ON COMMUNITY BUILDING
We are thrilled to officially announce the four practitioners-in-residence of RAKE Community 2021
The idea to facilitate some kind of ongoing, fluid community-based project came along at the same time as the idea to form a collective - before we had any idea what to call anything or how to set the two apart. In addition to pursuing our own collaborative practice, which has a strong focus and agenda, we have always wanted to work towards making it easier for artists, writers and anyone else who may not have been as lucky as us (who practically fell into each other’s arms begging to work together after a few pub sessions) in finding the right people, in the right place, at the right time, to team up with on creative research projects. Although RAKE Collective & RAKE Community are separate initiatives with distinct rationales, the same motivations are in place: to facilitate collaboration, skill-sharing, communal learning and mutual growth.
Loneliness increased significantly during the pandemic - and the art world can be particularly lonely, with practitioners often needing physical and emotional space to work. This, combined with the unnecessary but pervasive element of competition (and the ridiculous image of the lone genius) has made the need for creative collaboration all the more relevant. RAKE Community was launched off the back of pandemic-induced disconnect and our feeling that now was a better time than ever to try out a ‘test-run’ of something we’d been thinking about since forming RAKE. Through the initial programme in 2020 we were lucky enough to build genuine relationships with some incredible practitioners who we still regularly catch up with, trade feedback on creative projects and generally help each other out - all without having to navigate a single forced networking event or hang out sleazily at gallery openings twiddling our thumbs and waiting for ‘someone important’ to finally ask us what the hell we want.
Alongside a yearly ‘official’ programme taking place over a set period of time with participants selected through open calls, we dream of RAKE Community becoming an ever-changing and growing experimental space/ place/ concept/ project where practitioners can find what they need and share what they can: a year of fascinating Instagram takeovers and the launch of the RAKE Community online workspace preceded this year’s programme. And now we are super excited to officially announce the four selected participants of RAKE Community 2021: Practitioners-in-Residence! You may have already been watching the brilliant research of Meredith Morran, August’s practitioner-in-residence, unfold over the past few weeks. They’ve been engaging with Instagram - aka ‘baby’ - to expose the inner workings of social media sites and disrupt the standard user experience, while testing and toying with the limits of baby’s algorithm. More on Meredith’s research below.
Coming up in September is Self_Saboteur, who will be showcasing the curatorial process of choosing artworks to feature in a Race & Disability Zine Anthology. By exploring the intersections of race and disability through investigating narratives and stories in mainstream media, the project aims to uncover ideas around invisibility and marginalization. In October, Konstantina Mavridou will be asking how humanity decides which problem-questions are the ones to solve, especially before innovative technology is produced. Her residency will research the foundations and axioms we use to set the actual questions and various hypotheses to be researched upon, humanity’s needs to be covered through new technological inventions, as well as the directions we set in order to lead into new scientific discoveries. Lastly is Catarina Rodrigues who, throughout November, will be investigating the ritualistic performance of neural network algorithms and how rituals themselves can be seen as forms of computation in their ability to transmit information and to create networks. We absolutely cannot wait to see their research develop, and are keeping our eyes peeled for some possible collaborative extensions in December!
RAKE’s motivation to push the boundaries of storytelling and democratise research comes hand in hand with a responsibility to give back to the community that has shaped our practice. So - here’s to the family members who made the food and manned the doors at our launch exhibition; the partners who coded our websites & trekked down to Brighton on their days off to install our Photo Fringe show; the friends, flatmates and coursemates who’ve cooked for us & encouraged us & pulled strings to help us out; the parents who’ve hosted us & fed us; the tutors who challenged our ways of thinking & flipped our practices on their heads; the siblings who‘ve fronted the cash for countless wine-dashes during particularly intense meetings; and the wonderful people, from professional practitioners and creative directors to community organisers and facilitators, we’ve met through RAKE over the last 20 months who continue to champion, motivate and educate us. If RAKE Community can, in any way, help others - as we’ve been helped by others - we’ll be happy.
fun fact: the one and only Beyoncé’s Lemonade album credited 72 writers