Background | Hope and Expectations | Context
About
Background
As interdisciplinary collaboration emerges as a vital linchpin in an increasingly interconnected world, the role of Creative Producer is coming to the fore.
For many, having self-defined as a Creative Producer, or developed a Creative Producing practice independently, we are now looking for community and collective identity. During a six week program, Nicholas Medvescek and Lizzie Crouch led an international cohort of twenty-two emerging and established practitioners from different sectors and cultures, with different abilities and lived experience. We critically reflected on our role, and we collectively co-authored this manifesto for Creative Producing.
Hope and Expectations
Many of us came to this program seeking a supportive, caring, and critical community. We hoped to learn from each other and examine our practice through diverse perspectives. Through these lenses, we looked to refine our practices and challenge current production models that reinforce dominant perspectives.
Socially and commercially, there is often only a vague understanding about the work that we do. When creative labour is frequently under-valued, this often makes our work invisible. Through forming this community, and finding convergences and divergences, we hope to make our work visible so we can enact positive cultural change, and strive towards inclusive, equitable futures.
Context
We are a hugely diverse international group. However, we can not speak for everyone and everything. We can only speak to the lived experiences, cultures, abilities, and values that we have as a cohort of twenty-two humans.
Despite the benefits of digital tools, and the ability to come together in space in the virtual realm, we acknowledge that these technologies shaped our interactions and processes. They privilege some while limiting others, and we lacked the basic human contexts that in-person collaboration can give us.
There is never enough time to fall down rabbit holes, to dive deeper, to connect and understand each other, but we are proud of what we have achieved within such limitations. The program pulled apart our lived experiences, explored the processes and values that connected us, reflected on frameworks used in our practice, and considered the impact of our practice. In this process, we have found rich convergences, and richer divergences within the group.
This manifesto captures a moment in time. We acknowledge it is not perfect, and these words and graphs are only the start of its journey. As we ask ourselves how we continue to evolve as a community, we look forward to how our words and exploration manifest in new context and forms—inside and outside this initial group.
We invite you to take these words, and do with them what you will. Find yourself in them, critique them, manifest them, take them into your communities and explore them in different contexts. Far from being fixed proclamations, they invite dialogue—and we welcome and seek further discourse.
Manifesto
Divergences
We, an international cohort of twenty-two humans, contain multitudes that cannot be reduced to a common denominator.
As we say in our introduction, this manifesto captures a moment in time. This graph shows data that was generated during this moment. It was used as a tool for understanding important points of convergence and divergence. But this process was limited by time, personal capacity and technological access. It therefore may not depict a full or final representation of a person’s identity, values or beliefs.
During our six weeks together, it became clear we, an international cohort of twenty-two humans, contain multitudes that cannot be reduced to a common denominator. While there are clear ties that bind us together, we differ in our approaches and identities, and so it was equally important for us to map the negative space between us and celebrate our heterogeneity.
We’ve imagined the key concepts that emerged during the program as a constellation of nodes. The connections between these nodes show where we each find alignment with concepts.
While some nodes have many connections and show the places where the cohort converges, an equally powerful number have only a few. These soft connections form discursive relationships or stand alone entirely.
This map illustrates the dynamic tension in our community. The same force that attracts us to points of convergence also spins off our divergent perspectives. The nuance in the space between is what creates the unique context for this particular collective and the manifesto it has produced.
