Skip to main content

DIY 2020: Gordon Douglas – That’s Governance!

That’s Governance! invites participants to interrogate conditions of governance, and propose, through roleplay, a non-human candidate for SSW’s Board of Trustees.

This DIY is run in partnership with Scottish Sculpture Workshop.

About the workshop

That’s Governance! will invite a group of participants to work together and propose a non-human candidate to hold a position on Scottish Sculpture Workshop’s Board of Trustees. Applying games and exercises in deep listening and roleplay with puppets, the workshop will encourage a playful response and challenge to the perceivably immoveable conditions of governing. What can we achieve by heightening our grasp of organisational advice from non-human actors, and what can we complicate by attributing social purpose to phenomena as critical or reformative tools? The workshop is open to participants with keen interests in performativity, and who want to embrace further affinities with deep ecology, queer theory, actor network theory, and alternative structures of governance. 

The workshop responds directly to artist Jack Tan’s quotation that “a truly queer, feminist, anti-racist, posthuman board would dance a tango with Governance– resisting, releasing, evading, acquiescing, rejecting”, and will expand outwards from SSW towards challenging broader conditions of governance. The resulting conversations and collective proposal will ruminate on the performativity of personhood, eligibility criteria and barriers to governing, anthropomorphic hierarchies relating to non-humans, and considerations within collaborative decision-making.

Dates and location

Friday 27 November, 6pm — Sunday 29 November 2020. 

This workshop will take place at Scottish Sculpture Workshop. 

This DIY is free to attend and travel costs up to a value of £70 will be covered. There is also a small access budget of £75 per participant, we ask that if you do not need this additional funding to access the workshop, you opt out of it in your application.

Simple, shared accommodation on site will be provided for Friday, Saturday and Sunday evenings.
Daily evening meals will be provided on these dates, which participants will prepare and eat together. Food for lunches, breakfasts and snacks will not be provided. 

That’s Governance! is an in-person workshop, and we will be following Scottish Government guidelines closely regarding ongoing public health concerns in order to make this a safe workshop for everyone. For full information on COVID-19 safety measures at SSW, follow this link.

If you have specific access requirements you would like to share or discuss prior to applying, please contact [email protected]. Information on accessibility at SSW is available here.

How to apply

To apply follow this link,  deadline for applications 12 noon, Monday 19 October.

The selected participants of That’s Governance! are invited to Lumsden in Aberdeenshire to take part in this weekend-long workshop involving games, exercises, and roleplay. They will be joined by DIY artist Gordon Douglas and SSW’s Programme and Communications Manager Jenny Salmean and together will form a temporary working group. 

This DIY invites applications from those who want to challenge the hegemonies of organisational performativity with a playful approach, from a decolonial, queer and posthuman perspective. The workshop may be of interest to artists who are invested in organising, who are/ have been part of artist-led projects or Boards of Trustees; to those who have felt frustrated at conditions of organising, and who are pushing to make change in their communities; to those who have attempted to instigate new things, and those who are actively engaged in reforming the systems they hold stake in. 

We have aimed to simplify the process of applying this opportunity to three questions listed below. We acknowledge that there will be barriers to applying in this way, so if you would like to submit your application through other means, please contact us to agree on a more suitable format. 

Three or four participants will be selected by DIY artist Gordon Douglas and SSW Programme and Communications Manager, Jenny Salmean, with the intention of bringing together a group with diverse knowledges and experiences to participate in the DIY. All applicants will receive a response to their application by Friday 30 October.

The selected participants of That’s Governance! are invited to Lumsden in Aberdeenshire to take part in this weekend-long workshop involving games, exercises, and roleplay. They will be joined by DIY artist Gordon Douglas and SSW’s Programme and Communications Manager Jenny Salmean and together will form a temporary working group. 

Deadline for applications 12 noon, Monday 19 October 2020.

This DIY forms part of BE PART, a large EU Cooperation Project that critically explores collaborative art-making and sharing through decentralised governance models involving local citizens, artists, partners and policy makers.

About the artist

Gordon Douglas is a performance artist based in Glasgow. He devises embedded positions, games and events that set out to reimagine organisations, and investigate the performativity of working together. His practice is founded on a commitment to (and scepticism of) collaboration, and aims to generate social byproducts by playing through, or exhausting, perceived institutional systems. This research has seen him take on a variety of roles including time spent with: The NewBridge Project, Newcastle (2016); Edinburgh College (2016-17); Travelling Gallery, Scotland (2018); and Cooper Gallery, Dundee (2019). Recently, he conducted an extensive ‘performative audit’ of power, access and accountability within CCA Glasgow’s open source policy (An Opposites Programme, 2018-19). The non-human agent he shares most in common with is blu-tack.

Part of DIY 2020/21

A list of the artist development workshops being run as part of DIY 2020.

DIY 2020/21

DIY

A list of the artist development workshops being run as part of DIY 2020.

Read more

DIY 2020 – Ben Walters: DIY Hope Machines with Doctor Duckie

DIY

Artistic practice as queer civics: a series of online encounters about making better worlds through lived experience, material support, fun, and mutation.

Read more

DIY 2020 – Charlie Ashwell: Restless Study

DIY

Restless Study will be a space for people to study which privileges restlessness and distraction over focus and concentration. We will generate, manipulate and circulate objects of study, including text, conversation, image, action, movement, and beyond. We will throw off the shackles of goal-oriented education to reclaim study as a vital, liberatory mode of being in dialogue with others!

Read more

DIY 2020 – Gillie Kleiman: Fat Performance

DIY

A six-week collectively-generated course on and in Fat Performance for fat people.

Read more

DIY 2020 – Lydia Heath: Public realm as playground: towards a toolkit for earthly survival

DIY

This DIY project uses performance informed by science fiction, magic, ritual and idiocy to explore how our relationship to the public realm has changed and will continue to change because of COVID-19.

Read more

DIY 2020 – Stacy Makishi: Live Art Social (distance) Club

Social life marooned like Tom Hanks in Castaway? Don’t befriend a volleyball, get social at Live Art Social (distance) Club!

Read more

DIY 2020: Ashleigh Bowmott and Laura Sweeney – Doing, Undoing…and Doing Again

DIY

A 3-day remote retreat for six producers, curators and arts administrators who have had to undo their present and future work due to COVID-19. This DIY is run in partnership with ArtHouse Jersey

Read more

DIY 2020: Chris Bailkoski and Lizz Brady – Pins & Needles

DIY

Interested in using Live Art to create lo-fi short films exploring mental health and queer culture?

Read more

DIY 2020: Evan Ifekoya – Abundant Justice (Money Talks)

DIY

“… Money talks, Dirty cash I want you, dirty cash I need you, oho”

Read more

DIY 2020: Fabiola Santana – Mothers, Grandmothers, and Their (post) colonial Children

DIY

Autobiographical sessions for postcolonial diaspora. Bodies as places of legacy; voice as ancestral calling; sharing stories; rituals; being vulnerable together.

Read more

DIY 2020: Giorgia Ohanesian Nardin & Jamila Johnson-Small/SERAFINE1369 – A VAST AND INCIDENTAL KIND OF HOLDING

DIY

Conversations on expanded multi-dimensional ideas of anatomy, divination, geography and language, seeking to bring transformational movement to ideas of trauma and healing as they are shaped by oppressive systems and given form in our bodies

Read more

DIY 2020: Harun Morrison & Ofelia Jarl Ortega – Forest as Score

DIY

“We will each immerse ourselves in a nearby forest and co-generate shared experiences through a series of synchronous somatic exercises and collective reading online. These activities will be the departure point for writing ghost stories and erotica.”

Read more

DIY 2020: José García Oliva – White Vinegar

DIY

White Vinegar Workshop revolves around the quote from leading New York artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles “After the revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?”.

Read more

DIY 2020: Leonie Rousham and Ishwari Bhalerao – Alternative Mapping of Time and Landscape

DIY

Leonie and Ishwari will be working to explore alternative processes of mapping time and landscape, moving away from ideas of linearity and colonial legacies of demarcation. Focussing on process rather than production, they will do this using plant-based darkroom printing, fermentation and chorus interventions.

Read more

DIY 2020: Louise Orwin – Brave New Worlds: Building the Live Art Community Discord Server

DIY

Make like teenagers and build the Discord fanfiction version of Live Art from your bedroom, under the mentorship of real-life Discord experts (teenagers).

Read more

DIY 2020: Nwando Ebizie – Lucid Kink

DIY

An intimate online pleasure LAB for disabled queers exploring Kink as an artistic tool for self-care.

Read more

DIY 2020: Oriana Fox and Teresa Albor – The Art of the Headfuck: I learned it from Katherine

DIY

A workshop aimed at fans and future fans of the late great Katherine Araniello, a queer, crip, red-headed firebrand whose work lives on to disturb and tantalize in equal measure.

Read more

DIY 2020: Rachel Gomme – Resourcing in the Ruins

DIY

A workshop for artists who lost projects in 2020, sharing what we have lost, learned and gained, creating mourning rituals and (re)discovering our individual and collective resources.

Read more

DIY 2020: Raju Rage – Politics of Intimacy in Practice

DIY

An online residency queerying ‘The politics of Intimacy’ within our bodies and lives as well as in our creative practice/s

Read more

DIY 2020: Tim Etchells and Vlatka Horvat – A Way Away: Correspondence Course

DIY

A Way Away uses the mode of correspondence course to explore ideas around distance – spatial and temporal, physical and social, imagined and real.

Read more

DIY 2020: TINK + EFI – Wrap Live: exploring sensory underload for neurodivergent artists

DIY

Taking an experimental journey of gentle sensory under-load, progressively leading up to observing or participating in a full body wrap.

Read more

DIY 2020/21: Call for Participants

DIY

Apply to participate in DIY 2020; workshops developed and lead BY artists, FOR artists

Read more

DIY 2020/21: MOU7I6 presents – Circular University جامعة الدوائر

DIY

The first in a series of workshop sessions for SWANA  young people to find out more about creative careers, and exchange knowledge with not only each other, but boss industry professionals smashing it in their fields.

Read more

Also

DIY: 2020 – Call for Proposals

Professional development projects – BY artists FOR artists – across the UK.

Read more

DIY 2020: Evan Ifekoya – Abundant Justice (Money Talks)

DIY

“… Money talks, Dirty cash I want you, dirty cash I need you, oho”

Read more

DIY: 2005

DIY

Professional Development BY artists FOR artists

Read more

Donation

£