Social Making: Socially Engaged Practice Now and Next is a biennial symposium developed and delivered by Take A Part CIC. The aim of the symposium is to bring examples of international socially engaged practices to the South West of the UK, giving the region exposure to a wider network of projects and organisations, and an opportunity to consider a range of methods and their impact. This provides support and learning for artists, curators, arts organisations, councillors, commissioners, producers, students and academics, ensuring that the region continues to produce and support high-quality, risk-taking and ambitious public arts programmes.  It is also about sharing socially engaged practices in Plymouth and the city’s ambitions outwards, as innovators and risk-takers and as a centre from which projects are tested and grown.

The 2018 symposium will consider social practice and its engagement with identity(s); how art can help communities and audiences reconsider their understandings of, and positions on sexuality, gender, racial, economic, political, social, bodily, historical and geographic identities. We will be exploring how social practice can help us reconsider the notion of community itself. This year we’ll be showcasing the work of cross-disciplinary practitioners; from visual artists, to theatre-makers, to poets.

The symposium is delivered by Take a Part CIC thanks to support from Plymouth Culture and Arts Council England.

Take A Part works to unleash the creative potential of people. We are a socially engaged contemporary art organisation that works with communities to co-commission and co-create contemporary art in order to: risk-take, provoke and engage communities to establish and respond to, as well as set, local agenda and need.

Thursday 7th and Friday 8th June

Held at Devonport Guildhall, home of Real Ideas Organisation, the Arts Council England Bridge organisation for the South West

For more information visit: http://www.effordtakeapart.org.uk/social-making/about/ 
 

DRAFT SCHEDULE

Thursday 7th June

0900 - 0945 Registration and breakfast

0945 - 1000 Symposium welcome - Kim Wide, Director, Take A Part

1000-1020 Darren Henley, Chief Executive, Arts Council England

1020-1100 Social Making and the Plymouth context - Dom Jinks, Executive Director, Plymouth Culture, Gemma Ward, Horizon Projects Officer, Fiona Evans, Vital Sparks Producer.

1100-1200 Micronations and Sovereign Subjects - Frej von Fraahsen 

1200-1300 Lunch provided by the Column Bakehouse

1300- 1400 - Queering the museum: working with LGBTQ+ oral histories - Tom Marshman 

1400- 1500 Rebellious Sounds: celebrating regional histories of feminism - Natalie McGrath, Dreadnought South West  

1500-1530 Tea and coffee break

1530-1630 Accumulate: Empowering homeless people through creativity - Marice Cumber, Accumlate 

1630 - 1730 Pecha Kuchas from South West based  creative practitioners, selected via open call and sponsored by Visual Arts South West

1730-1830 (optional) Drinks in the Mayors Parlour 

1830-2030 (optional) Social Making SOUP, a conference dinner with a difference

Friday 8th June

0930 - 1000 Breakfast

1000-1100 Co-production and The Arts Action Group Model - Take A Part Carlow 

1100-1115 Tea and coffee break

1115 -1200 Community, collectivism, and collaboration: decentering normative codes of presentation - Rommi Smith 

1200 -1300 Lunch provided by the Column Bakehouse

1300 - 1400 Post-industrial place-making and the contemporary artist - Patrick Fox, Heart of Glass 

1400 - 1430 Tea and coffee break

1430 - 1600 Reflective workshop - contemporary challenges for social practice, led by Davis and Jones

1600 - 1630 Final thoughts - Kim Wide, Director, Take A Part

For information about the optional symposium dinner, see: http://www.effordtakeapart.org.uk/social-making/participate-soup/ 

If you are a South West based socially engaged practitioner, there are opportunities to get involved with the programme, visit: http://www.effordtakeapart.org.uk/social-making/participate-socialmakers/ and http://www.effordtakeapart.org.uk/social-making/participate-pechakucha/