END OF RESIDENCY WEBZINE

We are two artists Colette Lewis and Elinor Rivers living in Cork, Ireland. We have been working together as an artists group since January 2018 along with artist Marilyn Lennon.
We work together through socially engaged art practice, aligned through an interest in collaborative approaches to investigating complex interrelationships of people, space and place.
In our current project the People’s Land Trust (PLoT), we’re devising artistic methods of cooperation, care and production in response to a location, community and social and political context.

PLoT project has come from our shared interest in urban land use, models of community ownership, stewardship, and sustainability into the future. We have recently begun to work with a group of residents to explore these ideas and values through the model of a Community Land Trust (CLT) and Radical School. (CLT’s are a community-led model for holding land in perpetuity for use by communities.)
We are currently creating our ‘radical school’ structure as a social space where participants can learn, share and vision together in order to empower ourselves to take creative action.

During the UNIDEE residency we are planning to develop the PLoT Radical School. We are currently designing and making three mobile cart units in order to begin working outdoors with the group.

We are really excited to be here, and looking forward to meeting tomorrow, and hearing more about everyones interesting projects.

www.plot2220.ie

PLoT

Our Journey through the residency

Limbo ⟶ A reflection back onto ourselves, time to think, Non-Action Research ⟶ Action

A moment of realization, change or disruption

Covid shutting us down into the summer, suspending time and possible actions.
Slowing down…looking at wellbeing issues, reevaluating what is important,
Using our time designing, refining the building of hand carts, locating a space to build them and bringing a cabinet maker on board to co-create them.

A moment of realization in the week intensive was thinking about agency and knowledge and that school participants in PLoT need to choose books for the library themselves according to what they want to know.
Democratising the library cart, putting it into the public sphere,through liaising with a public library which enables wider community access

A moment of connection

A lovely moment of intimate connection within our small intensive group, when we each brought an object that has special meaning to us by way of sharing personal stories about ourselves.

Tools methods to share

Learn to listen, don’t be afraid to really care for each other, laugh at yourselves often.
Mapping the visible and invisible social relations and support network intersecting through a project
Setting up peer to peer networks for the sharing of knowledge, connecting our locale with places further afield.

‘The true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love’ Che Guevara

A question we are left with

How do we build stronger networks of support and solidarity in the social art world within and across countries and borders ?

When do you let go of or pass on a project ?

Something we will carry forward

The knowledge that many people around the world are doing the same work as us and trying to figure out the same challenges and it would benefit us all to connect with each other.

Be bold, act as if everything matters.

Time

To pause, to ponder, to re-envision.
Operating within a strange new time flow, how we act within time frames,
How we think about the past, present and future.
Taking our time, honouring our ancestors, being a good ancestor.
Envisioning the future as if it were now, taking time to listen to older people and young children.
Act as if we had all the time in the world !