The Growing Importance of Media
2. FACT’s Sub-Brands
2.2 Community: Collaboration Programme In the future, the source of human achievement will not be
2.2.2 A History of the Collaboration Programme
During the 1980s, Merseyside Moviola had been one of the art organisations in Liverpool that was committed to working with community groups, having run a number of film and animation workshops in community centres across the region.438 By the beginning of the 1990s, its community work became more formally integrated into the organisation’s programme, and following the inaugural Video Positive festival in 1989, Moviola responded to its own concerns that the festival had focused on “too much product in too little space.”439 As stated in Section 2.1.2, for the second Video Positive festival, Moviola stated its desire to give “a strong regional feel to Video Positive [19]91.”440 As a consequence, it sought and secured funding for a temporary post that would operate in the nine months leading up to the festival. The post that was created was for an animateur, a term which is infrequently used in visual art practice but which can be defined as:
A practicing artist, in any art form, who uses her/his skills, talents and personality to enable others to compose, design, devise, create, perform or engage with works of art of any kind.441
Simon Robertshaw, a video artist who had exhibited at Video Positive 1989, was appointed to the role, and his work was “devoted entirely to development and promotion of video and electronic media art within communities and formal education.”442
438 Haskel, interviewed by the author, 21 January 2010 439
Board Meeting Minutes, 09 May 1990, (Available: FACT Archive, Box – Board File 1, Folder – Moviola Until End 1991)
440Board Meeting Minutes, 14 February 1990, (Available: FACT Archive, Box – Board File 1, Folder – Moviola Until End 1991)
441
Animarts (2003), The Art of the Animateur: An Investigation into the Skills and Insights Required for Artists to Work Effectively in Schools and Communities, London: Animarts, p.9
442
Despite funding for the post only being for a few months in the first instance, Moviola outlined a long-term vision that would see the animateur working with other staff at the organisation to establish a strategy for collaborative projects to be integrated across Moviola’s programme, as well as seeing artists working with members of the community to create a number of “large scale video installation[s]...to be exhibited in a public context in Liverpool City Centre.”443 The long-term strategy developed by the animateur saw the creation of the Community and Education Programme which featured heavily in Video Positive 1991, and it subsequently gained further financial support ahead of Video Positive 1993. Louise Forshaw was appointed as animateur in July 1992, and it was under her guidance that the Community and Education Programme was renamed the Collaboration Programme, with her motive being a desire for the programme to “exist free from titles which compartmentalise” the work being undertaken.444
The permanent Collaboration Programme which emerged from this was intended to integrate the work of the animateur ahead of the Video Positive festivals into the everyday operations of Moviola, and consequently placed community art high on the organisation’s agenda.445 The aim was to “offer the kind of possibilities that are not available through traditional areas of training or education,”446 a particularly useful tool in a city with lower than average levels of education and employment. According to Moviola’s Business Plan 1992–1995, the Collaboration Programme, then still called Community and Education, intended to:
1. Develop educational opportunities by exploring new opportunities and creative applications for the use of video and electronic media in formal education and community contexts
2. Enable groups traditionally without access to the media to gain access byinitiating and facilitating community projects
3. Provide vocational training in a shortage area, by training the people without jobs for the jobs without people447
443
Board Meeting Minutes, 05 September 1990, (Available: FACT Archive, Box – Board File 1, Folder – Moviola Until End 1991)
444Animateur’s Report, July 1992-July 1993, (Available: FACT Archive, Box – Ed’s Office) 445
Board Meeting Minutes, 28 March 1990, (Available: FACT Archive, Box – Board File 1, Folder – Moviola Until End 1991)
446Moviola Business Plan 1992-1995, (Available: FACT Archive, Box – Admin General 1), p.17 447
The format for the delivery of these aims was initially a series of individual projects connected to each of the Video Positive festivals, such as My Idea of Paradise (1991), a collaboration with patients at Ashworth Psychiatric Hospital in Maghull which was screened at the St Johns Shopping Centre during Video Positive 1991,448 but as the Collaboration Programme developed, it became increasingly defined by a set of “underlying critical principles”449 that connected groups of people and individuals to the organisation through artistic collaboration.450
Fig. 2.2.2 Ashworth Hospital (North) Video Group, My Idea of Paradise (1991), Video Positive 1991
According to FACT, the Collaboration Programme established itself as “a ground-breaking arts initiative that places contemporary art practice at its core”451 and it engaged in a variety of different activities, including creating artworks for exhibition and creative training for a wide range of participants, as well as arts education and public programming that is more typical of arts educational theory and practice.452 Although there has been little critical interrogation of FACT’s Collaboration Programme, commentators have supported FACT’s claims,453 and it is perhaps the organisation’s view of the Collaboration Programme
448 Moviola (1991), Video Positive 1991 Catalogue, Sheffield: Unicorn Press Ltd, pp.39-40 449
Foundation for Art & Creative Technology Business Plan: Update (1997/98), (Available: FACT Archive, Box – Admin General 1; Folder – Business Plans 1997-2000), p.2
450FACT Centre: Synopsis (The White Book), (Available: FACT Archive: Box – Centre Business Plans (HIST.25); Folder – June 1999), p.13
451
FACT: Collaboration Programme, (Available: FACT Hard-drive) 452 ibid.
as a commissioning department454 that has prevented its location within more conventional arts educational literature. Alan Dunn, who worked for FACT, 2001–2007, states that the innovative approach of the Collaboration Programme provided “a more genuine and fertile environment” for both artists and participants, with communities as a whole entity becoming the constant factor rather than the artists or facilitators. This allows for a continual process of change in creative influence,455 and the Collaboration Programme established a constantly evolving profile that is situated within a changing environment of art theory and practice.
Openness to change has been integral to the Collaboration Programme, and this has been reflected by the frequent alterations to the name of the programme over its twenty year history. Having launched as the Community and Education Programme in 1991, it has also been called ‘Collaborations and Engagement’ and ‘Participation.’ Using terms like these which are, at various times, debatable in their definitions, reveals something of the complexity of naming an ephemeral project like the Collaboration Programme. Currently, FACT have divided it into Schools and Learning, Communities, Young People and Health Spaces. These four areas fall under the umbrella of ‘Engagement and Learning’ and although the programme areas have been subjected to many different titles, the basic premise and core principles remain the same. Consequently, the Collaboration Programme today continues working to “engage artists, communities, regeneration agencies and others in the development of strategic frameworks and projects which support cultural production.”456