Town-planning – is not mere place-planning, nor even work-planning…it must be folk-planning.
– Patrick Geddes
Claudia Zeiske is a curator, cultural activist and the founder of Deveron Projects (directing the organisation from 1995 – early 2021). Following her employment, Claudia developed research that reflects on the history of Deveron Projects during her tenure.
While a lot has been written in the past two decades about the impact of participatory arts on people in urban places, her practice based research aims to fill the gap in relation to the rural context – often places with little traditional arts provision.
Based on the development of Deveron Arts/Projects in Huntly, Aberdeenshire, where the ‘town is the venue’ rather than a gallery or arts centre, her aim was to show how cultural provision can be framed through a combination of durational commitment to place and effective cultural management.
To do this, she reflected on twenty-five years of working in the small town community setting, examining retrospectively her and the team’s role as curators/producers. Underpinned by Scottish philosopher Patrick Geddes’s Place/Work/Folk thinking machine and artist Joseph Beuys’s idea of social sculpture as well as other thinkers’ engagement with place and social context, she describes a cultural ecology that aims to assist the wellbeing of rural communities.
The study is based on four case studies that explain how the collaboration with artists can lead to transformative change through participatory practice led projects. Through them, her enquiry leads from the identification of socio-political themes to collaborative development of the projects between community, artists and the ‘Anthro-Producers’.
The research shows why and how art provision in rural locations can be structured sustainably through field-research akin to anthropological methods. The ensuing approach is called Transformational Fieldwork, a form of cultural management that combines social engagement with research methods relating to long-term participatory observation. Structured around 16 inter-woven administrative/artistic principles, this framework offers a tool kit for continued arts development in the rural community context.
Her contribution to curatorial sustainability discourse therefore is to show step-by-step how Transformational Fieldwork can contribute to rural development and community wellbeing in places that, unlike urban cultural contexts, have limited involvement with contemporary art.
Claudia Zeiske's website
ARTocracy
