Communities in Movement

https://communitiesinmovement.net/

Communities in Movement is an artistic research project organized and led by artist and writer Brandon LaBelle in collaboration with participating artists, researchers, centers and institutions. The project takes its name from urban theorist and activist Stavros Stavrides, whose work captures the emergence of new expressions of social solidarity as found, for example, in the movement of the squares. Stavrides underscores communities in movement as the undoing of identitarian enclaves in support of connective thresholds, commoning practices, and networks of care. As he suggests, “Emancipation may thus be conceived not as the establishing of a new collective identity but rather as the establishing of the means to negotiate between emergent identities.” Reflecting upon and engaging with questions of “emancipatory practices”, the project queries historical and contemporary forms of community, from the imagined to the symbolic, the micro to the temporary, and aims to consider community as a dynamic ethical, aesthetic, and cultural embodiment of resistant togetherness – what Jean-Luc Nancy terms “the passionate sharing of singularities”. This includes reflecting upon the ways in which community, and collaborative expressions of being-in-common, is often based on forms of creative, critical and (alter)institutional organizing: the establishment of common notions and independent structures that steer the fostering of community as the figuring of new worlds.

The project brings together working groups of participating partners and contributors, in specific locations and contexts, to collaboratively rethink and nurture community work through participatory research practices. This includes a consideration of (under)commoning, pirate care, self-organized governance and experimental pedagogies, as well as collaborations and compositions across human and nonhuman bodies, material objects and energetic forces. Such topics and approaches will result in a range of creative manifestations that work at putting community on the move.

Methods: Research in movement

The project adopts a speculative, emergent approach to undertaking research, where areas of concentration are discovered along the way, through the conversations and interactions between researchers and partner institutions. In this way, the project is performative in terms of capturing a process of finding-commonality, and allowing for that commonality to direct or self-organize. Rather than a top-down approach, where the project is mapped, articulated and deployed, momentum and direction are found step-by-step, or “in the labyrinth” as Jan Masschelein maps as key to “poor pedagogies” – a learning by way of doing together. Communities in Movement is therefore articulated by putting research on the move, leading to what we may understand as “research in movement”, a poor methodology that allows for staying close to the metabolism of space and time, situations and resources, successes and failures, the frustrations and desires shaping the project as a collaborative expression.

The project unfolds as a series of parallel movements that support and interfere with each other; from discursive fora in a range of settings to exhibition presentations with partner institutions, from shared readings and reflections to performative workshops, from the academy to the autonomous center. Such diverse movements are set in motion in order to multiply the project, as a proliferation that can support experiments in what it means to be many.

Communities in Movement was based at the Art Academy, University of Bergen, funded by the Norwegian Artistic Research Program, from 2019-2023. It continues today through a range of ongoing collaborations and emerging projects.