Rationale:

This project started with a concern about decolonising arts education – that is – centering different knowledges and practices. Building on work from Rahul Patel and Jheni Arboine at UAL, I wanted to support students to actively engage with marginalised knowledges, exploring and supporting how they’re produced through different external contexts to perhaps shed light on knowledge structures within the university.

In addition, I wanted to support students’ transition into graduate art practice. I considered this to be a social justice issue, first, in the sense that it was about providing experience of different non-institutional spaces for students to take forward their practices. In this case, that non-institutional space was a community-led housing scheme. Secondly, I have seen the impact of the precarity of the rental market, and landlords, on students’ engagement with the course. A project that could enable students to develop their practice in response to this  aspect of their lived experience felt like an opportunity to support students in finding their own ways to engage with this challenge.

Informing this decision is also the remarkable growth of community-led housing projects in the UK that have emerged from artist-run projects (Thompson, 2020). One example of this is Homebaked CLT based in Liverpool, an organisation born out of a storytelling programme commissioned by the 2010 Liverpool Biennale and led by artist Jeanne van Heeswijk. Since then, the project has transformed into an inspiring force for change in an area that had experienced severe decline as a result of the discarded Pathfinders regeneration project. It is now developing an architecturally innovative retrofit project for 9 social rent homes and the broader vision of a ‘highly energy efficient mixed-use high street scheme owned by the community’ (Homebaked CLT, 2023). Such projects speak to the possibilities that emerge when artists are invited to support the reimagining of community futures, a notion advocated by the Artist Placement Group, who facilitated residencies for artists in a range of institutional contexts to enable meaningful knowledge exchange (Rycroft, 2019).  

Context:

I’m an associate lecturer on the BA Fine Art programme at Chelsea. My main role is as a writing tutor, and I work with Year 3 predominantly.

The context for this research was a project where 12 Year 3 BA Fine Art students – who each responded to an open-call made to their year group – became “artists in residence” at a community land trust. 

Community land trusts (CLTs) have been identified as critical for addressing the lack of housing within the UK that is affordable, democratically governed and well-maintained (Moore & Mullins, 2013). They are an emerging model for the shared ownership of land, that is extracted from the market in perpetuity, in order to provide secure tenure at low rates for those most in need.  

The land trust in this case is called RUSS, in Lewisham, for which I’m a trustee. Part of the RUSS project is people building their own homes on what was empty land.

The event that I mention in my research question is an event that the students were asked to organise. It happens on the 3rd December 2023, and is on behalf of the future residents at RUSS, hosting neighbours from the two neighbouring streets. The event is an opportunity to bring these two groups together, future residents and existing residents, who are going to be living side by side in less than a year’s time.