse existing spatial projects in the archive to find ways of articulating art policy and methods through archival materials.
Through an analysis of the Nina F. bell House Museum archive at Casco, I examined how the principles and practices of commoning, care and unlearning can be compatible with a publicly-funded, semi-horizontal art institutional structure. Commoning is necessarily an ongoing constituent process that involves multiples trials, exercises, sometimes impossible obstacles and perceived failures, but ultimately a commitment to ‘stay with the trouble’. My research of the Casco archive enabled me to understand the complexities of these processes particularly as they were applied to the invisible, back-end of the art institution’s operational structure and staff relations, but equally the forms of social wealth these processes generated.
My research has culminated in an academic article entitled, ‘Commoning the Art Institution: A Case Study of Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons’. This article examines how the principles and practices of the commons and ‘commoning’ have been applied by Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons, as a means to make their institution more just and equitable. The analysis is conducted via a lens borrowed from Gerald Raunig, where he sets out six tenets for what he terms ‘the art institution of the common’, in his 2013 article ‘Flatness Rules: Instituent Practices and Institutions of the Common in a Flat World’. It will argue that Casco’s approach sets itself apart from the other institutions Raunig has examined, by applying the practices and principles of commoning to both their front-end programming activities and to their back end internal governance processes, what Casco call a ‘double track’ approach to commoning. It will also consider the challenges the team at Casco have faced, and their commitment, after Donna Haraway, to ‘stay with the trouble’ and not shirk from sometimes (im)possible challenges.
Together with my NCAD colleague and fellow Spacex-rise researcher, Seoidin O’Sullivan, who also conducted research into Casco’s archive, we are testing out commoning and unlearning exercises in the context of the art school with a view to the students unlearning neoliberal values that the students perceive to be negative. Workshops with the students concluded with a desire to unlearn values such as ‘individualism’, ‘competitive behaviour’, ‘that failure is only negative’ and the overwhelming feeling of ‘busyness’ that working as an artist against a backdrop of precarious labour and the gig economy gives rise to.